NORTHERN PLANNER

I wonder if slavishly following ‘lifestyle’ propositions can get in the way of good thinking sometimes. Much of strategy works make a ‘lifestyle’ available for purchase. If you don’t like your life, buy a new one…..have a garden makeover, a new ‘look’ for your wardrobe. This can make up for the tedium of life of life, but the tedium is actually pretty good, and it makes up the bulk of our existence.

If you’ve read ‘Herd’ by Mark Earls, you’ll be familiar with the idea that we should be looking for influence interaction BETWEEN people, rather than individuals themselves (by the way, this echoes the way physicists think about the basic building blocks of matter – they don’t look at how particles behave on their own, but how they interact). This already suggests that looking at individual ‘lifestyle’ may be flawed. But here’s an additional view…

You simply cannot buy your way into another life since so much of is made of unavoidable daily habits….things that involve too many other people to avoid. Collective daily habits are what makes life what it is – deadlines to meet, breakfast at your desk, theirs TV to view and sofas to slouch on.

We learn these habits off by heart and forget them – at least until they’re taken away. There’s a reason most in the UK don’t go on holiday for more than two weeks – we miss a proper cup of tea, our own bed or decent TV. Things we usually take for granted. BT has a fight on its hands to remove a stack of unused phoneboxes – not because we think about them day to day, we’re just used to them being around, the predictability comforts us.

But the grammar of our everyday lives changes imperceptibly over time – like the way we all got used to seeing mobile phones everywhere, or how the full English breakfast gave way to the two course toast and cereal, and now that is shifting.

I think there’s a lesson for marketing folk in this. Maybe there’s a lot to be said to shining  light on the everyday. We know ourselves so little, exposing the truths about ourselves can be more interesting and useful than so called ‘novelty’….not just the truth in our own lives, but the truths corporations forget about themselves.

What is Honda is not a story about how their people collectively behave? What is Vodafone’s ‘Make the most of now’ if it isn’t a discussion about the pace and complication of today’s daily life?