Hyper-Personalization
Years ago, I worked as a barista at Starbucks. Every morning, the same demanding customer entered. One day she rattled off a drink order and insisted that Mike, the barista, repeat it back to her. He did. Perfectly. She wanted a half pump of something, not the whole pump. She wanted it 180 degrees with an obscure and minor substitution. Mike marked the cup with abbreviations, showed it to her, then made the drink. When it was ready, she sipped it like she was tasting for poison. After an approving nod, she remarked, "You make it just how I like it."
"How did you make it 180 degrees?" I whispered to Mike.
From the corner of his mouth so as not to be overheard, he said, "I just made it normal."
"What?" I asked.
"I just made it normal," he repeated, laughing.
Digital marketing experts assert (with the confidence of an Italian Dictator) that we live in an era of hyper-personalization. The future, therefore, can have only one conclusion, the universe as self. Resist this conclusion at your peril.
Yet, sometimes I wonder if making messaging "individual" is less important than "making it normal?" Is it still possible to speak to "the group?"
The playwright Thornton Wilder believed it was. He claimed that Drama itself is addressed "to the group mind," and if anybody understood how to speak to the group mind, he did. His first full-length play Our Town is performed somewhere every day since it opened in 1938, and he's the only author to win a Pulitzer Prize in both Drama (twice) and Literature. Therefore, we should steal whatever secrets he has to offer.
Although Thornton Wilder's work is diverse, he consistently embraces three priorities.
1. A love for Permanent Things
2. Audience Ownership
3. An Interplay of Universals and Particulars
2. Audience Ownership
3. An Interplay of Universals and Particulars
Let's see if these three features apply to today's audiences.
Love for Permanent Things
Wilder prizes those things humans share across cultures and time. He betrays this belief in his writing: "For a while, in Rome, I lived among archeologists, and ever since I find myself occasionally looking at the things about me as an archeologist will look at them a thousand years hence."
If you're not convinced, listen to the narrator in his play Our Town.
"Y'know–Bablyon once had two million people in it, and all we know about 'em is the names of the kings and some copies of wheat contracts ... Yet every night all those families sat down to supper, and the father came home from his work, and the smoke went up the chimney–same as here."
Wilder viewed the past as a shared inheritance–something that unlocks understanding. But Tech marketing often treats the past as an embarrassment and the future as a self-evident good. This belief is almost a requirement. That's why tech marketing all sounds as though it's based upon the same revolution narrative...because it is.
Revolution narratives require the threat of shame and an unconsidered lust for novelty. They also exchange reason for fashion and try to forge community on the most temporary and volatile ground–the new. "What is the alternative?" you ask. Wilder answers that it's possible to pursue enduring, broad appeal based upon humanity's permanent features. Respect for lasting things gives us tools for meaning. Practically, we should ask what makes our technology resonate across time and people groups. Not all of those qualities will make it to the page explicitly. But understanding how permanent truths inform your product will give meaning to the features you want to market.
Audience Ownership
Thornton Wilder also involves his audiences in a conspiracy of imagination. He does this through clever framing.
Here's an example. One play opens with an empty stage: "At the rise of the curtain, The Stage Manager is making lines with a piece of chalk on the floor..." The play's narrator begins, "This is the plan of the Pullman car. Its name is Hiawatha..."
Wilder could have built the scenery on stage before the curtain opens, but he thought it was more important to construct the set with the audience–to enlist their participation.
This directness asks the audience not to observe passively but to own the experience. It's a reminder to look for opportunities to be direct about necessary things and, if possible, enlist the audience's imagination.
Here's my attempt to put Wilder's priorities to work in a rough video conferencing software message.
A lot of good writing is concrete, but too much particularity becomes disorienting. Wilder does something different. He contrasts concrete particulars with abstract universals. He calls this "cosmic reference."
Universals and Particulars
Like an artist that pairs opposing colors to increase their intensity, Wilder relates small things to big things.
Specifically, big things like war and death juxtapose with small things like breakfast and paper delivery. Giving "cosmic reference" to the ordinary lets the audience feel a kinship with the human family and unlocks the human heart.
Here’s an attempt to place something concrete (like a feature) against something universal in the product (it's actual human good).
This modest mockup attempts three Wilder-ish things.
1. Embrace the artifice of advertising to increase the confidence of the viewer.
2. Nest one comprehensible feature in a 1000-year-old universal activity.
3. Reference concrete but shared moments of human communication.
Fine, but it's too slow, you say. No one will sit through the absence of club-music for a whole minute. You may be right. So here's another faster-paced ad idea that strives for something similar.
So many forces encourage the self to spiral in on itself. The end result is constriction and self-regard, but Thornton Wilder makes us dream of a self that spirals outward to a shared human culture. Who knows? It might be possible to create messages that provoke the most self-involved consumers to respond, "You make it just how I like it."
