A concept I’m calling “marketing hypernormalisation”
My passing interest in the Soviet Union and its methods has become much more relevant to daily life in the Yookay lately than I'd care to admit, and all this Soviet shyt got me thinking about the state of the marketing… market.
So for research, I watched "The Death of Stalin," starring Steve Buscemi, and read "The Gulag Archipelago" by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.
One element of Soviet life becoming more relevant in the West is the concept of "hypernormalisation," coined by Alexei Yurchak. He described how, in the last years of the Soviet Union, everyone knew it wasn't working anymore. Everyone knew it was all fake, but because no one had any alternative vision for a different kind of society, they just accepted this sense of total fakeness as normal.
A line attributed to Solzhenitsyn sums it up well: "We know they are lying, they know they are lying, they know we know they are lying, we know they know we know they are lying, but they are still lying."
"The Death of Stalin" came out 8 years ago, so no spoiler warnings here.
It opens with Stalin calling and demanding a recording of a concert that has just ended. Instead of admitting there is no recording, the concert director bribes the pianist to go back on stage, a new conductor is dragged out of bed, and an audience of peasants from off the street is herded in so the performance can be restaged in the middle of the night.
Everyone knows it's absurd, but nobody dares say so.
Solzhenitsyn writes from his own time in prison, where millions of people were arrested and sent to labour camps on fabricated charges. Prisoners often confessed to impossible crimes - plotting with people already dead, or working for multiple enemy powers at once - because interrogators demanded confessions to justify their work. Quotas required the secret police to arrest a certain number of "enemies," so ordinary, innocent people were swept up at random to fill the numbers.
Marketing hasn't reached secret police levels of forced compliance, but it might as well have.
Everyone is pants-pissingly scared to do anything other than copy what every other marketer is doing. Their minds rotten with consumption, they wait for their guru to tell them what bandwagon to jump on next. Marketing hypernormalisation. They just can't imagine any other way at this point, despite everyone knowing that copying the competition doesn't work.
Now I don't know about you, but living as a downtrodden Soviet serf ain't for me.
And it's so simple. All you have to do is ignore what other marketers do and start focusing on what your market is doing.
If you're ready to lower your hammer and sickle and raise your sales with market-first marketing, here's the link:
James Perkins
