Identifying your relative position within the narrative chaos
I often find myself exhaustively explaining how our current narrative landscape actually works, especially given my experience in Branding and Marketing Communications; only to realise people have often made up their minds without adequate knowledge on how any of this works to begin with. We often find ourselves inundated by a barrage of multiple strategic messaging on what to think and believe, far more effectively than any religion was capable of in the past century. It can be pervasive to the point that we end up identifying our egos with these messages, digging our heels deeper in the face of contrary information.
The cynicism of self-unrealised individuals who cling on to edgy rebellion against deep philosophies from across history, often neglect that they are at war with themselves and thus, harbour a negative attitude against anything transcendent about our human condition. This is then further made worse by a need for self-redemption via a subverted sense of compassion, weaponising the best traits of human nature and subjugating them to the worst impulses of human nature. If this has enraged and stung you so far, there is a chance that you are exactly the person who needed to read this, at which you have two choices, close this article and remain in the hell you have found yourself in or learn how you can better navigate yourself from the folly you've found yourself in. If any version of care, concern and compassion has caused you bitterness or numbness, it only goes to show that you've built resentment that's pricking at you on a deep conscientious level, often in dissonance to who you would rather be.
Understanding Market Segmentation
The market, a nebulous term that encompasses you, me and everything else that engages in commercial activity under every capacity, is divided into multiple smaller groups into 'smaller markets'. Also known as Market Segmentation, these market segments have their own demographic characteristics, from physical to ideological such as shared beliefs and cultural attitudes. Customer and Audience segmentation is done pretty much in a similar fashion, albeit with several nuances, purposes and use cases. A business, does not sell it's products and services to you alone, it serves a certain identified niche in the market while everyone outside the niche trickles in, at which point relevant niches get discovered, grouped and marketed to based on profitability. Many times, market penetration strategies are employed to take on a more aggressive role rather than the previously mentioned passive, need based role. There are of course paradigms to this, so take your time to read that a few times.
Human society does not live in a silo where our activities are cleanly separated, our interests, activities and even intentions often converge and overlap. This applies to our mature business knowledge and practices; information, transportation, energy and financial activity, whereby they travel in similar patterns if you're capable of identifying them, even repeat themselves cyclically through a game theory lens on how some of these models act and perform. Furthermore, there are computational and technological models that allow for tracking and monitoring these in each industry, and critical segmentation data is no stranger in the use of such technologies.
Targeted Communication, Tailored Messaging
Almost everything we believe, rationally or otherwise is influenced and relayed to us from someone else. That is not a moral assessment. However, overriding our biological impulses and innate moral attitudes with rationalisations that begin from false premises are entirely a monster of it's own. We were bombarded with messaging by marketers to consume margarine and fooled multiple generations into horrible health consequences that butter was bad for you. This was not just confined to marketers, as poor nutritional advice were pushed by various authoritative sources for decades. We ourselves add a layer of complexity through word-of-mouth marketing in the short term, giving personal credibility to these ill-concieved notions. As a demarketing strategy to counter-market alternative products, food and nutrition was and is actively moralised to invoke an emotional response masquerading as rational science. As the ever growing list of moralised positions metastasize into cult-like proportions, successful marketing campaigns and their converts (conversion is an actual process in marketing and follows a funnel with alternative strategies for leaks) are herded with adjacent co-branding and co-marketing objectives. Other attributes and characteristics are added to redefine the demographic make up, making it successively easier to market future messaging. It's usually why despite our individual uniqueness beneath our similarities, it tends to be pretty easy to determine someone's system of beliefs and attitude by what we choose to wear, what we support and even types of words we use.
I do not speak from a position of authority or commit the logical-fallacy of appealing to one, but I get secondhand embarrassment when speaking to supposedly learned individuals, some even with a PhD (albeit in a different field) where the response to revelations such as the above is met with child-like denial, without spending a single moment reading or attending a marketing lecture, let alone a single day at a branding or marketing job, and we have not even touched on consumer behaviour and psychology yet. I am a firm believer that tabula rasa is a lie, as it only posits one side of the story and does not account for other mysteries of cognition that do not fit into its model. It's the 21st century and we are debating foolishly over fabricated parameters despite having infinitely more tools than our ancestors did. Ancestors that were able to determine the nuanced and holistic view of the human condition, only to be repeatedly destroyed and rebuilt time and again through history.
Breaking the Chain and Venturing out with your Tribe.
The way forward, unlike many who tell you what to think, is letting you know the playing field. I can only show you the door, as it is crucial in rebuilding the strength of your will to think freely. To have the ability to confront objective truths of our reality, even if we fail, we ensure our children have a better chance without the mental parasites we harbour, while ensuring that the sins of the father is not visited upon his son. It is only possibly to navigate the noise with people that are loyal to their kin, accept our differences and realising how to think so that we may build resilience as an individual, a tribe, a community and a society. We do not owe our loyalties to forces that do not care about us beyond our material wealth or submission of our support. We owe it to our spouse, family and friends that depend on us and in kind care for us genuinely.
A life can only be lived freely if it is not physically or psychologically enslaved and subjugated, lead to erroneously believe in deliberate falsehoods that divide us to remain atomised through the noise of narratives alone. No man is an island, and islands are one tsunami away from being swallowed into oblivion. It's time we rebuilt our tribes and redeveloped deep bonds and connections to people within our tribe, with strong virtues and principles acting as a protective barrier against subversive voices and divisive forces.
Civilisations rise and fall, Empires reign and crumble but nothing truly imprisons us the way we imprison our own minds and erode the divinity within us. It is the responsibility of every individual to be aware and care for one another, so that we may stand a chance to transcend the adversities we face in our lives, together.