I spoke at a Tedx hosted by XLRI yesterday.
I have repurposed the talk here.
We have faced these situations (or will definitely face them) in our careers – we launch a new product. The price is right, and the distribution is solid. But sales aren’t moving.
Why?
Because meaning wasn’t shaped.
Today, I have compressed some fundamentals of meaning-making and meaning-shaping that I wish I knew at the start of my marketing career 27 years ago.
I hope this gives you a head start and you never launch a product that becomes a blind spot.
Let’s begin with an exercise – which bottle of water will you buy?
I have run this exercise with over 1500 people and each time I get similar answers –
- some people pick blue because it stands out.
- others pick the thin bottle because it fits into their bag
- and the rest pick a bottle with grooves because of its good grip
Now all I did was show you 6 unbranded bottles. But you created meaning out of this simplest of stimulus.
What can we conclude? That every stimulus, no matter how small, carries meaning.
Let’s change the stimulus and see if the meaning changes.
Now, tell me which bottle will you buy?
Invariably, the meaning changes.
It becomes richer. Somehow, this ‘branded water’ feels fresher, and more superior.
Where did this meaning come from?
And how is it that even across diverse audiences, I got the exact same meaning each time?!
Turns out that our brains are biologically hardwired to make meaning out of everything we see, hear, taste, smell, and touch. Not by accident, but through centuries of careful evolution.
This is how it works.
Human intelligence is made up of two parts – the conscious and the unconscious. The conscious intelligence is the tip of the iceberg and is described as system 2 by Daniele Kahneman.
Conscious intelligence sees things as they are. It might describe all human faces as two eyes, one nose, one mouth etc.
At the same time, our unconscious intelligence or system 1, is working beneath the surface.
It understands what things mean. it can help you recognise your mother, sister or brother in a dimly lit, crowded auditorium or at a noisy Cold Play concert.
According to Timothy Wilson in his excellent book Strangers to Ourselves, our conscious intelligence consumes about 40 bits of information per second. But our unconscious intelligence can process 11 million bits per second.
How does our unconscious intelligence make sense of all this data? It compresses it. It compresses it into shortcuts of meaning which look like stories, images, memories and emotions – and records these into the hard drive of our brain.
It could be ideas like Rose Good. Poison Ivy Bad. Mother Good. Lion Bad. Peace Good. Prison Bad.
This gives us speed in decision making, which was critical when we were cave men and women because we needed a decision – whether to fight to run- within a split second, we we crossed paths with a herd of elephants or a blood-thirsty cheetah.
It is still true today when a herd of elephants is replaced by a double decker bus charging at us at a speed of 80 km per hour!
So if our brains are addicted to meaning making, good marketers understand that consumers don’t buy products they buy meaning.
They don’t buy Iodex, they buy pain-free movement.
They don’t buy a Mac, they buy the signal that they are creative and discerning.
They don’t buy ChatGPT, they buy instant smarts.
Therefore, if human brains are meaning makers, then good marketers are meaning shapers.
But meaning making and meaning shaping does not work in a static vacuum. Our brain is constantly consuming information and updating its hard disk.
Anything that’s old and familiar, with a consistent track record of delivery gets recorded as an automated response. Think of your favorite childhood snack. The moment it changes even slightly—different flavor, different packaging—you notice immediately. That’s trust.
On the contrary, too much familiarity becomes monotonous. A lion can spend his entire life just hunting, eating, mating and sleeping without having to go to a yoga retreat to think about its purpose. Not humans. We crave newness! Think of a new burger flavour you saw on a reel. You pause, you get curious and maybe even a little excited and want to try it. In marketing parlance, this is differentiation.
Brands that win, master the tension between the two. They retain trust while driving freshness through differentiation.
All marketing moves therefore boil down to four strategies – all four balance different proportions of the new and the old.
BLEND
The first strategy is when we blend two familiar categories to create a new third one.
Kurkure blends western chips with Indian namkeen flavours to create a third category of masala Kurkure.
BORROW
The second strategy is when we borrow codes from one situation to another completely unrelated one.
Lush borrows codes of grocery for soaps. Bath bombs are stocked like tomatoes and they display soap slabs very much like cheese, you can chop off as big or small a chunk as you need.
BUILD
Luxury brands like Birkin build scarcity into their offering.
Even celebrities wait upto 3 years to get a Birkin. The human brain knows anything that’s scarce is exclusive, precious, worth waiting for.
BREAK
Finally, the iPhone is the best example of the fourth strategy.
The iphone broke every conception we ever had of what a phone should be. But the genius of Steve Jobs was that by making us use our finger as a stylus, he made this magical piece of technology feel familiar and safe.
This brings us to a dilemma.
If meaning making is a feature. Is meaning shaping a bug?
Do good marketers get good people to buy bad things?
Only if we let them.
Let me ask you—when was the last time you bought something and later thought, ‘Why did I even get this?’ Was it because of the product? Or because of the story around it?
If you did buy a product because of its story and the product failed to live up to its promise, you will never buy it again.
So no, marketers cannot make you buy things you don’t already believe or repurchase products that don’t deliver.
And even though the meaning that marketers put out is just a tiny trickle in the ocean of news, fake news, and user generated content, businesses that last, use their meaning shaping powers wisely.
Because they realize that the meaning they shape changes the way we interact with the world.
I for one will never again be able to see a laundry detergent without thinking that dirt is good because when kids play, they don’t get dirty, they learn.
I will never be able to see Amul milk and not think of the Amul girl, and her irreverent commentary on culture.
I will never be able to ignore how each time I use a beauty product, I feel more confident, more elevated.
That’s why, as you lead businesses and marketing teams, remember to reshape meaning into something that elevates everyone.
Thanks for reading and I hope to see you next week.