We Are All Weird: The Rise of Tribes and the End of Normal by Seth Godin

Author:Seth Godin [Godin, Seth]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Business & Economics, Marketing, General, Consumer Behavior, Motivational
ISBN: 9780698408999
Google: LeVJBgAAQBAJ
Publisher: Penguin
Published: 2015-09-15T22:31:12+00:00

By 2010, the distribution of behaviors had spread to the point where there was more weird outside the box than normal inside it.

The Gutenberg parenthesis

Researchers at the University of Southern Denmark have pointed out that the five hundred years of the Gutenberg revolution are drawing to a close, that even something as apparently stable as the mass-marketed book is not going to be around much longer.

The ability for billions of people to create and spread their own version of the culture is something brand new, something that will make the changes of the last decade look trivial.

The opportunity lies in being the one that the weird seek out. Which means you must be weird as well.

Johnny Carson wasn’t weird

In 1972, The Tonight Show was watched by twice as many people as the 2010 versions of Late Night and Leno combined. Every night.

We pretend that what’s on network TV matters when it comes to reaching the masses. It doesn’t. That’s because there are fewer masses.

The Beverly Hillbillies has been replaced by Mad Men. You can be a TV critic if you want, but the marketer in you needs to acknowledge that fifteen times as many people watched Jed Clampett as watch Don Draper.

Does the opportunity to grab the middle even exist for you any longer?

You haven’t seen everything

Anil Dash points out that there is no longer a canon—no longer a corpus of work that a culturally intelligent person could be counted on to have experienced. It’s possible to have never seen Star Wars or attentively listened to Beethoven being played live. It’s possible to not know the significance of Keith Hernandez or Keith Moon or Keith Olbermann.

Making it worse, the endless varieties, remixes, and spin-offs mean that even if you have experienced one version of part of the canon, there’s another better faster different version that only the obsessives have interacted with. I own more than fifty versions of the Dead singing He’s Gone, and I haven’t even made a dent.

This explosion of choice and variation has a significant cultural impact. It sets us free to spin and gambol at random, getting weirder at every turn because once you’re a little out of sync, there’s little reason to avoid getting a little more out of sync.

How many billion?

McKinsey advisor and Harvard Professor Eric Beinhocker calculates that there are 10 billion items for sale in New York City alone. That’s up from two hundred items about five hundred years ago.

As soon as the numbers start with a “b,” they’re too big to count, too big to store, too big to corner the market on.

Ten billion items, all vying for our attention, all shouting for a sale, all sitting, just waiting to get picked. Can we agree that almost everything on this endless list is weird?

Digital is not a shadow, it’s a light (start with the ‘Net)

The interconnected nature of the Internet (more than one in twelve of the people on the planet use Facebook) has gone beyond the sideshow of the dot-com boom and ended up influencing everything that’s made and sold and distributed and discussed.

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