Toward a "Local" Approach to Building a Business
Audiences don't buy stuff. People buy stuff.
But it's understandable if you or a brand you love has forgotten that along the way.
Scale is central to the premise of the attention economy. In this system, one person's attention—or their data—isn't worth much. But an audience's attention—and their data—is worth much more.
Platforms take the raw material of individual attention and produce audience attention in an endless array of variations. They then sell that audience attention to advertisers for the price of a hoagie at Jersey Mike's.1 More individual attention leads to more audience attention, which leads to more advertiser attention, which leads to more ads paid for—and so platforms win through economies of scale. In turn, those relying on platforms to market their businesses have learned to produce audience attention, too.
Further, as Sublime founder Sari Azout points out, "Because the laws and constraints of the physical world don't apply to the digital world, the theory goes, anything online should be huge." The cost of adding one more individual's attention to an audience seems tiny to nonexistent. The cost of accommodating one more customer is marginal. Why court the attention of a single individual when you could court the attention of an audience?
Audience attention is an abstraction of individual attention.
What I mean by an abstraction is an idea of what is true or how things work derived from examples and applied as a general understanding. Audience attention is abstract in that it represents individual attention but is not individual attention.
When a brand focuses on the attention of an audience over the attention of an individual, that brand may engage with more people, but it can't do so with the same precision it once did. An individual is a collection of specific needs, questions, desires, preferences, experiences, etc. No matter how careful the messaging or how clear the value proposition is, an audience will always contain variations that a brand (and its offer) can't account for.
This isn't necessarily a problem—as long as a brand is selling a fairly standard commodity: toothpaste, cheeseburgers, kitty litter, software for editing video, a step-by-step guide to starting a podcast, or an online course about surface design. Because these commodities are standardized (to a degree), a brand can market and sell them at scale without worrying too much about what a specific individual might expect versus another. Each product performs similarly for each customer.
However, marketing to an audience (marketing at scale) can cause real headaches when it comes to less standardized products and services. Azout points to examples of companies scaling to the point that the unchecked variations among its customers and conflicting internal priorities led to a breakdown of quality and effectiveness. I've seen (and experienced) this first-hand.
Further, the ethos of scale that's central to the attention economy can infect the way a business is designed and an offer is developed. Once one sees attracting audience attention as more valuable than attracting an individual's attention, they're more likely to design a business that depends on scale to work financially. They're also more likely to use marketing tactics and messaging meant to cast a wide net for potential customers. They judge success by abstract metrics rather than specific results.
When attention is viewed in the abstract (i.e., as an audience), solutions become abstracted, too.
Products that were once tailored for the individual become one-size-fits-most. They become generalized to maximize mass appeal—even within a narrow niche.
I've thought about the trouble we run into when scaling up for years. But what recently caught my attention was a piece by New York Times columnist Peter Coy titled “Effective Altruism Is Flawed. But What's The Alternative?"
And it's true: effective altruism (EA) is flawed.
Effective altruism, a philanthropic philosophy that aims to do the most good for the most people for the least cost, offers solutions at scale. Effective altruists target what they consider to be the most ignored, consequential, and fixable problems facing humanity. They then survey potential solutions and calculate the most cost-effective course of action.
Seems reasonable, right?
"Effective altruism’s dispassionate calculation of benefits and costs can take it to weird places," writes Coy. He offers a quick overview of the arguments for and against EA that I don't have much to quibble with. Yet, the question of a real alternative is never answered. Instead, Coy points to how Melinda French Gates and Mackenzie Scott—both billionaires—take a more curated, hands-on approach to redistributing their wealth. That's all fine and good, but hardly an example we can learn from.
I think the reason that an alternative isn't really laid out is that there is no single alternative to effective altruism. Effective altruism has set the terms of engagement. It's a singular, totalizing approach to change that uses economics, empiricism, and rationality to argue for its adoption. EA is a formula. If we're to go looking for an alternative, well, we'll need to find a different formula.
Of course, there is no formula for solving humanity's problems. Trying to scale up locally successful interventions tends to lead to a whole lot of waste and confusion.2 What's more, the resources needed to scale up an intervention in the Global South almost always come from the Global North. So, the formula ends up skewed, centering white colonialist interests over the lived experience of the people dealing with the problem.
The alternative to EA's formulaic approach to solving humanity's problems isn't a formula at all. The alternative doesn't scale.
The alternative is local.
I mean local literally. And I also mean it metaphorically.
By local, I mean that true, lasting change almost always starts in the communities impacted by a problem. We don't need to impose solutions from the outside; we must equip communities with the resources they need to address their own issues and build the right solutions for themselves. The know-it-alls in EA, corporate philanthropy, and paternalistic nongovernmental organizations need to get out of the way unless they're willing to ask, “How can we help?"
When I think about local metaphorically, I start thinking about our small businesses and the attention economy again.
What would thinking and acting locally look like online? What does a virtual local marketing strategy entail? How would we develop a product or service from a local point of view? How would we shift our business models or operations if we focused on local impact?
As businesses quickly scale up, Azout writes, “the market opens for more non-scalable alternatives. Once Starbucks opens on every block, we crave the artisanal coffee shop.” We crave local.
When I talked with feminist writer Samhita Mukhopadhyay recently, I asked her about what a more equitable workplace looked like to her. The first thing she said was, "I love a local feminism." There is no singular vision for a more feminist or inclusive workplace. Every workplace is different. We might say there are broad principles that guide improving a workplace, but those principles will play out differently in each office or team when they're applied.
There is no organization that can determine what "effective feminism" at a global level could look like. Feminist relations are always in process, always being worked toward, always being renegotiated. Because a top-down approach to feminism isn't feminism at all. True feminism is local.
Feminist poet and essayist Adrienne Rich tackled this idea in a 1984 talk titled “Notes toward a Politics of Location:”
Perhaps we need a moratorium on saying "the body." For it's also possible to abstract "the" body. When I write "the body," I see nothing in particular. To write "my body" plunges me into lived experience, particularity: I see scars, disfigurements, discolorations, damages, losses, as well as what pleases me. ... To say "the body" lifts me away from what has given me a primary perspective. To say "my body" reduces the temptation to grandiose assertions.
“The body" could be anybody's body. "My body" is a distinct set of characteristics embedded in a culture that gives a unique shape to my many identities. Rich shows how theory, while a critical tool for analysis and sensemaking, can also become a useless abstraction. It can take us away from the particularity of our own lives, needs, or desires. It can remove us from the specificity of the where, how, who, and what of local and sweep us up into the scale of generalized narratives.
“The attention economy” abstracts the unpaid labor of millions of people, many of whom face barriers to accessing education, the formal economy, and social support. “The racial wealth gap” abstracts how specific policies and business practices have extracted wealth from poor and predominantly Black and immigrant communities, leaving families in a cycle of endless poverty. “The imposter complex” abstracts the many signals women, Black people, people of color, immigrants, Indigenous people, queer people, and others receive that indicate they don’t belong.
Scaling up always tempts us toward abstraction.
Scaling up dilutes the specificity of the ways we meet needs.
A popular Instagram account, an online course, a group coaching program, a book—these are all the result of scaling up. These forms are built to meet needs or desires that have become abstract to one degree or another. They're not bad or wrong, just not as precise. They can be very valuable but never as specific.
A local approach to building a business personalizes rather than generalizes. Its economics are local. Its operations are local. Its strategy is local. It might reach people all over the world (and likely does), but its focus is precise and particular.
Instead of asking how it can help many people meet a need, it asks, "What do you need?"
Footnotes
According to Gupta Media, the average CPM (cost per thousand impressions) for an ad on Instagram was $7.78. The price of the Jersey Shore's Favorite hoagie is $8.25.
See the "Worm Wars" episode of Maintenance Phase for a deep dive into one such initiative.
I found this essay thanks to Alicia Kennedy.
