Imagine it’s morning and you’ve just woken up. You shuffle to the kitchen in your bathrobe. You have the feeling you’re hearing some sounds, like many voices talking quietly somewhere all at once. You check the radio, look at your phone. You start concentrating on where these sounds are coming from. Your suspicion falls on the refrigerator. You carefully grasp the fridge handle and open it. The sound intensifies and you’re startled. There’s quite a lot going on in the fridge. The brands are talking to you.
In that hubbub you can’t hear anything at all, but if you really tried to distinguish individual voices, you’d discover that each product ignores the others and tries to start a conversation with you.
The milk carton is curious about what your breakfast looks like. You should photograph it and send it. The ketchup declares it has a gift for you to make your Christmas even more joyful—you should guess what it is. The beer addresses you informally, saying the time has come to celebrate. What are you waiting for, you should hurry to the pub. The butter asks how many types of Christmas cookies you’ve already baked. The chocolate says it’s already found its key to morning bliss—what do you think about that? According to the instant cream, you should draw in your journal what coffee means to you.
Language and communication were probably a crucial evolutionary advantage for homo sapiens. But if we hear inanimate objects or pictures speaking to us, modern psychiatry has a diagnosis ready for us that requires hospitalized care and chronic medication.
If the social media marketing utopia reached the stage of merging digital and physical worlds, brands would talk to us constantly. Except nobody wants to chat with brands. If they’re going to talk to customers, they should at least entertain or move them. Having a conversation with your toothpaste or beer is pretty horrifying.
For nearly a decade, the engagement model utopia blinded us. Conversations with customers are the margarine of marketing. For a while, entire society went crazy for it, except for a few old-fashioned conservative consumers who somehow didn’t get it. Yet any nutritional advisor would convincingly describe the benefits of omega-3 fatty acids to them. It took time, but eventually we rediscovered the value of butter and margarine returned to where it belongs—among substitutes.