Johannesburg - I’m bored. I’m really, really bored. Aren’t you? Bored of your job? Bored of the food you eat everyday? Bored of your friends? When phones and laptops are put away, we remember how bored we are so we turn on the television, or log-in to Facebook to try and distract ourselves from that encroaching feeling of boredom – that sense of dead space and deathly silence that exists in the rare moments when all our devices are turned off.
The irony is that it’s the meaningless content in our lives that is making us bored. The mundane content we’re reading on Mxit, those semi-conscious conversations we’re having on WhatsApp, the pointless thoughts we tweet in service of our disinterested followers, the photographs we like on Facebook that really don’t warrant remembering… these are the things that are fuelling our boredom. Why? Because they have no inherent meaning!
Boredom doesn’t come from a lack of activity. It comes from a lack of meaning. And the biggest problem with life in the 21st century is that we have these two things confused. In our desperate attempt to combat boredom we created a tsunami of media and entertainment that drowned us in activity. So vast are the options available to us, that we require multiple devices just to keep track of them all. But the more devices we have, the more options they spawn. It’s a vicious cycle… and it’s accelerating.
We normally think about boredom as nothingness. So when you try to imagine “nothingness” accelerating, it begins to conjure images of a vortex, or a black hole. Pretty terrifying, isn’t it? Well that vortex, that black hole, is what the existentialist philosophers at the turn of the century were so fixated on. They referred to it as “the abyss”. And they understood the relationship between this abyss and our existentialist boredom.
Jean Paul Satre – one of the greatest existentialist philosophers of our time referred to this as “ennui” – a French term that literally means “boredom”. Now, it’s no co-incidence that existentialism emerged at the beginning of the 20th century. It is a modern philosophy born from modern societal issues. In short, it arises from the accelerating meaninglessness of our modern lives.
In a feudal society where our labour was directly connected with our survival, activity and meaning were linked. You worked to eat, and you ate to survive and if there was any time remaining it was dedicated to God and religion. Materialism didn’t exist. Consumerism didn’t exist. People had neither the time nor the resources for that.
But the introduction of new technology during the industrial revolution solved many of society’s more manual problems and left us with the time to contemplate deeper questions of existence. Unfortunately many of these questions are profoundly unanswerable, and this triggered a kind of collective existential crisis that has, in many ways, fuelled the hunger for progress that has defined life in the 20th century.
Staring into the abyss, coming to terms with our “ennui”, was just too difficult so we began to seek-out distractions instead:
Books – which where once the preserve of clergymen and scholars – became newspapers and magazines for the general populace. Theatre evolved into cinema, cinema spawned television, symphony orchestras were broadcast on radio, conversations mutated into conference calls, cable gave way to the internet, the web became social, social went viral, we wired the world, the wired world became wireless, media went mobile, and everything became more, and more, and more… and we didn’t even realise that hidden beneath that more, was less – less time, less human interaction and less meaning.
The story of the evolution of media is in fact a tragic tale of moving from “meaning” to “meaninglessness”. There was a time when art served society as profoundly as religion. Cave paintings, oral tales, Ancient Greek drama – these things all helped to create meaning in our lives. They gave ancient man a sense of perspective. They allowed him to contemplate aspects of the world that he could not yet understand. But with the evolution of technology and the birth of mass media, this vital artistic discourse was replaced with materialism, consumerism and celebrity fetishism.
In the last few centuries we’ve evolved from Beethoven to Bieber, from Caravagio to Cartoon Network, and from Citizen Cane to Big Brother. We’ve opted for simplicity instead of complexity, we’ve replaced quality with quantity, and we’ve reduced everything to the lowest common denominator. Sameness has become the new originality.
We haven’t done all this simply because we’re lazy – but because it makes commercial sense. Capitalism is predicated on profit and growth. To make money you have to drive consumption; to drive consumption you have to create desire, repeatedly, constantly. How do you do that? By feeding people with food that keeps them hungry. It’s the McDonald’s paradox. No matter how big you Supersize your meal it will never fill you up for more than 20 minutes, because it contains no real nutrition. Junk food lacks nutrients in the same way that Junk Media lacks meaning. And like junk food, Junk Media is making our society sick.
Victor Frankl, the famous Austrian neurologist and psychiatrist, coined the term “Sunday Neurosis” to describe the dejected feeling one gets at the end of a work week when you realise how empty and meaningless your life is. Frankl observed that while ever more people have the means to live, fewer have any meaning to live for. Now Frankl’s theories were forged in the most horrific of fires – Auschweitz, Dachau and other Nazi concentration camps were he was imprisoned during World War II.
During that time, Frankl who was already a practicing psychiatrist, realised that those that survived longest in the concentration camps were not those who were physically strong, but those who retained a sense of purpose. This realisation formed the basis of Frankl’s theories, outlined in his book Man’s Search for Meaning, in which he explains that our main drive as human beings is not pleasure, as Freud had initially suggested, or power as Adler and Nietsche argued, but meaning. Our quest as human beings needs to be finding meaning in our lives. And just as we seek meaning in our own lives, as marketers we need to define meaning in our brands.
Quest for meaning
While there’s no one success formula there are a number of principles that can be applied to head in the right direction.
The first principle is purpose. To build a meaningful brand, you have to have a higher-purpose, something beyond products and profits – an ideal or a set of values that you share with your consumers. As John Mackey, the co-founder and chief executive of Whole Foods Market, said: “Businesses in the 21st century need to shift focus from profit maximisation to purpose maximisation.”
Not simply because it is the right thing to do, but because in today’s crisis-riddled world purpose is key to business success. Ideals form the cornerstones of a meaningful brand.
The second principle is the notion of responsibility. In his book, Frankl explains that before we can create meaning in our lives, we have to be aware of our responsibility to ourselves and to others. “Each man is questioned by life,” he writes, “and he can only answer to life by answering for his own life; to life he can only respond by being responsible.”
A great example of a brand that has unlocked meaning by accepting responsibility for its actions is Nike, a company whose near-perfect image was shattered when the world discovered that its products where being manufactured in Asian sweatshops. Nike was forced by customers to assume responsibility for the actions of its entire supply-chain. But the moment it did that, an amazing thing happened. In accepting responsibility for its actions, the company awakened to bigger issues facing society and this newfound consciousness helped Nike forge meaningful connections with its customers.
A third and final principle for creating meaningful brands that we can learn from Frankl’s writing is the importance of striving towards a future goal. During his time in the concentration camps, Frankl observed that the prisoner who had lost faith in the future was doomed. “Any attempt to restore a man’s inner strength in the camp,” he wrote, “had first to succeed in showing him some future goal.”
We live in a world where tomorrow is no longer guaranteed, and where economic, environmental and political crisis constantly threaten our existence on this planet. In the face of such dire uncertainty, it would be easy for humankind to lose hope, to give-up. But the moment we do, we will, as Frankl warns, be doomed.
And so as marketers and business leaders, indeed as human beings, it is our duty to contribute to a sustainable vision for the future. More and more businesses are beginning to understand this duty. They are beginning to heed the call, and in so doing are creating more meaningful brands.
One example is the international fast food company, Chipotle, who went from selling tacos and burritos to engaging consumers in the notion of cultivating a better world. As Nietzsche said: “He who has a why to live for, can bear with almost any how.”
We live in a world where economic, environmental and political crisis constantly threaten our existence. In the face of such dire uncertainty, it would be easy for humankind to lose hope and give-up. As marketers and business leaders it is our duty to contribute to a sustainable vision for the future. More and more businesses are beginning to understand this duty, heed the call and create meaningful brands. We can instill meaning into our brands by giving our consumers a goal and a vision to strive for.
We are living in a crisis of meaning that permeates our modern media landscape. A crisis of meaning that threatens to bore each and every one of us to death.
As marketers, brand owners, and business leaders we have the opportunity to liberate our customers from their existential boredom, to save them from their “ennui”. How? Not with advertising, not by simply selling them more meaningless content, but by helping them create meaning in their lives.
Frankl said that our purpose as human beings was “to weave the threads of life into a firm pattern of meaning and responsibility”. Surely this is our purpose as marketers as well: to weave the threads of our brands into a firm pattern of meaning and responsibility.
Achieve this and we can save ourselves from this interminable boredom.
* Jason Xenopoulos is the chief executive and chief creative officer of NATIVE VML
Business Report