Disinfect Your Mind

Official day of publication is Feruary 25! The printed copies are on the way to Amazon. See more at the Galiel.Net - the publisher’s site. 

The Big Moo: Stop Trying to Be Perfect and Start Being Remarkable by The Group of 33, edited by Seth Goding – ISBN 1-59184-103-8

A collection of short articles by a group of celebrities like Tom Peters, Malcolm Gladwell and Guy Kawasaki edited by Seth Godin.

Very nice collection for the funs of Seth Godin and his Purple Cow. The subtitle tells it all, and it’s very nice motivationally. The short size of individual pieces and change of author voices provides a very refreshing variety.

If you don’t know, Purple Cow in essence is a semi-conscious hybrid of using mind viruses for commercial purposes in an ethical way and marketing in a post-socialistic (as well as post-capitalistic) society, popularly referred as “information age”. The author (editor) seems to be well aware of both memetics and the fact that the age of mass production is over, but does not bother his readers with that and instead presents his ideas in a fresh succulent way more readily imprintable on a mind of an average person… according with the very ideas he presents in his books.

If nothing else, go through the book in a bookstore or visit thebigmoo.com site.

Presentation S.O.S.: From Perspiration to Persuasion in 9 Easy Steps by Mark Wiskup – ISBN 0-446-69554-8, 181 p.

The book is written by a renowned communications expert who speaks nationwide to many Fortune 500 companies. The main subject of the book is how to prepare and deliver powerful presentation that make people buy – speaking either figuratively or literally.

What’s interesting is that his central piece of advice is a “Power Sound Bite”, a piece of reiterated information that glues the whole presentation together and represents the core idea you want people to remember and bring out of presentation. “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself” (FDR), “I have a dream” (Martin Luther King, Jr.), “To be or not to be?” (William Shakespeare), “The tribe have spoken” are just few examples of Power Sound Bites.

If you already read the draft of my book or followed the advice and checked one of the books in memetic bibliography, you already recognize PSBs as something very familiar – a meme. Even better, a meme with an anchor and carrier – a mind virus.

Of course, he does not approach this from the memetic point of view, and hence the book has a few shortcomings. Here is an example of PSB, he believes is good:

When you support these goals for the direction of our marketing effort, you’ll
be assuring a good, profitable year for the company, making your customers
happy, and putting more money in your wallet.

Gees… What a bite of a corporate politically correct B.S. Marketing making customers happy?

Although, I have to admit, it’s a lousy meme, but a good wrapper and delivery mechanism for a really strong meme expressed in the last five words: “more money in your wallet.” The rest of the message simply gets the guards off. People listen to the beginning of this sentence and immediately classify is at “managerese” mumbling leaving it to internal defenses to filter it out. But when it drop there, internal filters see “more money in your wallet”, and, wow! Your inner self gets interested.

Let’s get a bit more formal, here is what this statement is in memetic notation:

(support me, is, extra money)
(support me, is, happy customers)
(support me, is, profitable year)

The long introductory part means simply “Support me”, because it does not carry any information about the “effort” or “goals” or “direction”. These terms are simply a bubble-talk to express simple “support me” directive. “Extra money in your wallet” = “More personal income” is the main anchor of the statement. The second two are auxiliary anchors in a case your audience has corporate profit or customer satisfaction metrics in the performance objectives.

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.

Hi folks,Have you ever received a mail that starts with something like 

“Dear Stupid,
I am Giving Away My Secrets on Getting Rich with …”

I do. You see, when I subscribe to the mail lists I often give names like “Stupid”, “Fool”, “Junk” instead of my first name. Really, these guys don’t really need my name. They only use it to fool me into a false sense of a personal touch. So, why not pull a little prank on them?

Really, why? Why am I doing that?

Do I enjoy being called “stupid”? Well, not exactly, there is much better reason for that.

Many mail lists on the internet are designed to lure you into buying something – a report that reveals secrets, a guide that should make you rich, schemes that are supposed to bring you wealth beyond your wildest dreams, pills that make you a sex legend, diets that will let you die healthy… You name it, and somebody on the Internet is already promising it.

You may wonder why somebody would ever consider such offers, and the answer is “marketing”. Marketing and advertising. A sales copy filled with anchors and mind viruses. A sales copy that pretends to be a messages from your old friend; a message that tries to start with something like “Hi, Joe,…” or “Hey, Bob, …” to make you think that it was written by an old friend specially for you. There are no friends behinds it, actually, there are no real people either, it all happens automatically. Your name was harvested, put into a database, and now it was automatically inserted into a template like, “Hi, ,…” Once you are deceived into the friendly mood, it becomes much easier to penetrate your mind and infect you with a buying virus. Yes, just that.

Now, you see what my little prank does? Instead of cheating me into a friendly open-mind mode, it automatically arms my defenses with an unexpected offense.

You know, it’s not what they call you, it’s what you do after reading their stuff that makes you stupid or smart.

Till the next time!