The Man In The Gray Flannel iPhone

In the 1950s there was a very popular book and movie called The Man In the Gray Flannel Suit.

It was a complicated tale, but one of the key threads was about conformity.

The icon of 1950's conformity was the suburban male office worker, commuting by train to "the city," trapped in an unfulfilling life of materialism, social climbing, and status anxiety.

Like all cliches, this had elements of both truth and fiction. Even though most of us weren't there to experience it, in our mythology this caricature has served us well as a short-hand for the zeitgeist of the period.

While commuting to "the city" the other day, it occurred to me that there is a new and evolving type of male big city office worker.

I saw this person a lot last week. There was a very large tech-related convention in San Francisco and public transit was jammed with these guys. They wore clean jeans and had colorful oxford shirts with their tails out. They had expensive eye wear and messenger bags thrown over their shoulders. They were thumbing away on their iPhones which were attached to their heads via earbuds.

There is no way of knowing whether the future will be kind to these "types" or if they will become the contemporary equivalents of the "gray flannel suits" who have been universally lambasted by smug hipsters and intellectuals.

Which brings me to the point of this post. We in the trendspotting business are always ready to assert that whatever the latest mania is will have a transformative effect on society. 

In fact, viewed with a sensible perspective, most of our behavior is highly regular and remarkably recursive. Sixty years later, we can still make a pretty good case for the guy commuting by train to "the city," trapped in an unfulfilling life of materialism, social climbing, and status anxiety.

Mostly what has changed are the clothes and the gadgets.

In Enemy Territory

A few weeks ago I was a speaker at a social media conference in Minneapolis. I was facing a ballroom full of social mediacrats and was surprised at the graciousness with which my ungracious remarks were received.

Best of all, I escaped with all my major body parts intact.

It was billed as a "fireside chat" between the excellent Jason Falls, leader of the conference, and me. I had imagined a roaring fireplace, smoking jackets, and brandy snifters.

Alas, it's just Jason, me, and the world's largest chair.

Speaking So As Not To Be Understood

Throughout history the purpose of speaking and writing has been to be make oneself understood. Not any more. There is a new way of speaking and writing in the world of marketing, the purpose of which is to sound like you're saying something without actually saying anything at all.

Welcome to The Golden Age of Bullshit.

Now writers, pundits and industry bigwigs write and speak so as to be misunderstood. They write in ways that intentionally misuse language, and they speak in riddles to hide their vacuity. They hide behind buzzwords and cliches which they throw around willy nilly regardless of context.

The practice of creating a simple declarative sentence that means what it says is outmoded. Today's marketing pundit, in order to be taken seriously, must speak in tongues.

So we get nonsense like this:

"I have a deep love and appreciation of the different roles of product pricing, go-to-market, competitive differentiation, etc that make up the marketing value chain. I’m not discounting the strategic parts of making sure there’s a business model, but I’m focusing on the part that the vast majority of people think of as “marketing”. You and I might know this is more about promotions than the full range of marketing but most people don’t recognize this distinction."

Now you might think that the paragraph above was written by a not-very-bright junior college marketing student. But it wasn't. It was written by a person who claims to be a Stanford lecturer and a Harvard Business Review author.

Then we get this from the incoming Chairman of the 4As:

"Branded content was an interim expression. To me now, saying branded content is like saying advertising, because it’s all about content and how we insert the brands into that message to add true utility for the customer."

Oh.

Here's a simple way to figure out who's full of shit and who isn't. If someone is saying something you don't understand, and it's not about quantum theory or special relativity, more likely than not he's full of shit.