Here’s the wind up.
Once upon a time there was a dream. Or maybe, In the Beginning, there was a product. Maybe we’ll even work in a Meet Cute between the public and our sponsor. But first, we need numbers. Lots and lots of numbers so you know this is a serious article written by a serious person, preferably with glasses. So let’s get that shit out of the way so we can make our point and you can move on with that satisfied feeling of accomplishment. Wait, that’s me because I finished the article, but maybe you too if you found it useful, so:
We take in information with our five senses at an approximate rate of 11,000,000 bits of data every second. That’s MILLIONS of bits every single second. Even if we crunch that number to the easily digestible 1.3 MB, the average person can only actually process around 40 or 50 bits per second at best. Even if you’re not that fabulous at math you can see that we swim in a lake of information, but drink a mere glass at a time.
So that glass is a hot commodity. Current accepted numbers for exposure to brands is in the thousands a day, advertisements all by their lonesome make up several hundred, we are only aware of a quarter of those and are only engaged in some way by around a dozen. Twelve. Of the thousands a day, we actually feel something about only twelve of them.
Whether that’s eggs or apostles, mental Real Estate is at a prime.
So let’s get busy fitting Prong 1 into Slot A, shall we?
Here’s the pitch.
Think of your stomach. Most of our stomachs like to be thought of (gurgle), and ad campaigns associating food with all kinds of appealing things like pleasure or love or sex help the stomach get that well-deserved attention. It helps chocolate manufacturers stay in the black and has given the developed world one of the worst obesity problems in history.
As my college history teacher used to say, “So what?”
So here we arrive at the divergence. People in general have needs, desires, and impulses. Obviously. Or we wouldn’t be so freaking susceptible to the same ads tying the product to the drive. As soon as you identify the impulse, the vultures begin to circle the carcass. How do we take advantage of that directionless energy?
Whole forests have been denuded in an effort to map out ways to get people to do what you want them to do. Marketing, inspiring, selling… Wait, did you say inspiring? I think I just found a segue into the question of faith. Let’s hop on that train and see where it goes, shall we?
Faith can be complete trust in someone or something. It can also be belief based on conviction rather than proof. Heady stuff, that. Regardless of whether your faith is of a personal or a religious nature, the point is: it is powerful. Sometimes we need to be reminded that power is at the root of the word powerful. Add the potential (read: directionless) energy of a person’s wants, desires and needs with the exponential factor that is belief and you have an untapped oil field just waiting to be exploited. As such, belief and the power of the mind become a commodity. They become currency.
Salesmen sometimes don’t realize they’re slimy. They don’t always know they repel on an instinctive level. Remember swimming in a lake of information? Imagine it more as a waterfall coming down on you. It’s Newton’s 3rd law of motion: For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. Put another way, you try to sell, I try to avoid you. Our brain finds ways to block or resist what we can’t handle and don’t want.
But let’s move from physics to chemistry: sometimes we actually want what you’re selling. What then?
Here is the crack of the bat.
So our fiction is a result of that need, sometimes a desperate need, to believe, to ‘buy in’ to products as well as ideas. X-Files should immediately spring to mind, if it hasn’t already. “I want to believe”. We all do. And the less callous of us manage it with all our hearts. Those with a few more scars still want to drink the Kool-Aid. It is our nature. Hope is the nuclear energy in all of us waiting to be tapped or exploited. History repeats itself first as tragedy then as farce. So we are slow to believe, slow to put a hand in the fire yet again. Experience cements the definition of insanity within us as doing the same thing over and over hoping for a different outcome.
So we invent the different outcome for ourselves: I know better than to go any deeper than a shallow gloss over religion or sports, but fairytales and rom-coms? (You wondered when I’d be getting to those, didn’t you?) They all live happily every after, of course, everyone knows that. Ask any child and they will tell you with conviction. It is both a means of fulfilling a desire as well as channeling all that directionless energy.
So what would a world look like if everyone believed…in themselves?
There it is. The detonation that flattens civilizations, razing them for something shiny and new and lasting to be built on top. “I don’t believe in Beatles, I just believe in me”. And then he got shot. But everyone wants to quote him and associate their ideas or products with him and people like him. Ask yourself why that is.
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