Disinfect Your Mind

As any marketing expert will tell you, in the XX century the dominant way to sell goods and services was based on branding and positioning. This is more questionable now, in XXI century, but we will talk about that separately. Just as a refresher, what is branding and positioning?Branding, in a nutshell, is linking a completely non-sensible logo or name to the category of a product or a service. Positioning is about positioning your own non-sensible logo or name relative to others in the same category, so that you still sell even if there is a lot of contenders. 

How does it all work memetically? By putting a meme into your mind. (Car rental, is, Hertz), (Soft drink, is, Coke), (Computer, is, IBM). Then once you need a car rental, soft drink or a computer you go to Hertz, Coca-Cola or IBM. Why? Let’s see how our brain make decisions.

First, it gets a notion of what you need, like “Car”, “Week”. Then (Week, is, temporary) meme is applied and it gets “Car”, “Temporary”. Then (Temporary, use, rental) applies, so you get “Car, rental”. All this happens very fast, so you even don’t notice the process. In fact, you cannot notice the process, because it’s the same process as noticing something – that’s your thoughts. Then the branding meme strikes and you end up with “Hertz”. Simple enough, isn’t it?

The idea of branding is to link a triggering need to the company, hence directing everybody who has this particular need to buy from a particular company rather than its competition. Introducing a meme that will make the link was the job of marketing.

To the disappointment of marketing firms’ customers, this gave the initial result but then stopped working for most companies. (Computer, is, IBM) is fine, but what could you do if the customers are bombarded with competitive memes (Computer, is, Compaq), (Computer, is, Dell), (Computer, is, Hewlett-Packard), (Computer, is, Sony, Samsung, et al.) It was found that only the top two conflicting memes survive, the rest of them hit the dust with only marginal recognition. So, positioning become the king by trying to get a meme of a specific company in the top two slots, or invent a new category, where it can get into the top two slots.

So, why do only the top two memes survive in branding and marketing? Let’s see again, how our mind works. First, we have a need. Then we use a meme with the needs on the right side with the left side of the same meme. (Car, week) -> (Car, temporary). Then we do that again with new matching memes, (Car, rental), and so on. Each time many memes match, but only the strongest is used. Once we get the solution, we may like it or not. Or we may just hit a dead end. In both cases, we rollback a step or two and apply the second strongest meme to get a different answer. If we hit a dead end or a solution that we don’t like, we go back again and try the third strongest meme or we may roll back a step or two more. Now, if you need a soft drink, how many times will you hit a dead end? Zero. And if you don’t like it, you get “the other cola” in an instance. When buying a commodity product, there is simply no way you can hit a dead end too many times. It’s not like you cannot go through the endless list of different “cola’s”; you can, but it would simply be a waste of time, and there is no reason why you would want that.