More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
The biggest cultural shift that the Internet has amplified is the ability to make an impact on your own culture.
When you don’t feel alone, it’s easier to be weird, which sort of flies in the face of our expectation that the weird individual is also a loner. Social acceptance of weird behavior makes being weird more popular. This reinforcing effect causes tribes
to rapidly splinter off from the now fading idea of mass. The weird person seems normal to her small group of fellow choicemakers, but no, that behavior is not big enough to be attractive to the mass marketer.
If you want to sell $900 handmade rifles to obsessive collectors, the easiest way to grow your sales is to grow the market of obsessive rifle collectors.
Material goods and commerce are not the goal, they are merely a consequence. The goal is connection.
Thomas register
solar lantern.
They’re addicted to mass and there’s no mass available.
more than half the revenue at the second-largest ad agency in the world comes from activities that aren’t mass advertising.
If you cater to the normal, you will disappoint the weird.
Since each market is now a market of one and a market of now, the marketer has no choice but to surrender all pretense to mass.
Weird begets weird
Instead, find out what weirdness they excel at and encourage them to do that. Then get out of the way.
Tribes are fueled by our never-ending desire to avoid loneliness. Weirdness (which used to be a shortcut to lonely) is now fueled by the very tribes that fought it.
the religion ceases to be about faith and hope and connection and love and positive change and begins to focus on compliance, this organizational embrace of the status quo runs straight into the trend toward the weird. Playing the morality card is a weak way to build a tribe. Weird is not immoral.
Today we can see that the post-industrial age and the Internet permit a different sort of power, one of silos and smaller but tighter networks. Now, there’s an incentive to fragment instead of coalesce. And given the choice, given the chance to be weird, more and more of us are taking that chance.
“Everyone hates advertising in general, but we love advertising in particular.”
We don’t like the advertising that’s not for us, not about us, not interesting to us. But talk to me, directly to me, about something relevant and personal, and I love you for it.
