Us vs. The Other

In Anthropology we spend endless hours discussing “Us vs. The Other”. It’s social, political, educational - you name it. The anthropologist vs. those she studies. The school administrator vs. the children he teaches. There’s a constant struggle as we walk the line that divides us from them.

In marketing, the debate goes unspoken, but it exists at the core of what we do. Recently AdWeek reported on a study that found that Ad people had different perspectives on what makes an ad effective than the general public. No, really?

Walk around any ad agency and you will hear constant banter about our consumers or customers, not people – or in many cases us, our significant others, children or friends.

In my last posting I discussed authenticity and the role it plays in both marketing and anthropology – if we apply that to the “us vs. the other” debate, then authenticity means breaking down the walls between marketing-types and customers. Just as Julia Child broke down the walls between French cuisine and the American people, marketers should simply be striving toward erasing “The Other.”

In the new marketing democracy where people choose when, where and how they interact with brands, in order to truly find success we must stop thinking of them as consumers or customers and begin approaching them as people. It is from that perspective that we will be able to create the most effective relationships between brands and people, because we will be designing and creating for the actual needs and desires of people, not what we as marketers assume they need and want.