If it makes you happy, it can't be that bad;
If it makes you happy, well then why the hell are you so sad?
-- Sheryl Crow
On
several fronts lately I have been debating the distinction between what
people need, what they want, and what they would value as 'nice to
have'. The discussion has been in the context of innovation
and marketing. I'm not a fan of Maslow, so I'm not referring to his
'hierarchy of needs'. To me, needs are those things that are essential to physical, psychological, and emotional health.
So I believe certain freedoms, a rich social life, some fun, and
self-esteem, for example, to be needs for most people -- I have seen
too many suffering among those lacking these things not to consider
them as anything less. By 'wants' I mean those things that you think would make you happier. Whether they actually do or not, as Sheryl's lyric above shows, is not the point. And by 'nice to haves' I mean those things that have some value to you, so that you would be willing to invest at least some time or money or other currency to get them.
The purpose of marketing, generally, is to create wants, nice to haves, and perceptions of need. I may think
I need a sports car, thanks or no thanks to marketers, I may even ache
at the thought of not having one, but I don't need one. I don't need a
car at all (although I live far from the city, I could get up early and
walk or bike to the nearest public transportation stop, seven miles
away -- and my health might actually be better if I did so). I don't
need a private house, just a place to protect me from extreme elements
and to sleep comfortably. I think it is very telling that most of the
things we need are intangible, while most of the things we want are
material.
What is ugly about marketing is that they prey on
weaknesses (things we need but often don't have, like self-esteem) to
con us into believing we need something we don't (like some brand of
overpriced crap clothing). The con is that if we buy the crap, we'll
feel better about ourselves, and the real need (self-esteem) will be
fulfilled by satisfying a mere want. As a result, it is in the interest
of the marketers of crap that we do not
fulfill our needs, since that would leave them nothing to exploit. The
poor and the under-educated are the main victims of this con, and the
biggest advertisers support, with campaign dollars, politicians who
keep as many as people as possible poor and undereducated, so they can
sell more and satisfy their shareholders (who, for the most part, are
rich and educated and neither want nor need the product). The more
radically simple your lifestyle, the more you realize that you need
very little, and generally the happier you are, so therefore the less
you want and the fewer your nice-to-haves. You will therefore never
read nor hear about radical simplicity in any sponsored program.
Many
modern electronic devices primarily fulfill wants and nice-to-haves,
but because they are so feature-packed, they also have many features
that most users don't use at all, and which have in fact negative utility
because they complicate the device unnecessarily. Simplicity and
ease-of-use therefore become wants and nice-to-haves that let vendors
of well-designed products charge a higher price for a product with
fewer features -- less is more.
So what? I have repeatedly
argued that the best innovations tap an unmet, deep human need.
Agriculture, the wheel, the printing press, antibiotics, and birth
control pills all met urgent human needs -- in the context of the times
in which they were invented. Yet today we live in a world where
aggregate human health -- physical, psychological and emotional --
remains poor (judging by wellness during life, not just average
lifespan, and considering, for example, that more people suffer and die
from diseases caused by excessive diet than from malnutrition). So, I
have argued, any organization that wants to be truly innovative should
take an honest look at our lack of wellness and invent something that
will improve it.
Many people today are gambling addicts (in
Canada money spent on lottery tickets and similar gambling activities
is so high that it rates a separate line in the government's average
household expenditure statistics). Addiction is one (very effective)
way of converting a want to a need. Addicts get physically and
psychologically ill if they try to quit the activity to which they are
addicted, but, catch-22, also get physically and psychologically ill
from these activities. The tobacco and alcohol industries are just two
which have produced dozens of billionaires by exploiting the misery of
addiction, and still we tolerate them. Add in gambling, the adrenaline
and dopamine-producing social activities like violent films and sports,
food addictions (like salt, sugar, etc.), and other socially contrived
'needs' (study the agitation of schoolchildren who have to go to school
without the expensive peer-approved brands of clothing, footwear or MP3
player), and the majority of our discretionary income could well be
spent on 'manufactured' needs. Add that to the real
needs of the modern Western world -- (non-addictive) food, shelter from
heat and cold, transportation to our wage slave jobs, health care, and
a reasonable quality education for our children (to equip them for
their wage slave jobs), and you have 'needs' that greatly exceed
average income -- so we fall into the two-income trap and become addicted to debt as well.
So
if I were an innovation incubator, looking for projects to fund, I
would start with projects that address both real and 'manufactured'
needs (both at the individual and societal levels) -- and things that
people merely want, or would find nice to have, wouldn't even be on my
radar screen.
This intriguing article
by John Thackera suggests that the nice-to-have features that can be
inexpensively built into any new technology have infatuated designers
to the point they overwhelm the product, or as the author puts it "If
you put smart technology into a pointless product, the result will be a
stupid product."
We are told that within a generation 90% of all
Internet traffic will be machine to machine (M2M). But what value comes
from having staggering numbers of information transfers between
machines? Is this really mostly useful and (human) time-saving activity
or is it mostly noise and infrastructure to allow marketers and others
to be even more invasive and presumptuous about our needs and wants?
Just as Microsoft steals most of the additional space and processing
speed of each new PC for its ever-more bloated and useless-feature rich
'newest releases', is M2M stealing bandwidth from people that would
better be used to solve real human problems?
Even worse, will
mindless new applications pollute the Internet the way mindless
violence has polluted the motion picture and television industries --
ever more money spent on ever more sophisticated special effects to
evoke ever-harder responses from an audience dulled and numbed by
meaningless, shallow excess? And will commercial data transfer so clog
the staggering bandwidth of the future that there will be no room left
for 'free' human P2P connection, about things that are truly meaningful?
I
had a strange dream the other night. In it, various people I 'knew'
virtually from e-mail and weblog exchanges told me that they had simply
switched off their PCs because they had become an impediment to real
conversation and social interaction. And I was saying to them, You mean
TVs, you have switched off your TV's to pursue social network
activities and they said No, we did that years ago, now we're switching
off our PCs for the same reason -- The Internet is now saturated with
spam and ads and superficial, sensationalist 'news' and self-promoters,
and 'Britney Spears' is now the number one Google search term, and the
Internet as a whole is becoming a barren and ineffectual way of
carrying on social discourse, compared to talking with people face to
face, and a frustrating and unproductive way of learning, compared to
going outside, say, and learning from nature.
And I realized
they were right. We would be much better off rediscovering the here and
now in the real world, and finding out what people think, and need, and
want. More conversations and interviews and observations. Less
searching and browsing, more listening and really paying attention with
your senses.
I started this post with a song lyric. I guess I
might as well end with one, too, about the imprecision of language and
the unimaginably low signal-to-noise ratio of online information, and
the disheartening incoherence of our messages to each other, from Phil
Collins:
While I sit here trying to think of things to say
Someone lies bleeding in a field somewhere
So it would seem we've still got a long long way to go
I've seen all I want to see today
While I sit here trying to move you anyway I can
Someone's son lies dead in a gutter somewhere
And it would seem that we've still got a long long way to go
I can't take it anymore
Turn it off if you want to, Switch it off it will go away
Turn it off if you want to, Switch it off or look away
While I sit and we talk and talk and we talk some more
Someone's loved one's heart stops beating in a street somewhere
So it would seem we've still got a long long way to go, I know
I've heard all I want to hear today
Switch it off
Turn it off |
2:57:37 AM 
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MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
Lessons from the Collapse of the Soviet Union:
