A Marketer’s Blindness: Avatars Don’t Lie

Having myself been quoted out of context and wishing I could die over it, I’m working very hard to give Mark Hughes (author of Buzz Marketing?) the benefit of the doubt. But I’m having a hard time coming up with a scenario in which a smart, savvy marketer would legitimately say this today:

"The people in Second Life, they aren't worth reaching. It's just a weird place. It's never gonna catch on. It's a fad, not a fashion at all."

I’ll give him that Second Life may be fleeting in its fame, and it is kind of a weird place.  But did he just tell me I was a consumer not worth reaching?

The context was a story on the economy of Second Life by Janet Babin that aired today on America Public Media’s radio show, Marketplace.  By public radio’s, and Marketplace’s standards it was a pretty poorly framed story.

You might expect me to be indignant and riff on the legitimacy of the people in SL.  But like anyone who is the least bit involved in SL I’m dismissing Mr. Hughes’ comment as uninformed about the place and the people.  I’ll also bypass the opportunity to wax poetic about the power of word-of-mouth. 

What amazes me on a broader scale is a marketer, any marketer, who dismisses the opportunity to look straight into the heart – the very soul – of its customer and deem that as not worth the effort.

The avatar is art – created from the mind, heart, subconscious, conscious, yearning, aspirations, personality, context, experience of its owner.  All that is on display as a virtual person, a created object or an entire simulation.   The avatar portrays various aspects of our identity, our self-image.  Over time, the avatar takes shape in ways the owner could not predict, sometimes for reasons the owner cannot articulate. 

The avatar is shaping the language we use, and therefore the way we think of our “self.”  We breathe “life” into something that is clearly not alive, and we endow it with characteristics that are in some part the “real” us – it could be nothing but.

We move – in our minds and in our language – effortlessly between the real and the animated self:   “I’m in Second Life.”   “I’m editing my appearance.”  “Be right back, have to take a call.”

Sherry Turkle, director of MIT Initiative on Technology and Self, renowned author and researcher, published an article 9 years ago in Wired title “Who Am We?” in which she discusses this concept at length in relation to MUDs (Multi-User Dimensions).

“A 26-year-old clerical worker says, ‘I'm not one thing, I'm many things. Each part gets to be more fully expressed in MUDs than in the real world. So even though I play more than one self on MUDs, I feel more like 'myself' when I'm MUDding.’ In real life, this woman sees her world as too narrow to allow her to manifest certain aspects of the person she feels herself to be. Creating screen personae is thus an opportunity for self-expression, leading to her feeling more like her true self when decked out in an array of virtual masks.”

Marketers have spent billions researching our psyche for “real” motivations and our deepest longings in order to create products – or shape messages – that promise to enable the “real me.”  Now here we are in SL creating, shaping and discovering the “real us” for any one to see.

A smart, savvy marketer ought to be watching and listening.

Photo Credit:  Andromega and Gita Rau

January 22, 2008

Comments

[csven]

Two things:

1) I can understand why SL or any user-controlled medium wouldn't be "worth" a traditional marketer's time. The whole industry has been raised on passive consumers stuck with one-way television programming. Things have been going well for a long time. And when things are comfortable, most people don't like change. We're still in the comfort zone for plenty of people (even if the heat is starting to make them sweat). So I don't expect the marketing community to do what others won't: adapt without resistance.

2) Having worked inside corporate marketing I read "have spent billions researching" and was reminded that when the research didn't align with what the Big Box Buyer wanted or the individual marketer (for job security reasons) didn't like hearing, it got thrown out without so much as a second thought. Thus I'm not as surprised at the casual dismissal of research into what consumers "want". Mostly, consumers get what's made available to them (for now, anyway) and plenty of marketing people know this; it's the very thing that allowed Wal*Mart to succeed simply by importing cheap junk from China in the early 90's.

Don't take this as a slight against the Marketing community. The Industrial Design community is equally dismissive and ignorant of what's going on in this arena.

[Linda Zimmer]

Hi, csven. Oh, I too can understand the "mass" mentality and the lack of enthusiasm for change. And it makes my head hurt to think of companies literally throwing away research.

And, you are right. Mass and Scale will trump for a long time yet.

What just boggles my mind though is the opportunity that is just sitting there - for free - to capture all that knowledge that could only benefit the marketer, and they just can't see it - in fact dismiss it.

I think it has to do with the fact many people need "explicit knowledge" before they can see value - exactly what it is, exactly what it is good for, what do I do with it exactly to get X benefit out of it, etc.

Others are curious, and can incorporate a kind of tacit knowledge - exploring, allowing the threads to build up into a picture of value or application.

Today, tacit knowledge is the competitive advantage, as things move too fast to wait until everything comes into focus.

[Mary Ellen Gordon]

I agree with all of the eloquently expressed comments in the post about avatars, but what really drives me crazy is how irresponsible people are about reporting that 5% drop figure (in the story, not the post).

This isn't the only news story I've seen it in, yet no one seems to consider the simple fact that months have different numbers of days in them and takes the obvious and easy step of adjusting for that. When you do, that shocking drop was actually 2%. While it's true that month-on-month drops have been rare in SL's history (there was a 1% drop once you adjust for days in the month in August of 2007, and an 8% drop in March 2005), the reason is that up until about the middle of 2007, SL was enjoying double digit growth (most months) in monthly hours of use. That's enough growth to mask a lot of pesky details such as variation in days in the month and vacation and holiday periods when a lot of people are not near a SL compatible computer.

But the thing is, no form of media (including those reporting this story) enjoys monthly double digit growth in hours of exposure forever. Even if you look at the second half of the year during the period of "slowdown" hours of usage increased (after adjusting for the number of days) by 14%. Most traditional media outlets would be jumping for joy if their own hours of viewing increased by 14% in six months, so I'm not sure why they're so quick to interpret it as a sign of doom when it comes to Second Life.

[Linda Zimmer]

Mary Ellen - as always you bring such great persepctive to the discussion - thanks for sharing your research expertise on this. You obviously listened to the story to catch the 5% drop in usage stat that was quoted.

Can I quote this in a separate post?

[Linda Zimmer]

I forgot to mention after hearing the story yesterday, I just had to email Marketplace to let them know how inaccurate I thought their story was.

[Mary Ellen Gordon]

Sure Linda -- No problem quoting in a separate post.

Mary Ellen

[Prokofy Neva]

Well, many voters and marketers in the United States wouldn't find NPR listeners worth reaching, either, they're likely a tiny minority compared to, oh, Clear Channel listeners or AM radio listeners.

The speaker may have only referred to the very real problem of a tiny set of numbers, relatively speaking, that don't (yet) constitute a very defined trend-setting sort of upscale niche.

We all know there is no 12 million. There might be 350,000 (that's my estimate, based on the very pragmatic consideration of the number of people last month who spent more than one Linden dollar).

That 350,000 aren't all NPR listeners, or NY Review of Book readers or NY Times readers or however you wish to define it. They represent a tiny sliver of "the intelligentsia" and "the creative people" from a half dozen of the world's most industrialized cuontries, and then a huge collection of more mass consumers, but also not in any recognizable demographic.

From the perch of this marketer, the comfort level just may not be there with SL, if he finds some of its people and practices too exotic or troublesome.

It may mean it just takes more work to reach a taste-maker like *him* but there's a limit to how much it's worth it.

I'm not buying the idea that the drop in numbers is about different month lengths.

November around Thanksgiving took an unbelievably hard hit because four things happened at once that really sunk SL's numbers:

o Thanksgiving, which by itself would have been a trough for the 4-day or more holiday

o huge pre-Christmas drive by RL retailers to create a Black Friday after Thanksgiving that led some people to go buy their Wii or their Halo or whatever and spend elsewhere than in SL

o Three days of actual technical outages for most of the day, on top of the short-staffed holiday lows

o Griefing attacks that took advantage of this, or helped precipitate it

Then after that, we had more casino cashouts and the bank announcement.

[Mary Ellen Gordon]

Hi Prokofy,

I'm not suggesting that the drop is only due to the length of the month -- I think those other things you mentioned probably do come into play too. What I am suggesting is that if someone is going to make a big deal out of a month-to-month drop, they at least should compare apples to apples and do it on an hours per day basis. As it is, more than half of the 5% drop can be directly explained by the fact that there are 3% fewer days in November than there are on October. It would definitely be possible to get even more fancy about things and adjust for factors such as holidays, whether there are four or five Sundays in the month, hours of technical outages, etc. To be even more precise those adjustments could be made on a country-by-country basis because, for example, Thanksgiving only affects people in the US. It may well be in Linden Lab's interest to do that sort of modeling, though I wouldn't expect the media to do it. What I do expect is for them not to make a news story out of the fact that October has more days in it than November.

Mary Ellen

[Helen T]

Whilst I think the marketer is crazy to ignore the opportunity, I can quite understand how he got himself into this self-justifying situation. Second Life is not easy to explain, or the benefits easy to quantify, things that big corporations tend to like.

I've been really lucky to have a fantastic sponsor for the work we've started with No 7 on SL, a real support for trying it, engaging with the community, learning from it and then hopefully repeating the cycle over again. Boots is a fairly conservative environment, so even more encouraged that have been given the opportunity to embrace part of the future now.

So, yes, I think he's missed the point, and missed the opportunity. You know what, it's possibly not a loss, if he is not engaged in SL, then how can he hope to create an SL experience that will engage and add value for the community. It might be better for him to continue to sit this one out.

[Linda Zimmer]

Hi, Helen. Would be very interested in hearing more about your experience with community engagement thus far in your initiative. If you are interested in chatting, please let me know!

Yes, Mark missed the point about Second Life - but I believe that someone one is involved with word of mouth marketing ought to understand 1) that everyone is an influencer; 2) people are distrubted in multiple "places." Therefore to say "people in Second Life" harkens back to a very old way of thinking about media.

SL is definitely not for every marketer - nor is every person a suitable engagement. But we just can't equate "place" anymore with "target market."

IM me in world - Znetlady Isbell - would like to learn more about how No 7 is experiencing SL!