These Aren't The Goals You're Looking For
Or why "building an audience" isn't right for everyone or every business.
Today’s premium post is an excerpt from a project I’ve been working on. It’s called Remarkable, and it’s a comprehensive approach to marketing strategy grounded in accountability, digital ecology, and humane business. If you’re not a premium subscriber, enjoy the first part of this post—or upgrade for just $7 per month!
No matter what you spend your working time on, you probably want to spend that time effectively.
But what does it mean for an action or strategy to be effective? An action is effective when it causes an effect.
However, not all effects are created equal. We often work toward effects that are flashy or even addicting but aren’t all that beneficial to us. Think followers, steps, calories, orange checkmarks, etc.
Technology mediates the effects we perceive as desirable.
ClickUp or Asana turns task completion into a desirable effect. What’s effective, then, is completing a task. Task completion helps to justify our continued use of the software, which means it’s beneficial to ClickUp or Asana because we keep paying for the product. But we can focus on task completion at the expense of checking in with strategy or conditions on the ground to know whether that task should still be completed at all.
Social media platforms are another example of how technology mediates what effects we perceive as desirable. Social media platforms recommend sharing moments from your life, snapping candid pictures of yourself, and engaging with your followers in all sorts of ways. And it’s true that doing those things will often result in more reach, likes, and comments. So in that way, those recommendations are effective.
But is additional reach, more likes, or more comments the effect you want? Or do you want to fill your client pipeline or have more people sign up for your newsletter? Because those same recommendations might not lead to those effects. Further, reach, likes, and comments are good effects for platforms because they signal that people are willing to stay on the platform longer and, therefore, view more ads.
So, really, the question to ask might be: effective for whom?
We’ve learned that “un-marketing,” the companionable alternative (e.g., show up and give value, be yourself, don’t sell, etc.) to corporate marketing, is the most successful on social media networks.1 However, un-marketing is highly inefficient. It can lead to new clients or customers, but it takes time. Since activity within capitalist systems always evolves toward efficiency, we have to assume that our inefficiency actually creates efficiency elsewhere in the system.
Platforms, of course, benefit from the proliferation of un-marketing—it’s all content, and content is data. By focusing on mediating features such as likes, followers, and engagement, platforms substitute those effects for the ones we might actually prefer—like dollar signs. In turn, we change our behavior and dub un-marketing the most effective way to produce those effects. We churn out more and more content (that doesn’t appear to be marketing), and the platforms benefit from all that profitable data.
What seems like resistance to commercialization, commodification, and the ethos of control embodied by traditional marketing practice is actually an efficient means of producing data that actually benefits capital directly by, in effect, turning every waking hour into an opportunity to resist by producing the commodity for free. Or, as critical marketing scholars Detlev Zwick and Alan Bradshaw write facetiously:
Marketing is hence transformed into a communal ethos of digital socialism based on consensual partnership with consumers who are certainly not controlled but rather are invited by the corporation as equals in the joint task of joyous co-creation.
This is not to say that creative, relational, or self-expressive forms of marketing are bad. Certainly not! Rather, they function within a system designed to create entirely different results from the ones we probably hope for. The feedback we receive through social media platforms—likes, follows, shares, etc., as well as qualitative feedback like comments—is skewed to those ends.
This feedback reinforces the effects we’ve valorized rather than the effects we ultimately aim to create. We judge the effectiveness of our actions through the metrics and reports that social media companies supply rather than the impact on our own bottom lines. So, we continue to shape our actions in ways that lead us astray from our real goals.
What are our real goals? Let’s examine three common goals for digital marketing and how they shape what we consider effective.