There is little denying that with most of us the classification of that which is good maps substantially with the classification of that which is beautiful.
One simple explanation is that there is an ipso facto relationship built between the two classifications. In that the way we define the classification "good" maps on to our definition of what is "beautiful". In that case the seeking of the relationship between the two is an exercise in etymology.
However could this link be in the arena of how the universe is organized instead of being through how human language has panned out?
An examination of the above possibility must begin with the question whether good and evil is a fundamental dichotomy or just an arbitrary line drawn compelled by "local conditions" (as those priests of the universal- the physicists- would call it).
If we stick to physics, at the frontiers of that science, the question is just beginning to be asked.
Much of classical and modern physics left out "consciousness" is a factor to be built into the equation. Even with the Heisenberg Principle of Uncertainty where observation and its effect is at the heart of the assertion.
The collective of the highest class of human genius that built modern physics did not leave out consciousness out of oversight. Instead it was a conscious decision.
Born out of the direction of this pinnacle of Western thought. Physics is, at its heart, is the trek, powered by rational thought and empirical validation, from the material to whatever exists as the organizing principle of the universe.
And is this upward journey the need to put consciousness in the equation came later. Because the best practitioners realized that consciousness was a contender for the job of being the organizing principle of everything.
The frontiers of physics today have now reached the stage where a rational and empirical consideration of consciousness is the next step.
Now consider the progression of thought in the body of philosophical contemplation called the Vedanta (that pinnacle of Indian and Eastern thought).
It begins with consciousness and treks towards an explanation of the "world" using the power of intuition that inseparable adjunct of consciousness.
Another difference between Vedanta and Physics is that the journey of thought that Vedanta undertook is complete while that of physics has still some way to go ( you would expect that given that Vedanta has at the least a 7000 year lead).
Coming back to finding the link between what is good and what is beautiful. The way forward on this trek is also to begin with consciousness and go forward using the power of intuition.
Good is the state that state that is harmony with the "truth". The truth in its essence being fidelity to the way the world is organized through Consciousness.
Evil is the state that denies the assertion that the universe is at all "organized". It denies the Faith that underpins Truth.
Vedanta uses Faith to arrive at the Truth.
Physics use rational thought in its journey to the Truth.
Beauty is the state that is in harmony with Rational Thought.
That's why as we pursue Beauty we glimpse the peak we are heading towards- the Truth.
The worst of marketing communication denies any organization principle and is rooted only in the instinct to consume.
Brands on the other hand are constructs of beauty that are in harmony with not just with our U&A (usage & attitude towards consumption in general and a category of products/ services in particular) but at some level with human truth.
Brands today start with Beauty and work towards the Truth because they are in essence Western constructs.
Might there be brands waiting to happen that begin with the Truth and lead to effulgent Beauty? Is this the way Indian business will build global brands?
If yes, will India's best-paid who are also the most well-resourced and maybe even the most expert, brand-builders ever begin to explore that possibility while being obsessed with things like the Cannes Awards?
Sunday, September 7, 2008
Friday, September 5, 2008
The Meaning of Obama
It does not matter whether Obama wins or losses the election,the power of Obama the symbol if not the man, has already been unleashed and established for ever.
Because the emergence of Obama is the emergence of a new world.
Obama is the classic Outsider so evocatively portrayed by Colin Wilson in his book with the same title.
The Outsider has never been part of the world of mass emulation.
Politics has always disdained the Outsider. Especially the politics of "loud" democracies like the US and India. Occasionally quieter democracies in Europe might elect one to a position of power.
Advertising has always disdained the Outsider. You see it is a niche in the market but there is,as they say, no market in the niche.
Though some of us have always admired Outsiders when we meet them in the occasional book, the rare movie or in the quiet corner of a party.
So if we suddenly have an Outsider firmly center stage on the world's biggest stage surely it signifies a humongous inflection.
The inflection when the world our public life stops being dominated by the principal of the Least-Common-Denominator or LCD, as many in the world of mass communication call it.
LCD is when we choose to address an issue only at its most simplistic level just because that is the only ground common among all those we want to address.
Obama certainly does not subscribe to issues at the simplistic level.
So what is it that enables him to reach out to so many, so intensely?
Is it because the common ground has moved up to include complexity and gray?
Is it because one to many communication has found the means to get closer to having the power and richness of one to one communication?
It is a mix of both.
Today's young and those among the old who keep up with the times do not see the world in black and white.
Simply because the world keeps pumping into our consciousness a never ending stream of information, images and emotions through a pipe whose fatness increases every minute.
And it is the same technology and communication infrastructure that feeds the above mentioned fat pipe that enables savvy practitioners to give one-to-many communication the intensity and power of one-to-one.
The emergence of Obama signifies a moment that the world of marketing must not ignore.
The inflection has been on the cards for a long time and by and large the portends have been ignored.
But now that we know it has happened and the proof is speaking on every television set in the world, it would be incredibly foolish of marketing not to change its ways.
In previous decades it was said that Madison Avenue would adopt an outlying, rebel movement and quickly make it mainstream. And continue on its merry, unchanging way.
Not this time. Not with this inflection. Real change will wait no longer.
Because the emergence of Obama is the emergence of a new world.
Obama is the classic Outsider so evocatively portrayed by Colin Wilson in his book with the same title.
The Outsider has never been part of the world of mass emulation.
Politics has always disdained the Outsider. Especially the politics of "loud" democracies like the US and India. Occasionally quieter democracies in Europe might elect one to a position of power.
Advertising has always disdained the Outsider. You see it is a niche in the market but there is,as they say, no market in the niche.
Though some of us have always admired Outsiders when we meet them in the occasional book, the rare movie or in the quiet corner of a party.
So if we suddenly have an Outsider firmly center stage on the world's biggest stage surely it signifies a humongous inflection.
The inflection when the world our public life stops being dominated by the principal of the Least-Common-Denominator or LCD, as many in the world of mass communication call it.
LCD is when we choose to address an issue only at its most simplistic level just because that is the only ground common among all those we want to address.
Obama certainly does not subscribe to issues at the simplistic level.
So what is it that enables him to reach out to so many, so intensely?
Is it because the common ground has moved up to include complexity and gray?
Is it because one to many communication has found the means to get closer to having the power and richness of one to one communication?
It is a mix of both.
Today's young and those among the old who keep up with the times do not see the world in black and white.
Simply because the world keeps pumping into our consciousness a never ending stream of information, images and emotions through a pipe whose fatness increases every minute.
And it is the same technology and communication infrastructure that feeds the above mentioned fat pipe that enables savvy practitioners to give one-to-many communication the intensity and power of one-to-one.
The emergence of Obama signifies a moment that the world of marketing must not ignore.
The inflection has been on the cards for a long time and by and large the portends have been ignored.
But now that we know it has happened and the proof is speaking on every television set in the world, it would be incredibly foolish of marketing not to change its ways.
In previous decades it was said that Madison Avenue would adopt an outlying, rebel movement and quickly make it mainstream. And continue on its merry, unchanging way.
Not this time. Not with this inflection. Real change will wait no longer.
Wednesday, September 3, 2008
Let There Be Light
I have always believed in the power of poetry.
The power to evoke ourselves to ourselves.
The power to build brands.
That's why all practioners of the art of the brand must try and practice the art of poetry.
Here is an effort of mine.
LIGHT
The unfurling of meaning cannot just be
A glissade of energy.
It is of course what meets our eager eye
That first gazes at this world.
But is it what exists between whatever exists,
Molecues, electrons, quarks, strings?
Less up in the air, so to speak,
Is it what informs the organs inside us?
Before the surgeon;s knife
Or gods forbid the assassin's bullet?
Let's cut, if we may, a little deeper. Ha ha!
Is it what gazes on nothingness
To create space?
As yesterday, the dance of the motes
In the afternoon of my gloom
Created hope
The power to evoke ourselves to ourselves.
The power to build brands.
That's why all practioners of the art of the brand must try and practice the art of poetry.
Here is an effort of mine.
LIGHT
The unfurling of meaning cannot just be
A glissade of energy.
It is of course what meets our eager eye
That first gazes at this world.
But is it what exists between whatever exists,
Molecues, electrons, quarks, strings?
Less up in the air, so to speak,
Is it what informs the organs inside us?
Before the surgeon;s knife
Or gods forbid the assassin's bullet?
Let's cut, if we may, a little deeper. Ha ha!
Is it what gazes on nothingness
To create space?
As yesterday, the dance of the motes
In the afternoon of my gloom
Created hope
Tuesday, September 2, 2008
The Coming of the Emotion Age
Those among us over the age of forty remember the all-pervasive heralding of the Information Age in the late eighties.
Today a new age is creeping in on us unheralded.
It is a sign of the times that great change does not get the world stage it did just a couple of decades ago. Simply because the world stage exists no more. Its disappearance is a counter-intuitive consequence of the Information Age coming, so to speak, fully of age.
News today is millions of rivulets of communication with even an individual with just a computer and an Internet communication capable of broadcast with the potential of reaching a worldwide audience instantly. And of course capable of receiving millions of such communications instantly.
This democratization of information has started exerting a downward pull on the economic value of information just as at the later stages of the Industrial Age began the downward pull on the economic value of manufactured goods and services.
So as the buying and selling of information recedes as the main economic activity of human society, what next?
What's beyond the consumption of material goods and services or the cognitive reception and absorption of information? The affective reception and absorption of bundles of stimulus we call emotions?
From time immemorial human society has traded in emotions. From stories around the campfire to songs on the radios to movies to television shows.
This buying and selling of emotion however currently occupies a small fraction of human economic activity. If we include leisure travel, a rough estimate is that the buying and selling of emotion currently accounts for less than 10% of human economic activity. If we include the currently illegal activity of the provision and consumption of psychotropic drugs the number still remains below 12%.
Is this on the path to swell to over 30%? How?
Growth in the traditional channels of generation and consumption of emotion, viz the printed word, recorded/ live music, radio/TV shows, movies and psychotropic drugs will constitute one part of the emerging dominance.
However like the modern technologies of communication and computation gave an altogether new dimension to the generation and consumption of information, it will be technology breakthroughs that lift the generation and consumption of emotions to the level of being the predominant economic activity.
Perhaps as the science of electrons provided the backbone of modern communication and information technology, the science of the genome will provide the backbone of tomorrow's emotion technology, ET, if I may call it so.
Perhaps what the fab is to IT today the nano-fab will be to ET tomorrow.
And like the theory of communication there will emerge a theory of memes.
Quite likely all parallels in the evolution of new technologies will breakdown as human science moves from the paradigm of predictive models to purely empirically grounded action as postulated by the likes of Stephen Wolfram (" A New Kind of Science").
However as the Emotion Age emerges one thing is clear. There never was a better time to be "creative", if creative is defined as the ability to put together a medley of various kinds of stimuli to generate an emotional response.
Human society is emerging into the epoch where the storyteller, the musician and the painter of colors and light will sit at the pinnacle of human economic activity.
There is of course the possibility that the Emotion Age bypasses technology and consumption and manifests itself in a society that transcends buying and selling into a mode of symbiotic being that resembles the animal world while exploring the higher reaches of human consciousness. An age beyond all labels really but if have to give it a label in today's terms, the Spiritual Age. But that is another story, another blog.
Today a new age is creeping in on us unheralded.
It is a sign of the times that great change does not get the world stage it did just a couple of decades ago. Simply because the world stage exists no more. Its disappearance is a counter-intuitive consequence of the Information Age coming, so to speak, fully of age.
News today is millions of rivulets of communication with even an individual with just a computer and an Internet communication capable of broadcast with the potential of reaching a worldwide audience instantly. And of course capable of receiving millions of such communications instantly.
This democratization of information has started exerting a downward pull on the economic value of information just as at the later stages of the Industrial Age began the downward pull on the economic value of manufactured goods and services.
So as the buying and selling of information recedes as the main economic activity of human society, what next?
What's beyond the consumption of material goods and services or the cognitive reception and absorption of information? The affective reception and absorption of bundles of stimulus we call emotions?
From time immemorial human society has traded in emotions. From stories around the campfire to songs on the radios to movies to television shows.
This buying and selling of emotion however currently occupies a small fraction of human economic activity. If we include leisure travel, a rough estimate is that the buying and selling of emotion currently accounts for less than 10% of human economic activity. If we include the currently illegal activity of the provision and consumption of psychotropic drugs the number still remains below 12%.
Is this on the path to swell to over 30%? How?
Growth in the traditional channels of generation and consumption of emotion, viz the printed word, recorded/ live music, radio/TV shows, movies and psychotropic drugs will constitute one part of the emerging dominance.
However like the modern technologies of communication and computation gave an altogether new dimension to the generation and consumption of information, it will be technology breakthroughs that lift the generation and consumption of emotions to the level of being the predominant economic activity.
Perhaps as the science of electrons provided the backbone of modern communication and information technology, the science of the genome will provide the backbone of tomorrow's emotion technology, ET, if I may call it so.
Perhaps what the fab is to IT today the nano-fab will be to ET tomorrow.
And like the theory of communication there will emerge a theory of memes.
Quite likely all parallels in the evolution of new technologies will breakdown as human science moves from the paradigm of predictive models to purely empirically grounded action as postulated by the likes of Stephen Wolfram (" A New Kind of Science").
However as the Emotion Age emerges one thing is clear. There never was a better time to be "creative", if creative is defined as the ability to put together a medley of various kinds of stimuli to generate an emotional response.
Human society is emerging into the epoch where the storyteller, the musician and the painter of colors and light will sit at the pinnacle of human economic activity.
There is of course the possibility that the Emotion Age bypasses technology and consumption and manifests itself in a society that transcends buying and selling into a mode of symbiotic being that resembles the animal world while exploring the higher reaches of human consciousness. An age beyond all labels really but if have to give it a label in today's terms, the Spiritual Age. But that is another story, another blog.
A Fresh Look at Brands
A brand begins in the mind of a consumer much before the marketer conceives of it.
This beginning is rooted in desire.
While desire is at the core of all life, the complexity of desire defines the human condition.
Human civilization is a result of the complex nature of human desire.
Every epoch of human progress is a result of a new culture of human desire.
Not straying too far from today, the post-industrial culture of desire was shaped by the emerging surfeit of material goods and comforts.
With this culture of desire was born the culture of "products". For example as basic an act as bathing got crystallized around a set of material products. And the discipline of modern marketing was born with the trade-marking of soaps.
It was marketing that drove the spread of modern media.
And it was media that was the harbinger of the Information Age.
We get a fresh take on the computer when we conceptualize and consider it as media, which was what the brilliant guys at Palo Alto did with the invention of the GUI.
The concept of brand as we understand it today came into marketing at a much later stage of its evolution.
In fact it is my contention that the concept of brand is the end of marketing as we know it .
Because a brand is an entity of the imagination while marketing as we know it is rooted in material products and services.
Marketing today has become effete because its practitioners are in essence living a lie.
To jump metaphors, they are all falling between two stools.
Brands are the essence of a new culture of desire (the New Culture of Desire is a phrase and concept I first came across in the book "The New Culture of Desire" by Melinda Davis, the CEO and founder of The Next Group).
Brands have very little to do with material products and services.
The fact that much of marketing today revolves around the concept of the brand is like trying to get an Intel microprocessor to work for an old-fashioned abacus.
When I use the term brand, I of course mean it in as the idea that signifies an emotional state that crosses a threshold of intensity.
Marketing today has got the concept of the brand firmly in its grasp.
However the desire to link it to the consumption of a particular product and/or service is entirely misplaced (and at the core of the increasing failure of modern marketing to deliver).
It is essential to realize that in the new culture of desire an emotional state that crosses a threshold of intensity is the central object of desire.
It is what Melinda Davis terms as " The State of O".
The concept of brand is sue generic and nothing at all to do with the marketing of products and services.
In fact the central "industry" of the next few decades will be creation, "manufacture" and propagation of brands.
That is why the next few decades are going to be characterized as the Emotion Age because the buying and selling of emotions is going to be primary form of commercial activity just as the buying and selling of information was for the fast receding Information Age and the buying and selling of manufactured product was for the bygone Industrial Age.
Marketers understand brands and once they delink this understanding from the selling of material products and services, they will emerge as the prime movers of the Emotion Age along with artists, entertainers and communicators of all hues.
This of course will happen to those marketers who answer in the affirmative to the question: Does Marketing Need Reinventing?
Either because they recognize brands not just as entities independent of the marketing of products and services but as in themselves the key "products" of the Emotion Age.
Or because they recognize that trademarks are convenient pegs to hang the identity of products/services and beyond that the deeper concept of "brand" has very little to do with the buying and selling of material products and services.
This beginning is rooted in desire.
While desire is at the core of all life, the complexity of desire defines the human condition.
Human civilization is a result of the complex nature of human desire.
Every epoch of human progress is a result of a new culture of human desire.
Not straying too far from today, the post-industrial culture of desire was shaped by the emerging surfeit of material goods and comforts.
With this culture of desire was born the culture of "products". For example as basic an act as bathing got crystallized around a set of material products. And the discipline of modern marketing was born with the trade-marking of soaps.
It was marketing that drove the spread of modern media.
And it was media that was the harbinger of the Information Age.
We get a fresh take on the computer when we conceptualize and consider it as media, which was what the brilliant guys at Palo Alto did with the invention of the GUI.
The concept of brand as we understand it today came into marketing at a much later stage of its evolution.
In fact it is my contention that the concept of brand is the end of marketing as we know it .
Because a brand is an entity of the imagination while marketing as we know it is rooted in material products and services.
Marketing today has become effete because its practitioners are in essence living a lie.
To jump metaphors, they are all falling between two stools.
Brands are the essence of a new culture of desire (the New Culture of Desire is a phrase and concept I first came across in the book "The New Culture of Desire" by Melinda Davis, the CEO and founder of The Next Group).
Brands have very little to do with material products and services.
The fact that much of marketing today revolves around the concept of the brand is like trying to get an Intel microprocessor to work for an old-fashioned abacus.
When I use the term brand, I of course mean it in as the idea that signifies an emotional state that crosses a threshold of intensity.
Marketing today has got the concept of the brand firmly in its grasp.
However the desire to link it to the consumption of a particular product and/or service is entirely misplaced (and at the core of the increasing failure of modern marketing to deliver).
It is essential to realize that in the new culture of desire an emotional state that crosses a threshold of intensity is the central object of desire.
It is what Melinda Davis terms as " The State of O".
The concept of brand is sue generic and nothing at all to do with the marketing of products and services.
In fact the central "industry" of the next few decades will be creation, "manufacture" and propagation of brands.
That is why the next few decades are going to be characterized as the Emotion Age because the buying and selling of emotions is going to be primary form of commercial activity just as the buying and selling of information was for the fast receding Information Age and the buying and selling of manufactured product was for the bygone Industrial Age.
Marketers understand brands and once they delink this understanding from the selling of material products and services, they will emerge as the prime movers of the Emotion Age along with artists, entertainers and communicators of all hues.
This of course will happen to those marketers who answer in the affirmative to the question: Does Marketing Need Reinventing?
Either because they recognize brands not just as entities independent of the marketing of products and services but as in themselves the key "products" of the Emotion Age.
Or because they recognize that trademarks are convenient pegs to hang the identity of products/services and beyond that the deeper concept of "brand" has very little to do with the buying and selling of material products and services.
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