In the previous essay, is “10x product” the right strategy?, we saw how people moved from buying things because there was a real functional need, to buying things as a way to build and exhibit an identity, where having that thing becomes the need.
A quick summary of that evolution:
Edward Bernays used Psychoanalysis to understand consumer unconscious desires. Then he used Propaganda techniques to create associations between products and symbols to tap into these desires.
Eventually, people realized that they were being manipulated into buying the same things that they didn’t really need (consumerism), and a new movement of self-expression and individuality was born.
But coincidentally, the evolution of the manufacturing methods allowed for smaller batches, which were perfect to allow consumers to achieve that individuality.
This started a never-ending consumer boom, where the generation, who had once rebelled against the conformity imposed by consumerism, now embraced it because it helped them to be themselves. Now they consume to create their Identity.
How to win as a Startup: From Value to Identity
Currently, we believe that to win we need a 10x Value product, then consumers will choose our product over the alternatives.
But we learned that this is not true, consumers will choose the product that better fits their identity even if it's functionally worse.
This will happen when our product becomes a symbol. A representation of something else (identity, values, beliefs) that allows the consumer to build an identity or to keep belonging to it.
A B2C Case
So one day you start cycling casually, after a few weeks you start thinking about yourself as “a cyclist” and you start paying attention to the symbols the other “pro-cyclist” around you are displaying (the brand of the helmet or the bike, the specific accessories they use, …)
In no time, you will find yourself buying that very same brand of helmet, not because it's “10x better” than the other helmets, but because it's a symbol you associated with pro-cyclists.
One by one, you will keep adopting more and more of these symbols until you feel like a true pro-cyclist. Then, if a new symbol (i.e., a new gadget) pops into the scene, you will get that one too, to keep belonging to the group.
A B2B Case
Now you're probably thinking that this makes total sense for consumer products but that selling to companies is totally different, companies act in a fully rational way, it is all about Value/Cost, right?
No. The person making the decision in the company also has an identity, and that will greatly affect their decision.
Keep in mind that our identities have multiple layers, you can identify both with being a “pro-cyclist” and a “sophisticated startup founder”.
So, if you are looking for a new task manager for your company because the team grew and Google Sheets is not enough, and you fully identify with Jason Fried (Basecamp founder and author) sophisticated way of thinking about Teamwork, then you will choose Basecamp over Asana even when Basecamp is lacking in some areas. The Identity alignment you have with Jason/Basecamp will offset any functional shortcomings that Basecamp could have.
In fact, Basecamp can achieve more growth by spreading Jason's ideas to a new generation of founders, aligning with their identity, than trough adding more features to the product.
How to make our product a Symbol
Well, this is the mother of all questions, and the answer it’s going to take us a few essays. The good news is that it can be achieved by design, Bernays did that repeated times over his career. So all the effort that you put to achieve this will have outsized returns.
The very first step is to understand the underlying dynamics that make this possible, that is, “the rules of the game”. So when we play the game, we can make the right decisions.
Today we will focus on two of these underlying dynamics:
Why people are building identities trough consumption
Why a product/brand can become a symbol
Not that long ago, products/brands didn't hold any symbolic power and identities were built by other means (inherited, job rank, …) but all of that is different now, and we need to adapt the way we build and sell products if we want to succeed.
Power and Responsibility
To answer these two questions, I will use a great video from Leslie Fluette (embedded below, with a full novelized transcript after it).
The story is a pretty uncomfortable one where you will see an inherent conflict in the current game:
Capitalism is the system that allows us to do what we love, creating great products. Products that will win if they become symbols for people that need to build an identity because capitalism robbed them of their own one (alienation).
When working on a startup it is less likely that you feel a high degree of alienation (the feeling that the work we do is meaningless, that we are just a cog in the machine) but most of your users are not that lucky.
Our goal as Startups is to help them do a task with our product WHILE helping them feel more confident in life trough building/reinforcing their identity.
We will use powerful tools to achieve that, but you know what comes with a great power…
Enjoy Responsibly.
PS: Leslie’s mentions a specific song in her video, I included the censored and uncensored versions at the end of the novelized transcript.
Commodity Fetishism and The Spectacle
by Leslie Fluette
In 2011, American hip-hop artist McLemore released his debut single, Wings. The song depicts the young Macklemore's infatuation with basketball and his insistent belief that his Nike Air Jordan shoes will make him fly, just like Michael Jordan.
To him, Nike is “so much more than just a pair of shoes”. They are what I am, the source of my youth, the dream that they sold to you. The shoes, it seems, have been imbued with mystical qualities, they have been fetishized.
Part One: The Commodity Fetish
According to Karl Marx, commodity fetishism is the process of ascribing mysterious or magical characteristics to an object and in doing so, the labor that went into creating the object is covered up.
Essentially, material relations between producers in a capitalist society take on the form of social relations between things during exchange. So when a young kid sees his hero Michael Jordan wearing Nike shoes and then encounters those shoes on the market shelf, he thinks there is something intrinsically valuable within the shoes themselves.
But this is not the case, of course, we can probably understand this better by looking at another Nike campaign in which the fetish was unmasked, revealing the true nature of the commodity.
In the 1990s, Nike branded and advertised its women's shoes as symbols of empowerment and feminism, only to later be revealed, that these same shoes were being made by underpaid women working in horrific conditions in Indonesian factories.
Nike took a big hit at the time and came to learn that if you're going to successfully sell your customer base a dream about flying or empowerment, it’s indicative that they don't know where that mythic magic truly comes from.
And these phenomena is not restricted to just luxury goods, it happens with regular everyday subsistence commodities as well. Take the meat industry for example: the production of meat is consistently concealed, sanitized, even glamorized, through a mishmash of branding, sanitized packaging and advertising.
The presentation of the neatly packaged commodity on the shelf seems to appear by magic, thus obscuring the horrid working conditions that factory farmers face every single day. This sanitation process, also masks the cruel and torturous industry of inhumane animal slaughter, and it provides people a guilt-free way to consume animal products without ever having to get their hands dirty, thus detaching the whole process from their conscious reality.
The principle of commodity fetishism happens because workers are contracted under an inherently exploitative system to produce an abundance of commodities, which are then separated from them. So what they are really producing is an abundance of dispossession, this is the bedrock of alienation and commodity fetishism.
Because capitalism is a system of generalized commodity production with capitalists owning the means of production, workers become alienated from the products of their labor, which are subsumed by the bourgeoisie for exchange value.
They become alienated from each other as they compete for jobs and higher wages, and they become alienated from the act of labor itself as they perform repetitive, perhaps even dangerous work, without having any say in the creative process.
The act of work itself, which Marx believed to be the source of human freedom and purpose, is “degraded to a necessity for staying alive”. We work for wages instead of to express our creativity and build the worlds we live in.
On the opposite end, the consumer is able to immerse himself in the consumptive process without ever having to consider the worker’s plight. It is this separation between producer and product, between production and consumption, which allows for this fetishization to happen.
Part 2: Society of the Spectacle
After the Second Industrial Revolution, another layer of alienation began to emerge as well. As a surplus of commodities accumulated, workers were no longer seen as just workers, the ruling class needed them to become consumers of all this abundance.
Largely thanks to the work of people like Edward Bernays, nephew of Sigmund Freud and the father of Public Relations, a system of need creation based on propaganda was developed.
Using Freud's theories of psychoanalysis to enter the consumer’s subconscious, Bernays devised a strategy to tie the commodity to identity instead of to use value. For example, his 1929 campaign which branded cigarettes as “torches of freedom” to exploit women's desires to be free from the patriarchy and equal to men. It worked, by the way, and smoking rates among women skyrocketed.
Advertisements, television, mass media, and images of all kinds began to bombard the social sphere. Genuine needs were replaced with pseudo needs, which really just mask the one ultimate pseudo need, to perpetually grow the economy and propagate capitalism, and it is here that Guy Debord would say we've entered the society of the spectacle:
“The spectacle is a permanent opium war designed to force people to equate goods with commodities and to equate satisfaction with the survival that expands according to its own laws. Consumable survival must constantly expand because it never ceases to include privation, if augmented survival never comes to a resolution, if there is no point where it might stop expanding, this is because it is itself stuck in the realm of privation, it may guide poverty, but it cannot transcend it.”
(Guy Debord, The society of the Spectacle, Thesis 44).
In their book, “Dialectic of Enlightenment” Adorno and Horkheimer argue that mass media companies purposefully manipulate the masses onto passivity, cultivating false psychological needs that only the products of capitalism can satisfy.
Meanwhile, our real needs of freedom, creativity, and happiness are stifled. On top of this, technological advancements that could have eliminated or at least reduced work, must instead preserve labor as a commodity.
The reserve army of labor is thus recruited into a new sector, the tertiary, or services sector, where their sole responsibility is creating pseudo needs and pushing consumption of these useless commodities in order to keep that capital machine flowing.
Part Three: Cultivated Identity
We are now living at a time when we have access to more stuff than ever, and yet we are more alienated more depressed and more anxious than we've ever been.
We go to work every day at our shitty-ass soul-sucking jobs to produce goods which we'll never have access to, for a boss who cares only for the bottom line and at the end of the day, we get in our car, this overpriced box made of metal and window panes, which separates us from interaction with the outside world.
We drive home to our house, this other box, which cost me my life savings, to watch TV on this box which distracts me and pacifies me, perhaps I see something shiny that I need to buy, so I move out over to my other box my computer and shop online.
Perhaps I decide to post an imaginary image of myself to all my Facebook friends, all of which numbs the pain just long enough to tide me over to the next step when I get to get up and do it all over again. Life becomes a perpetual cycle of work, consume, repeat.
Life becomes fragmented, and the more fragmented life becomes, the more we begin to use commodities and images as not just distractions but as stand-ins or signifiers for our identity.
Buying all the Star Wars gear to signify ultimate fandom, buying Nike basketball shoes to signify athletic superiority or perhaps just coolness. Even seemingly mundane choices like buying Pepsi versus Coke, Organic versus conventional, all of these purchases say something about us.
Whether that be consciously or subconsciously, we use these products to tell a story about our life, to present an image of ourselves. And in doing so, we think we are being unique individuals ready that we are creating our own lives.
But who was it that gave those commodities meaning?, who decided that suits and ties signify formal wear and jeans signify casual wear?, who decided what it means to be an Apple versus an Android user or to wear Prada versus Target clothes?
Mass media, ads, TV shows, subtle product placements, and popular films, direct and indirect messaging through a variety of media outlets. Those messages shape our everyday realities, and those messages are directed by capital by the powerful ruling class interested in maintaining the status quo.
The spectacle is the existing order’s uninterrupted discourse about itself, it’s laudatory monologue. It is a self-portrait of power in the epoch of its totalitarian management of the conditions of existence.
(Guy Debord)
In the society of the spectacle, our entire existence, the fabric of our very identities, is, in fact, cultivated through images manufactured and distributed by the culture industry. Representations of happiness, friendship, and love that we see depicted on TV or in movies, actually shape the foundation of our material reality.
How often do we hear people say things like they wish they couldn't find love like Dawson and Joey or Edward and Balor. How often do we hear about young girls developing eating disorders because of magazines and movies filled with these stick thin supermodels.
Just as the fetish of the commodity masks the reality of production, the spectacle serves to mask reality by mediating our relationships with the real world and with each other.
When I go out with a friend, our time is almost always centered around commodities and images, whether it be a conversation over coffee shopping or seeing a movie. But does seeing a movie really constitute a meaningful social interaction?, I don't know, maybe. But it seems to me that nothing better represents the term lonely crowd than a bunch of people silently staring at a screen in a dark room for two hours.
This isolation is masked however by the dialogue that results from this shared cinema experience. What could be more indicative of a spectacular society than one in which even our most basic conversations are mediated by images, whether that be in the form of the latest flick, who won the Super Bowl or which politician tweeted what.
These spectacles serve to distract us and cover up how fractured and separate our lives really are, and even more apt I think for this conversation would be the shitshow that is social media. If you want proof that the advertising industry has colonized our social lives, look no further; the Facebook friend.
When I post an image of myself on Facebook supposedly living my best life or a scathing review on Twitter, I'm basically selling you an ad that I want you to consume for likes, for social capital.
This type of incentive structure engineers our behavior and reduces our lives to a series of commodity exchanges, where appearance is now more important than substance.
We have gotten to the point that it is now more important that I appear to have the perfect family than to actually work on meaningful relationships with my family members.
This is what Debord means when he says we have moved from a position of being to having to appearing.
Part four: Recuperation
So what can we do? It seems as though, even if we rebel against the spectacle, rebellion itself becomes purely spectacular rebellion. Dissatisfaction itself has become commodified.
Even if I take on the identity of radical eco-socialists extraordinaire, even that identity has the potential to become incorporated into the mainstream. Think about the irony of mass made Che Guevara t-shirts, black lives matter being used to sell Pepsi or the recuperation of the Internet by a private capital interest which serves to wash dissent and artistic creation.
If you look back over the past fifty years or so, rebellious cultural practices and subversive symbolic expressions, particularly in art and music, have been inundating society, and even as these acts of resistance multiply, the status quo remains intact. In fact, capital has systematically converted counterculture into exchange value.
Take the song Wings, for example, that I discussed at the beginning of this video. In it, McLemore explains how capitalism seduces us into believing that commodity consumption will make us happy or powerful or famous. And he ends the song with the realization that Nike tricked us all, it's just another pair of shoes.
It's a radical message against societal commercialism and consumer capitalist hegemony. However, in 2013, Macklemore entered a deal with the NBA allowing them to use and repurpose the song as a promotion for the 2013 NBA all-star game. The song was totally clipped of all its anti-consumerist messaging and certain parts even re-recorded to convey a pro consumerist Pro sneaker culture message, the exact opposite of what the song originally promoted.
Backlash was Swift with many people feeling like Macklemore sold out, and here is a perfect example of capitalism's uncanny ability to take politically radical ideas and images and incorporate them into the existing power structure, thus neutralizing the message, this is known as recuperation.
In response to the backlash, McLemore sent out an open letter to the public addressing the criticism and, in fact, summed up perfectly the contradiction at play. It basically went something like this: Although I'm not thrilled that the main anti-consumerist message was cut and used to promote shoes, I had to look at the bigger picture. Millions of people were introduced to my music that had no clue who I was before, many of them downloaded the original song and got the whole message and are now fans, so they'll continue to get my message and that's a win.
And there lies the contradiction, in order to spread a subversive anti-capitalist message you often have to operate within the confines and under the logic of capitalism, and in doing so, the message inevitably becomes diluted.
Guy Debord and the Situationists saw the effects of recuperation in the 1950s and decided to use these expressions of the capitalist system and media culture against itself using something called Detournement.
Detournement attempts to re-appropriate existing popular media by injecting it with subversive and radical connotations. Examples of this include subvertisement like replacing the stars on the American flag with corporate logos or transposing an image of the cop that pepper sprayed peacefully protesting college kids into other settings to critique police brutality.
Although this is only one tool in the toolbox, it is an effective political tool because, unlike a rational argument which may be met with defensiveness, a carefully crafted Detournement can bypass and disrupt an individual's preconceived notions, using already familiar images and symbols.
Leslie Fluette.
If you liked the video, please click here and leave a like.
If you are curious about the song mentioned in Leslie’s video, here you have the original, uncensored, version:
And the NBA All Stars “Recuperated” (AKA Capitalism Friendly), version: