Marketers, Tear Down These Walls!

Liberating the Postmodern Consumer

By: Michael Solomon

Narrated by: Alan Taylor

We change our identities faster than a chameleon changes color. On Monday, you may be a Hugo Boss suit-wearing salesman who listens to Adele, reads The Wall Street Journal, quaffs a greasy burger for lunch, and tunes in to Fox News. Come Saturday, out come the tats from underneath the starched collar, you ditch the suit for a Kid Dangerous tee and Vans kicks, you down a sushi taco with a craft beer, and listen to Imagine Dragons while you check out the latest issue of High Times.

Just what lifestyle category do you belong to? Good luck to the marketer who tries to describe you.

Today's postmodern consumer defies categorization -- sometimes deliberately. S/he yearns to be liberated from cubicles, labels, market segments, and especially those confining walls that restrict him or her from expressing the unique self that s/he has constructed out of all the lifestyle materials that marketers of many stripes have to offer.

The postmodern revolution requires marketers to revisit the walls they have erected over many years. That's not an easy thing to do. Conventional marketing strategies are built upon predictability, stability, and the comfort in knowing that we can understand our customer yesterday, today, and tomorrow. We love to put people into categories, and often into super-neat dichotomies, and call it a day. Those walls used to be solid, and marketers relied upon them to build a structure that formed the basis of their traditional strategic worldview.

But now many of these walls are crumbling and fast. They are like safety hazards that threaten successful brands from thriving in the postmodern revolution. And they obstruct our view of the marketing possibilities that lie beyond them. In this audiobook, I describe many familiar walls that form the bedrock of marketing strategy and thought today. Then I demolish them.

©2018 Michael Robert Solomon (P)2018 Michael Robert Solomon