More Whuffie

So I made a video last week about wuffy, this concept that is now getting a lot of interesting conversations started on the internet because of Tara Hunt's book, The Wuffy Factor. And it's a— this is a concept, the concept of social capital, reputation, as Zen Archer said in his video, that is really not nothing— it's really nothing new. But what is new is what's happening in business— in the business world as a result of recognizing what to me looks like a major inflection point in the way capitalism works today. For most of the 20th century, in at least in the post-mass media 20th century, advertising has been one of those areas that we are all at least ambivalent about, if we don't outright reject as a concept. Now, I've made videos about advertising, and it on our reaction to advertising for a long time. I'll see if I can dig some of those up and put links to them. But first of all, we all almost universally deny the impact that advertising has upon us, and that's always been an intriguing assertion to me that we would say, oh no, advertising doesn't affect what I do at all. I, I just, I'm kind of a, you know, I'm a facts kind of guy. I kinda look at the facts and make my product decisions based on facts. Well, the fact of the matter is that advertising has a huge impact on us. The notion of a brand and the identity integration that products have developed in our lives is a huge part of the psychological landscape that we live within. I mean, you know, why we buy You know, why, why, why an iPhone instead of a Nokia? Why an iPod instead of a Zune? Why? Well, yes, there are functional reasons for purchases, but brand plays a huge part. Now that makes us nervous because we believe we are being controlled by forces that are intent on not, not on our best interest, that their intention, that the intention of the advertiser, the marketer, is to manipulate us, to do, to make us do something against our own will, first of all, and that's not in our own best interest. And, and I mean, we all know that we've all been seduced. Remember when you were— I mean, I remember when I was a kid You know, we would see in the backs of magazines, you know, the little coupons, and you cut out the coupon and you send away and you're gonna get magic tricks, you know, and you get this box of crap that you get back. And, you know, so we've all been disappointed by advertising for as long as we've been exposed to advertising. Now What, what's— and in the age of broadcast-only media, when, you know, you had to have a TV show, or, you know, you, you had to be a large entity in order to communicate about anything, um, advertising had really cornered the market on how people learned about products and discussed products. And so, and as we have gotten more distributed in the way we communicate with one another, we have of course used these communication channels to talk about things, things that we care about, things that are interesting to us, things we like, things we don't like. I do like my My headphones, these Etymotic 6i headphones. Like them a lot. Think they're great. Talk about them anytime anybody asks me about them. There's a lot of things I like, but— and I talk about the things that I like. Now, as I talk about the things I like, I also am talking about other things. And so just like with your friends in the real world, which this is, um, if I talk about something I like and you think that I'm trustworthy, that what I'm talking about is credible, then you're likely to listen to what I have to say about headphones or anything else that you— that I might talk about that you might be interested in. And you might actually take that into consideration when you now look to make a purchase in that category. So woofy is simply that notion of people who I know and trust talking about things that are of interest to me, and the amount of credibility that those individuals have, reputation, etc., would be their woofy. It's not a big deal, not a big concept. Now, what's the— what's changing? What's changing is that companies are also people. Remember, the, the people who work in companies are people. That's an odd idea, right? They're actually living in the world with us, and they have the same reaction to advertising that we have to advertising. We tune it out, we TiVo past it, we skip it, we don't click the banner ads, we don't follow the— we, you know, we are— we have become immune to mass marketing. Not totally, because why? Spam obviously still works, or it wouldn't be sent in the numbers in which it's sent. I know that's a remarkable concept for most of us, but I don't know how it works, but it does. Apparently it still does, because people are what, sending out billions of pieces of spam a day. But let's take the spammers and put them over here on the side, and we'll take companies that are interested in not being seen as spammers, not being seen as companies who are trying to trick you into buying things, right? Now, you know, we all buy things. We buy things every day. It's what we do in America and all over the Western world, all over the developed world. We buy things. We can put over here on the side the idea of whether we should buy things or shouldn't buy things. If we would have— could all all live a more monastic, simple life, would that be better for us and the planet? Probably so, but that's not the world we live in. We live in the world where we buy things. Now, when people who are interested in selling things, living in this modern world, look at their options, many of them say, well, it's stupid to keep trying to do the same stupid things we've been doing for the last, let's call it, 75 years since radio. Right? Look, it's stupid for us to do that. Let's try something new. Let's try actually talking to the people who we're trying to convince to buy our stuff. Let's try talking to them as if they were what? Real people. And let's talk to them in ways that make them at least consider that we might not be lying to them. We might be telling them the truth. About what it is that we have to sell to them. So we say, you know what, this device here, life-changing. Just gonna tell you, life-changing device. Walk around, have this thing in your hand, in your pocket, anywhere you are, you know, life-changing device. Just want to let you know. Okay, you don't have to believe that, but if the person who tells you that is a person who has told you other things that were credible in the past, you might consider it. And if the company that tells you that had, tells you, has told you things in the past that leads you to believe. And by the way, if every interaction with that company is not about simply buy, buy, buy, buy, buy, but oh, here's something else you might be interested in, here's some information that we found interesting, here's some things that we like, here's— if the company begins to act like a person that you have conversations with on a day-to-day basis, and you're gonna buy things anyway, might you buy things from that company that has woofie, or would you buy things from a company that has no woofie? Call it manipulation, uh, uh, pick it, uh, don't buy from the companies that try to talk to you like a person. Do whatever you choose, but the fact of the matter is Marketing is changing, and it's changing because society is changing. We are no longer responding to the old ways of doing things, and the people who sell— by the way, that's us, we work for these companies, we make our living from these companies, most of us— uh, we're trying to figure it all out. So more on woofie, and, um, we'll see you out there trying to make some more woofie for myself and for my clients. Take it easy.