Now reading | For success in social media, conversation is not enough, you need narrative.
http://www.fastcocreate.com/3039565/for-success-in-social-media-conversation-is-not-enough-you-need-narrativec
Before I started reading this article that my friend Jack Burgess was kind enough to share with me, I looked up the definition of cognitive anthropology (this one comes from Indiana University) for a quick refresher:
“Cognitive anthropology investigates cultural knowledge, knowledge which is embedded in words, stories, and in artifacts, and which is learned from and shared with other humans” (D’Andrade 1995:xiv).
“The field of cognitive anthropology is distinguished not so much by its focus on cognitive phenomena as by its methodology and approach” (Colby 1996:209).
Cognitive anthropology generally focuses on the intellectual and rational aspects of culture, particularly through studies of language use. The centrality of language to cognitive anthropology is related to the origins of the sub-field. Cognitive anthropology is distinguished most by its methodology, which originated in attempts to fit formal linguistic methods into linguistic and social anthropology. This methodology also assumes that semantic categories marked by linguistic forms are related to meaningful cultural categories. Cognitive anthropology’s methods for revealing meaningful cultural categories in language have also been expanded to more general ethnographic methods (e.g. Duane and Metzger (1963)), and some recent work has focused on emotions and culture. Cognitive anthropology has ties to linguistic and psychological anthropology, linguistics, cognitive linguistics, psycholinguistics, cognitive psychology, and other cognitive sciences.
In this article, cognitive anthropologist Bob Deutsch argues that brands seeking connections with people should be looking to enter their self-narratives, not their conversation. He says that a paradigm shift is needed: from conversation to narrative. Here are some great excerpts. Forgive me, but this piece was so interesting that I pulled almost the entire article:
One last transformation is still needed for marketing success. Marketers need to evolve from considering products as brands to considering “person-as-brand.” Nowadays every person wants to be its own brand—to perform, and to be liked, looked at, followed, and bought into.
Now, with “me-as-brand,” the secret to success in social media is not simply entering a conversation, but entering people’s narrative. (a spoken or written account of connected events; a story)
When people identify with some “thing”—when they feel something is part of them—the brain’s medial prefrontal cortex is activated, a brain region involved with self-definition. In the case of product marketing, the product is felt to fit into the picture a person has of herself or himself. A reverie about self is provoked in which a self-referring narrative envelops the product.
People are more human than the category “consumer” permits. Attachment, not likeability, is the goal. Believing, not thinking, is the mechanism. Metaphor-making, not information-transfer, is the medium. Marketing’s knowledge base should reanimate the processes that are responsible for the mind’s subjectivity—how a person creates models of the world and then translates that into “my world.”
Objectivity and rationality are puny in the face of the emotionally based associative capabilities of real people, living real life, real time. People are not wholly rational, objective, or linear machines. People are makers and gatherers of meaning.
Attachments are realized from what a person feels, not from what a person knows.
Attachments are generated from the simultaneous activation of three feelings:
Familiarity: a person must perceive there is something about you that is instantly recognizable as like her or him [It’s Like Me]. A personal identification is conjured up such that a feeling of relief is felt from the assumption, “I don’t have to start over again from scratch.”
Appeasement: A person must perceive that you understand some things about them, and must feel their point of view is considered and appreciated [It Likes Me]; a sense of trust develops from this.
Familiarity and appeasement are ways to confirm and affirm an audience, respectively. This is important, but a deep and rock-solid emotional attachment requires a marketer to do one thing more that is quite unfamiliar: challenge the audience’s narrative about themselves.
This third dimension is:
Power: A person must perceive your product or brand as different from them and sense that in that difference you can help them be more; with you as venue, a person feels that you can help them make manifest something that is already in them (in their self-story), but latent. Your product or brand become a vehicle for a person’s felt sense of self-expansion, their familiar is reconfigured.
Whatever the offering—dinner entrée, smartphone, a piece of clothing, or what have you—to be successful a product or brand story must feed people’s appetite for self-expansion. Self-expansion isn’t just a business driver, it’s a life driver.
