Watching Seth Godin on a train travelling through a dark Sweden is quite a way of spending a sunday afternoon. As always, his ideas sparks thoughts in my mind. This particular video I have seen many times before but this time I really started to think. Around a specific topic that has been on my mind many times in many different shapes and forms. I speak about related things here and have a presentation around it here. In the broadest sense it is about how you communicate a message in a world that has gone completely banans with digital sharing and connections but in this post I would like to narrow it down a little. To the fact that in fact we are all at the fringes, that every single one of us is an outlier, an anomaly, a part of something nische. This has major implications for communicating an idea, product or whatever it is that you want to communicate.
Let’s look back at the days of Mad Men, when mass communication was the thrill of the day and you built a brand by shouting a message in a clear and crisp manner. Mass communication is founded on the notion that a median person is a viable proxy for society or the specific market segment that you are trying to communicate with. You reach the maximum number of eyeballs by communicating towards a median, an average message about a product or an idea that ideally should appeal to as many people as possible. We were all treated as if we were very similar (which we of course aren’t) because this was actually the best and most economical solution at the time. This model gave us mass consumption of rather bland mediocre products, everything sustained by massive mass marketing.
So what about today? Have we changed as human beings just because technology has advanced and we have seen the birth of the internet? No, of course not. What has changed is the possibility for all of us to actually express ourselves to the world. And you know what, when we do that it turns out that we are not that average at all. We are all actually quite quirky. At least in some part of our life. Some aspect of our personalities. We all care religiously about some things and other things, the majority actually, is completely indifferent to us.
For example, I love to engage and discuss how the web changes our lives and society at large and also to discuss liberal politics. My cousing is a devoted motocross biker and engage deeply in those kind of discussions. Then we have the people that are devoted to bread and spend countless hours to share recipies and take pictures of their latest sourdough bread to post online. Other people find it dramatically interesting to play online games while another bunch of people discuss the latest rims available for Volvo cars. So we are all on the fringes now, for some small aspect of our lives. This is a dramatically different world than the median seeking Mad Men-world we are now leaving behind.
In this world, it is much more important to focus on the people on the fringes than to focus on the median. The reason is very simple:
”An average message towards and average person will never be retold in social media while a valuable message towards a person on the fringe actually have the possibility to get its own life and travel across the web through various sorts of social media”
The average is a dead end, the fringe is the possibility to build what Seth Godin calls a tribe. The reason for this is of course that even a small fringe topic, when taken onto a global scale, actually could garner quite a large following. And you know, the web is global.
So the lesson is, the more fragmented our world turns in terms nisches popping up, the more important does it become to actually engage with the right kind of nische for your specific product. And if your product actually isn’t targeted towards a nische? Then fight the battle over diminishing attention or go back to the drawing table.