Like it or not, this is your marketplace.
Spoiler Alert: This post is intentionally satirical. The reason is the difficulty in accurately describing something as bizarre as human “logic.” If I took the edge off, it would come across as academic. But these ideas cannot be found in academia. They’re typically in fringe media and more importantly, in the advertising industry. So, I apologize if I insult you. (Tongue in cheek)
I hope you know, I hope you know
That this has nothing to do with you
It’s personal, myself and I
We got some straightening out to do
And I’m gonna miss you like a child misses their blanket
But I’ve got to get a move on with my life
It’s time to be a big girl now
And big girls don’t cry
Don’t cry, don’t cry, don’t cry
Big Girls Don’t Cry… Song by Fergie
When I was 8, my friends and I used to play army. By about 11 we gave it up. By 14 we had jobs. By 18 we were joining the Marines. Today, 75% of the “kids” who play army, better known as Call of Duty War Zone, are over 18. That number is 250 million!
If you’re over 40 you might think half of the popular music written today would fit perfectly on the Jeffrey Epstein playlist. Rife with childish babble about boyfriends, girlfriends and infantile jealousy, for anyone with a brain it’s nauseating.
The business of childishness.
Watching “grownups” vomiting out asinine opinions is the future. Believe me, it’s planned. More on this below. But look at the film industry. In the decade of the 60’s, of the top 10 grossing films only 2, The Jungle Book and Mary Poppins, were children’s films.
Since 2000, of the top 10, only one, Titanic, WASN’T a kid’s movie. (Titanic was rereleased in 2000, it’s actually a 1997 film.) Grown men have comic superheroes.
63% of the people who visit Disney are described as “Disney Adults.” These are people over 18 who do not have a child in the house. Add to this the fact that both JK Rowling’s and Mark Twain’s books are described as literature, when in fact, they’re children’s books. 50% of Harry Potter readers are over 18.
And finally, the movie Barbie in the US has a rating of PG-13. In other words, it was considered unfit for a girl young enough to play with a Doll!
To a businessman, a market is not something you criticize.
The market is the market. You either study it and understand it or get taken out by your competition. The fact that 75% of the population are overfed children is not our cross to bear. It’s our marketplace.
The fact that your local coffee shop has a garbage can with three recycle holes and one garbage bag is something you study, not carp about. Why would a company do this? Why does Home Depot allow people to bring back products because they don’t like them? Why do shoe stores allow women to wear shoes and bring them back? (In Germany, you buy it you own it.)
With AI, the market research will become personalized.
Keep in mind, it’s already largely already personalized. As you are annoyingly reminded, the internet vomits back at you even the remotest hint you might be interested in buying something. It’s simple logic.
But AI personalization will not be based on logic. Why? Because people aren’t logical, they’re biological. And this is something that can be neither ignored nor even glossed over. This is the essence of understanding human behavior. To understand illogical human behavior, it’s instructive to step outside the box and think of it in a non-judgmental way.
The “intellectual” obsession with IQ.
You can make a lot of money as a coder. When I was young, one could make a lot of money writing in now extinct computer languages. A few years later these coders were working for bar tab money.
What many of these geeks have in common are high IQs, but what is IQ? To see this look at an IQ test. It’s all pattern recognition. What sticks out and what is common in abstract photos. Most of what we call IQ is implied from knowledge tests. The SAT is not an IQ test. IQ is a function of left-brain activity. But humans are not designed to be abstractly focused which is why less than 2% of the population has an IQ over 120.
The reason I mention this is because the world is becoming literally insanely left brain driven. (1) The left brain is the “seeing” part of the brain, the right side being involved in reasoning. (Or we might say, conceptualizing.) As Lian McGilchrist posits, because of a variety of factors people are becoming dangerously left brained.
In other words, they can think but cannot reason.
This means, obviously, your customers are unreasonable. Being unreasonable is a form of mental deficiency. Trying to reason with an unreasonable person is just plain stupid. The lack of reasoning in people today is so widespread that it’s now normal.
AI doesn’t care if people are reasonable and will not enter into needless arguments.
People do not believe in biology.
Most people, even university educated biologists see Biology as an academic subject, not something that exists within their own body. In fact, the same people who believe that IQ is a biological instinct refuse to recognize that humans (as well as animals) have any number of instincts.
Not only are we rife with instincts, such as sexuality, music, language, emotion, the senses, etc… but they interact and overlap in ways that make them hard to define. All these instincts have their own “bell curves.”
The sexual instinct goes from monks who live in caves in the Himalayas who never see a woman to pedophiles that rot away in correctional facilities. The rest of us are somewhere in between.
In music, there are people who literally can’t listen to rap and people who literally can’t stand classical music.
For centuries music was studied as a math course. Music is numbers representing sounds in space. It’s broken down into quarter notes, half notes, octaves, etc. Pitch is a form of mimicry, where the ear is trained to segment pitches as on or off. Different people instinctively are attracted to different music on a bell curve, just as some people have greater math “instinct.”
Are people devolving?
This is an important question. In humans, the left and right brain are, to put it simply, connected by a frayed wire. The hemispheres are more separate in humans than other animals which is why humans are less instinctive. Whereas a bird will chirp the same chirp until the day they die, human language is complex and nuanced.
But humans are supposed to reason. This is our biological superpower. Thinking. By intentionally shutting off half of our brains, we become more like our Pleistocene ancestors.
The 21st century influencer.
Influencers are not a new phenomenon. They were first used institutionally by advertisers in the 60’s. In his book Propaganda, (2) Ed Bernays lays out the strategies necessary to use influencers to create public “opinion.”
Bernays influencers were trusted professionals such as doctors, dentists and elected officials. Unlike Bernays influencers, todays influencers are… well, how do I say it… avatars?
Bernays knew what McGilchrist knows. Most people do not think, at least in the classical definition of thinking. (Bernays tagged the number of people capable of thinking at 15%) In other words, they don’t (or perhaps can’t) reason. In leu of reasoning, they follow influencers who talk for them. But when the influencer is not available, they use memes, cliches and pat phrases that combine a wide range of ideas, emotions and beliefs.
Maya Perry takes this one step further. In her article “Everyone’s Existential Crisis,” (3) she explains that even as many people can reason, they are using unreliable second and third hand information, transmitted through influencers.
The next influencer will be a CGI creation.
There’s almost a lock on that. To understand this, look at pets.
A dog is not an animal, it’s a pet. All dogs are descendant from the Timber wolf. They were bred as hunters, or guard dogs, the wolfishness bred out. In the process, the wolf that was most likely to be the alpha male more than likely was not fit to be domesticated.
Today’s dogs are not bred to hunt or protect, but to act as surrogate children. Wolves don’t have floppy ears, wag their tails or beg. (Their puppies do.) They kill, sometimes for food, other times for access to sex with all the females. They’re savage animals, because killing another animal with nothing but your teeth is a savage act.
The real question though is why would a person want an animal that acts like a child? Because they want children! Child rearing is an instinct. Societies that have few children (like Europe) have high incidence of drug abuse, and mental problems. (As someone who spends several months year in Europe, I guarantee you, Europeans are miserable people.)
Do you think the same people who want animals that act like surrogate children won’t follow a CGI, an avatar or a robot? I wouldn’t bet my 401K on it.
Are journalists CGI’s?
One of the oldest adages from propaganda is, “In politics, statements that are true have no value.” Politics is by nature, divisive. If something is unquestionably true, it has no value as an argument.
Consider these statements.
The Lord is the truth is the way
Science is real
Love is love
What these statements have in common is they make no sense, or better yet, they only make sense between the ears of believers. If you know any hard core “believers” they all think they know something you’ll never understand.
In a way they represent what Lucien Levy-Bruhl (4) described as a form of “secret language” that only the leaders understand. These languages were common in the past, going back thousands of years. They could be seen in things like court languages, religious languages like Latin and Urdu, as well as speaking in tongues.
In fact, these statements are the basis of most religions where it is a function of faith to believe things that are frankly unbelievable. The only real difference between politics and propaganda is which side of the curtain you’re on. But, as we discussed above, one side is becoming increasingly mentally ill, and as a businessman, you’d better be cognizant of that, or all that vomiting will be on you.
Journalists though are not intellectuals. They are hired because they fit the marketing profile. A truly intelligent journalist would bankrupt a media company in the age of the channel changer. If a journalist makes no sense, I guarantee, the target audience has no sense.
Democracies create nonsense.
It’s easy to see why. If you look at European democracies, they have multiple parties, many of which are single issue parties. This creates division and shunts decision making. The Germans just announced a “snap election” in six months. When democracies agree on something, it’s generally so lame that it’s absurd.
In the EU they agreed that soda bottle tops could not separate from the bottle when opened. They also agreed that anyone who sells them energy must be carbon neutral. Only a “democracy” would expect an oil company to be carbon neutral.
Perhaps the best example of the opposite effect is a prayer called “The Nicene Creed,” created by the council(s) of Nicaea in the Eastern Roman empire in the 4th century. This prayer has been recited and debated for 16 centuries, which is why Constantine agreed to it.
It starts out as “We believe in one god, the father, the almighty, creator of heaven and earth and all that is seen and unseen.”
Can you imagine anything more likely to start a blood feud than this? At the time of the Byzantine Empire, before Roman Catholicism, people fought ferocious wars over who God was. But Constantine, who was not a believer, had no interest in war. His interest was in unification. So, he adopted the creed and killed its detractors.
Contrary to its detractors, this “creed” created the most powerful and dominant culture in the history of the world. Its believers conquered entire nations despite being outnumbered thousands to one!
This is why when Democracies fail, they become dictatorships. In the end of the day, the people want stability and will support whoever gives it to them, providing you have one God and he makes the rules.
Will AI make people more childish?
It seems likely. When the world was opining on how the internet was going to change the world, how many predicted the massive rise in pornography? How many have predicted the largely unreported epidemic in sexually transmitted diseases? How about child trafficking, terrorist networks, bank scams and mental illness?
The tech revolution, contrary to what most geekish Trekkies think had more to do with banking than computer innovation. The flood of money created by the FED, shadow banks and foreign central banks was the seed that tech grew from. Elon Musk’s first successful rocket launch led to a flood of investors. Without new investors, there would not have been a second launch. Tesla started with a $500 million grant from the government and NASDAQ shares as cash equivalents.
Thousands of US startups are not or will never have anything that even remotely resembles a profit. Amazon went decades before it made money. Its shares were its currency. In fact, the quality of earnings in NASDAQ companies is so bad it’s laughable. The biggest problem highly profitable companies in mining and the oil industry have is getting financed, yet an jerk-wad.com is swimming in cash from investors.
What does this have to do with childishness?
In the end, money must be made. What is the easiest way to make money when your customers are… logically challenged? Sell them what they’re already buying only better. This means more superhero movies for 50-year-old men, more games where people can make pretend that they’re in the army killing terrorists, more $8,000 vacations so a 40-something couple can pretend their royals in the Magic Kingdom, and, of course, CGI AI driven porn so people can masturbate their lives away.
Here’s an idea. The latest emotional vomit is food die which is apparently a carcinogen. People are afraid that the coloring on Skittles causes cancer, somehow fantasizing that Skittles are a health food. Simple: create an all-natural, organic Skittle.
If this sounds stupid, you’ve not only blown off everything I’ve written but are unaware of how the organic food industry operates. Organic pesticide is the Vegan equivalent of organic red die on Skittles. You still have to kill the pest. Remember, you are selling to unreasonable people. Don’t try to reason with them, just nod your head.
A good way to accustom yourself to this is cable news. The vast majority of “debates” on cable news are pointless, irrelevant bloviating by people who don’t seem to have ears. So, who is their target audience?
Think of price and quality.
Why do women pay $1,000 for a handbag that they know is made for $50 with slave labor in a third world ghetto? Because they’re not buying a handbag. They’re buying the name on a handbag. If you try and beat $1,000 manufacturers at their game, you’ll probably go broke.
A good place to witness this firsthand is the shopping district behind the Hofburg in Vienna. The first time I went there I thought the prices were in Japanese yen. $300 for a pair of $10 plastic sneakers. $500 for a dress shirt. The cheapest overcoat was $1,800. And smack dab in the middle of this gaudy display of Walmart quality opulence was a 5 Guys hamburger joint. (Always packed)
Your next stop is the opera. Vienna has one of the world’s worse opera houses. It seems like 1/3 of the seats are obstructed vision. It’s filled with people who hate opera. But they’re not there to see opera but to be seen (in selfies) in the Vienna opera house.
There isn’t enough pot in California to make this make sense.
But people are not logical, they’re biological.
What we learn from Systems Engineering.
Our challenge is to run companies in a world that is increasingly fractionalized.
The problem, for those who don’t already see it and have to deal with it, is best described by Harold Robertson in another Palladium article. We are being crushed by incompetence, which is a byproduct of what I described above. This is also our customer base and employee base.
Thinking in systems.
A new old science, systems engineering has been around for centuries in another form. It was called evolution. It’s best described by Donella Meadows in her seminal book, “Thinking in Systems.” (5)
In my work, the biggest value of systems engineering is the simple phrase, “I don’t know.” In an illogical world filled with grown up children whatever level of logic they employ will be lost on anyone with common sense. Since you can’t know what the customer wants or worse, how they’ll react, the only solution is to use AI to test, test and retest.
It’s not enough to know how they buy or when or at what price point. We can now know what they’re thinking when they buy all along the customer engagement process. The best place to see this is Starbucks.
Starbucks is perhaps the most customer understanding company on earth. Many people hate them, which is a Trumpian strategy. Their target market is young aspirational people. They do this by leasing extremely expensive real estate in areas frequented by young people.
The Starbucks in Vienna is right behind the opera house. In Nuremberg, it’s on the river in the cities most desirable retail space. In Merida Mexico, it’s in a beautiful 2-story building with outdoor seating and 4 study rooms.
A person can spend all day in a store and not buy anything. Their app is as advanced as any in the world. It’s designed to make it easy for rich parents to autoload their kids accounts and monitor their spending. When a young girl sees a college girl with a free water slumped over a MacBook staring at an I phone, that’s exactly what that youngster wants to be! You can’t buy that kind of advertising.
Everything in Starbucks SCREAMS young people, but also, we don’t want old people. As I told an old Australian friend who was bitching about Starbucks, “Do you really think they want your miserable ass in their stores?” Starbucks sales per store are roughly 2-3X anyone else and their margins are obscene, even though they pay very high salaries and benefits.
And they sell average coffee and bad food.
Starbucks is a system, not a restaurant.
The myth of AI is that AI will do things for you. But you’re not dealing with tasks needed to be completed by a computer. Your job is to understand that Starbucks hired hundreds of engineers to interpret who the customer is and what buying environment they want based on the one they have.
A great, yet largely overlooked book on the subject is Wanting, The Power of Memetic Desire in Everyday life, by Luke Burgis. Burgis quotes the French fiction writer Rene’ Gerard as saying, “we come to desire many things not from biological desire of pure reason, nor as a decree from our illusory or sovereign self, but through imitation.”
Anthropologists have long known that at the age of about 12, children stop mimicking their parents and start mimicking their peer groups. If you’ve ever listened to Barron Trump, he had a very clear Slovenian accent when he was 5. That accent is gone today.
As Bernays has taught us, the customer thinks in memes in leu of reason. They’re unreasonable. The meme triggers a large number of ideas, emotions and beliefs. To see this another way, look at a very (weirdly) unique political party with no memes. The Libertarians.
The people who can’t agree with anybody.
You’ll not meet a more disconsolate group than the Libertarians and their king, Ron Paul. If you give congressman Paul a list of 20 things, unless he agrees with all 20, he falls into a pit of despair proclaiming the end of the world. His son Rand is the apple that never rolled far from the tree. The Paul’s believe the ultimate goal in life is to win ALL arguments.
If you want to get a good laugh watch the Libertarian convention. It’s a near certainty that it will collapse into a sea of chaos. Why? Because the room is filled with people who can’t agree about anything. Their claim to genius is macroeconomics. The fact that the people who control the world couldn’t give a rat’s ass about global macroeconomics means nothing to the grand party of disagreement.
The point is though that these are the far right in the “agreement” bell curve. They never agree with anybody. On the far left you have people like the Germans, leftists, university professors and evangelical Christians.
The people who need to belong.
This is the far left of the agreement bell curve. They can be breathtakingly hypocritical and give great latitude to the “influencers” in the groups they join. They have high levels of 2 of the big 3 traits that psychologist think are most important, agreeableness and conscientiousness. These are the top of the chart of traits to build a cohesive society.
But they’re also breathtakingly hypocritical and can be wildly unethical.
They’ll tolerate almost any indiscretion if they believe you are in their group but can be violent if they believe you aren’t. I can’t state enough, these are illogical people. They belong to groups, not countries. The farthest left are those that belong to radical religions such as Islam, far right Judaism , evangelical Christianity and woke socialism.
Now that we’ve beaten that horse to death.
We can move on to the big three. How to analyze the market.
The easiest tool is mimicry.
Find a company that’s spending insane money on identity and list what they do. A good start is to follow the people that represent brands on Instagram. I follow 3, Kim Kardashian, Gisele Bundchen and Alessandra Ambrosio.
These are a few quotes from Ambrosio.
- The @vizzano_oficial. is here ✨ with #GlamourRevolution A manifesto of style and power.
- Celebrate life in all its shades and colors, highlighting how amazing it is to be authentic and enjoy every moment, follow your passions, choose your own path and have the freedom to become your best version.
- Cali winter… sunset hues 〰️🌞🌊
No one is more scripted than a supermodel largely because they don’t just represent brands, they ARE brands. Even in the middle of her contentious divorce, Bundchen still towed the line. “Life is wonderful, there’s beauty everywhere,” yada, yada.
To Ambrosio, female empowerment is not about hating men. Why? Because the products she represents make women desirable. What could possibly make a women less desirable than in your face political vomit?
Another example is from a book review I read for an autobiography by the former VP candidate Sarah Palin. “I loved your book, it’s wonderful… I hope to have the time to read it someday.” Palin was a supermodel for married evangelical women. Palin to this day walks the walk.
Again, your job is not to take sides. BOTH SIDES are unreasonable. Just look at what they say and do.
The next is AI.
We use GROK. we’ve used both ChatGPT and Perplexity. Why GROK? Because GROK exclusively mines the opinions of it’s user base. This is exactly what I want. The user base.
Look at this post.
“Our food is weaponized, and this is proof – look at these disturbing images of how food scientists engineer processed food to make it addictive. (Photos obtained from recent lawsuit filed against every single major food company in PA.”
This is GROKS interpretation of the personality type.
From GROK…
“To analyze the personality characteristics of the person who wrote the X post you’ve mentioned, we can make some inferences based on the content and tone of the message:
Skepticism or Distrust: The author expresses a strong skepticism towards food companies, suggesting that they intentionally manipulate food to be addictive. This indicates a distrust of corporate practices, particularly in the food industry.
Conspiracy-Oriented Thinking: Phrasing like “Our food is weaponized” implies a belief in a deliberate, possibly secretive, agenda by food companies against consumers’ health or well-being. This could suggest a personality trait leaning towards conspiracy theories or at least a heightened awareness of potential corporate malfeasance.
Advocacy or Activism: The sharing of photos from a lawsuit to make a point shows an intent to expose or educate others about what they perceive as wrongdoing. This action points towards advocacy for consumer rights, health, or transparency in food production.
Emotional Reactivity: Using terms like “disturbing” shows an emotional response to the information they’re sharing, possibly indicating a personality that reacts strongly to perceived injustices or threats to health.
Inquisitiveness or Curiosity: The interest in legal documents and lawsuits related to food companies reflects a curiosity about how food is made and regulated, which aligns with investigative or curious personality traits.
Concern for Public Health: The focus on how food might be engineered to be addictive suggests a concern for public health, which might indicate traits of conscientiousness or a sense of responsibility towards community well-being.
Openness to Novel Experiences: Sharing such controversial information might indicate openness to challenge existing norms or to bring unconventional or controversial topics to light.
Here’s how these traits might be linked to broader personality characteristics:
High Openness: Likely due to the willingness to question mainstream practices and explore alternative explanations for food industry behaviors.
High Conscientiousness: Demonstrated through the effort to inform others about health concerns, suggesting a duty to spread awareness or advocate for change.
High Neuroticism: The use of emotionally charged language like “disturbing” might suggest some level of anxiety or concern about food safety and corporate influence.”
End of GROK analysis…
Again, your job is not to like or dislike. This is an analysis.
I’ve known many farmers and food processors. They all say the same thing. “You can only sell what people buy. If we sold nutritious food to health-conscious people, we’d go bankrupt. “
We can learn with AI what farmers learned with feast and famine.
Next, study the exact language of your target market.
This is where you’ll learn how to communicate with them.
Hillary Clinton’s book, It Takes a Village to Raise a Child, was written at an 8th grade level. This has nothing to do with Mrs. Clinton as it’s unlikely she wrote a single page of it. But its target is the 8th grade level which is the level at which the average US college graduate reads!
To a person that reads at the 8th grade level, intelligence has nothing to do with knowledge. It’s an identity looking for appropriate memes to follow. You should think of language level like musical taste. Some people literally can’t stand opera. In the same way, they’ll shut off complex language. (Unless that’s your target market.)
The next level though is accent and slang.
Most recently Kamala Harris tried using accent in her campaign. Harris’s problem was not that she tried but that she has no political skill. There are several country singers that use southern twang in their music but talk like Yankees. It’s a skill. Many African Americans seemingly speak 2 different English languages, black and white. Some are so good it seems like they become white.
One of my favorite quotes is from JR Tolkien in his book, The Lord of the Rings. He describes Hobbits as only reading books “filled with things they already knew set out fair and square with no contradictions.”
As Bernays might have said, your audience is Hobbits.
In Summary…
There’s nothing new in target marketing but for one thing. The tools at your disposal to target. Applications that were once reserved for the biggest agencies and corporations are now available for beer tab money in AI applications.
The key is to step as far from inside the box as you can all the while saying to yourself. “I don’t know. Let’s do a study.”
