Rituals - Short bites. Episode #1 - Take-aways from the participants

As we come— sorry about that— as we come to the end of the hour, I'm checking the time and there's so much more that we could talk, but I'd like to end this discussion the way we begin, with a tour de table. And one of the premises of this podcast is that there's too much talking and not enough doing. So let's pass the Right? Let's pass the mic and tell us what you've heard today that will inspire you maybe to start doing something different, differently than the way you did prior to this conversation. And I'll start to give you time to think by sharing my own takeaways from this conversation. I was really intrigued by this notion of purposefulness leadership. And as I'm building my own digital marketing agency, I didn't think of what are the various rituals that I would like to create create purposefully, very difficult word to pronounce, with my team. I was also, so that's number one. Number two is I was intrigued by the idea that rituals and brand, or brand or creating rituals or a set of habits to help to simplify the purchasing process and, you know, speed up the decision-making. And in that sense, if it helps people, I think that's a positive thing. And I want to think more on with various clients that I'm actually working with. And then the last one that I— that opens a new door was this comment that Jonathan had about thinner relationship, that when we talked about ritual processes, that there might be more steps, more complexity in the way we go about our days, but each has a thinner relationship. And I'm wondering if that's an opportunity for brands to actually make those thinner contacts deeper and thicker. And I don't know what it means, I would have to think more, but that's my takeaway. So anyone wants to share some of their ideas or revisiting of some of that, but if you have to just jump in.

I, I'm, I'm, I can jump in. I'm really intrigued by the concept of purpose, especially when it comes to marketing. And of course, when it comes to the, the company that we're currently at, like, why are we doing the things that we're doing internally? There are 19 million meetings every day in America. We certainly don't need another one. We need to have a meeting that has purpose. And how do you bring purpose to somebody and say, this is what you're going to do inside this meeting. This is what you're going to do inside this company, giving everybody kind of purpose. And then on the flip side of that is in marketing terms, uh, technology is changing so much about the way that we interact with people. You were talking just before about the in-store experience. You walk into a store, which is a magical place. You do, you hand gold coin to somebody and they hand you bread, but online it's the same as, you know, playing a video game. So it lacks that real purpose. And so understanding how marketing works online is, I think, also understanding how people engage online, because it's not ritualized. You can't shop with your friend online. And you don't browse online at a store. You go to an online store to buy the bread, but you don't walk down the aisle and say, "Oh, this kind of bread looks really interesting." You don't have those kind of moments. And that's true of anything that we market online. Understanding how that technology, how technology can then bring in those ritual moments and bring people together, I think that's gonna be a really important thing thing for all of us to learn as we move forward.

Agreed. I appreciate the reminder to question why we do this behavior. I think we passively fall into repeatable behaviors, and occasionally just taking a moment to go, "What the hell am I doing this for?" I said moving the peanut forward. I think it's something I know I don't do often enough. So I— that was a great reminder to just take a moment to pause and go, is this accelerating or impeding our progress? So thank you. Thank you for that stark reminder on a Tuesday afternoon.

That's a great, great point. Anyone else wants to share their views?

I've got a couple of things. I mean, I'll keep thinking about this on and on now, but just a couple of points. Jonathan, when you said commerce is religious, as a religious activity, I wanted think about that a lot more. This idea of— I want to almost flip it around, like what you were saying, Hilton, of the idea we fall in. I mean, organizations happen all the time. We fall in passively, as you said, fall into behaviors that we don't even think about. Now, what's interesting, if we go back to when we think about rituals, as soon as you start questioning a ritual, like a religious ritual, it starts to lose its meaning, which is kind of something that's to think about. But I was thinking about too, when I— what we were talking about before, the symbolic behavior, I keep thinking about that. And it's like once you introduce the notion of symbolic behavior, then all human behavior starts to feel symbolic. So I think the other way I want to ask that question is not so much— I mean, it's a different way of phrasing the why am I doing something, like what is the symbolic behavior? What am I trying to show or say with this? You know, like, I think this meeting's stupid, but I show up. Why? Well, I want to show them a team player. This is, you know, this is how we signal to each other that we're working hard or something. Like, there's another— if you start looking at your behaviors as symbolic when we don't even think of them that way, it suddenly gives you a frame to wonder, what am I trying to say with sending an email? Like, I think about this— sending an email at 10 at night. If I'm doing that, is it because I'm showing, well, that's how hard I work? So hard. Or whatever, or maybe I didn't work all day and then I said something at 10 at night just to make it seem like I was working. I mean, so that, so I'm thinking about this purpose, but more in terms of what is, what am I saying without even being aware of it by doing this and that? And if I wanted to say something different within a particular context, how would I need to act differently?

That's good. Jonathan, yes, any— or before you give us, since you started, before you give us the last few words, Martina, any thought, any comment, anything?

I was really fascinated by how— so we came into this discussion and the word ritual was to me at least, it felt like this very tight-knit sort of thing that is just a couple of things that fall into that. And as we started unpacking it, it sort of feels like it lives almost everywhere. As Matt said, every behavior can be seen as symbolic behavior. And to me, I'm starting to think about this notion that either there are brand rituals, which is pretty much the kind of behaviors that brands and brand managers deem as relevant to their brand and therefore want to harness the kind of ritualistic behavior around them. Or those are things that have some kind of embedded meaning. Or it could be any kind of random behaviors that are becoming more ritualized. And they are not very much organic and they are not meaningless. And just by the mindless repetition, we are actually creating meaning around them. And those are, I think, exactly the kind of behaviors that we need to revisit and ask ourselves, why do we do that? Just because something is habitual doesn't mean that it has to be— like, habitual in a way that has become ritualized doesn't mean that it's ritualistic or that it has some kind of inherent value to us. So that distinction mentally, that's— at least to me, I will be thinking about it a lot after this call. That to me is like the most valuable insight that I was able to get today. So thank you for that.

So Martina, you're suggesting countless selfies is not a behavior that we should be propagating. I just want to check because I think I've got 15 of those.

Unless you are the owner of Instagram, I would say no, but Yeah. So there's actually this interesting, uh, I don't, I wouldn't really call it a study, just that like insights from an article that I read that if you really struggling to get in shape and really struggling with the motivation to just start running, actually selfies are a great external motivation for you to start running. This idea that I can signal to others and myself that I'm really committed to doing this. Just by the way that I am posting it on the internet and how I look and how I feel. I can say, "7K, woohoo, I'm great." And in reality, I can just run 300 meters and just get really exhausted. But the fact that you can present that kind of behavior in a way that makes you feel and look good, that in itself is inherently valuable. So we are all different and mad and we ascribe symbolism and meaning to all sorts of different things. So it's incredibly diverse rituals.

Thank you. Jonathan, last few words?

Yeah, so, you know, even that question with Instagram, is it good or bad, I think points the direction of where we're going with ritual, which is that it's a powerful way to structure purpose and meaning. But it's also kind of in crisis, as we find so many things in our societies, including in business, in crisis. I mean, right now, business isn't quite sure whether it's headed up or down. And I think the answer is probably that it's doing both in a whole bunch of different ways. And so we need to make sense of these things. And Matt Hames, his whole experience of being at home and needing to connect and to feel part of a company of people he never sees except on a little screen. That seems to get to the essence of it all. But we do create meaning, as Martina says, in practically everything that we encounter. You know, if you put a couple of dots and a swirly kind of line on a wall, it becomes a face. That's what we humans do. We make random things into something that means something. And so, in that spirit, I want to point you all toward what may be either a source of despair or hope. Online, Matt, I don't know if you can get a model for meetings out of this, but there's a new game out that I've learned about through my children, of course, because that's how we learn most important. And its title is actually Untitled Goose Game. And it is a game in which you are a goose going into a village and just causing trouble. Tying people's shoes, stealing things from them, you know, and this is actually, it can be looked at as a sign of the destruction of all sense in our society, in our culture, but it can also be looked at as a way to play the role of a trickster, which is a ritual role. And to do that online, online spaces are these places where we can get lost, but also places where we have the ability to do things like become a mischievous goose that otherwise would not make any sense. And I think that these spaces are the greatest ritual realms that have ever been created. And yet they feel completely out of our control, both as individuals and as businesses. And I sincerely feel that that is the task that we all face Figuring out how to ritualize the online space is a way to keep our lives human, you know, so that we're putting it in a box when we need to, but also a way to get to a higher level of transcendence, which is only available online.