Understanding People

CATEGORY — UNDERSTANDING PEOPLE

Understanding People

My Story

I am engaged in my life-plan. I work hard at it

As I experience my world of spontaneous activity, I am connected by my senses, my orientations, my thoughts, my actions, my intentions.

I encounter a world of means and ends, of hindrances or aids, a web of complexes of interests, complexes of problems, systems of projects and feasibilities inherent in the systems of projects … experienced by me as my plans for the hour or the day.

If you understand my meaning system, you understand me: where I’ve been, where I am, where I could go with you.

As much as survey research is about probabilities; focus groups are about possibilities.

Because life is experienced as time-driven with a past, a now and a future, my meaning system is experienced as the narrative of my life which has yet to be concluded as my story, one for which I yet have some hopes and dreams, intentions and plans.

My story is embodied in my presentations of self in everyday life and I experience my life as a drama in a universe of theatre; complete with heroes and villains; acts one-two-and-three; props, sets, costumes, and staging; endings happy or not; frogs or princes; with audiences large or small. Who knows? Yet.

That’s my story. And I’m sticking to it.

What’s your story?

Deciding who to be

“Objectivity is a useful goal when one is trying to calculate means to ends by predicting the consequences of action, it is of little relevance when deciding what sort of person or nation to be.” Achieving Our Country; Richard Rorty; 1998

Who we are going to be is a choice we have to make together. That’s a leadership issue whether you are in marketing, management or mysticism. Who we are going to be is a choice based on our social knowledge.

Focus groups are centrally concerned with social knowledge.

Social knowledge is a matter of conversation and social practice, rather than an attempt to manifest some objective, extramental truth.

Our lives are intersubjectively disciplined, but personally intentional.

We accept as given the structures of our personal world and our place in it until it becomes, in small or in large ways, problematic.

Then we endeavour to fix it … make it better.

There are levels of satisfaction that tell us when a problem, each to its own, can be considered “solved for now.”

This does not mean that we endlessly lie to ourselves about some truth beyond our grasp; rather that we must tolerate living in a contingent universe. And we must recognize that we do this together.

It is this context which informs our struggle to structure our personal meaning systems as clear, coherent and compelling identities which will endure a lifetime.

Whenever we make choices together, one of the choices is to be together; there’s always a give and take, a transaction, of some kind involved.

Creating ourselves is hard work and we are always at it

Beyond Branding to Identity

Who we are used to be determined from the circumstances of birth. Now it’s a life-style super-decision.

This life-style super-decision has three phases: [1] getting the idea of the new me who I want to become; [2] getting the reality, I.e., buying-in to a job and a residence and buying the basic furnishings and costuming of that life; and [3] engaging my environment with elaborations, embellishments and displays conspicuous or not in maintaining this presentation of self in everyday life.

The things that we buy and buy-in to are purchased, we usually think, because of their use to us. But one of their uses to us is in the assembly of an identity … embodied in things.

My meaning system is a complex web of systems of propositions, claims, facts, practices, presentations, definitions, beliefs, attitudes, aspirations, values, rules of performance, performances, relationships and relationships between relationships that constitute an IDENTITY.

For a brand it’s a question of fit. not just what you mean to mean but what I can make it mean for me; or how I can use you to help create a better story about me. Much of the value of things I possess is what they say about, and for, me.

Buying is selecting the things that will define who we are.

Do your things speak of me?

Do they help me speak of myself?

Then I want them.