Conformity and Marketing, Part One

Quote of the day:
"I don't write about victims. They just bore me to death. I prefer to write about somebody who can pick themselves back up and get on with their lives."
--Terry McMillan

The pressure to conform has vastly increased over the last 40 years. Each of us must fit in to an ever-more-specific mold of a productive consumer and, secondarily, happy patriot. It has become a required identity.

We all both produce and consume, and extremely well-funded market science enables us to do both with increasing precision and for increasingly-sophisticated ends.

We “produce” into ever-narrower psychographic niches. Efficiency is pushed and pushed to levels where slight, unnecessary head or hand movements become the obsession of the day.

We also consume to fit into more- and more-specific psychographic groups. Because, after all, we really don’t want to belong to any group that would have us as a member.

Daily, we claim both unique individuality and membership in the most-vital marketing target of the moment.

The marketing goal from the consumer point of view has become how to be a consumer and fit into an unbelievably cool niche without appearing to.

And the “not-appearing-to-be-in-a-niche” is a niche into which we are all fitting.