Marketing Needs More Sonder

Okay, I’m going to admit right up front that using a word that’s only been around since 2012 to plead for a return to better marketing is a bit odd, but we really do need better stories. And even saying that—when “storytelling” is all the rage—shouldn’t need to be said.

Let’s start with that word. It was coined by John Koenig in The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, where it is defined as follows (emphasis mine):

You are the main character. The protagonist. The star at the center of your own unfolding story. You’re surrounded by your supporting cast: friends and family hanging in your immediate orbit. Scattered a little further out, a network of acquaintances who drift in and out of contact over the years.

But there in the background, faint and out of focus, are the extras. The random passersby. Each living a life as vivid and complex as your own. They carry on invisibly around you, bearing the accumulated weight of their own ambitions, friends, routines, mistakes, worries, triumphs, and inherited craziness.

When your life moves on to the next scene, theirs flickers in place, wrapped in a cloud of backstory and inside jokes and characters strung together with countless other stories you’ll never be able to see. That you’ll never know exist. In which you might appear only once. As an extra sipping coffee in the background. As a blur of traffic passing on the highway. As a lighted window at dusk.

What I love the most about this concept is the idea that everyone you meet or don’t meet is immersed in an existence just as unique as your own, and it’s worth exploring and understanding. It lifts our eyes from our own lives and provokes curiosity. Best of all, it helps us see that our own uniqueness actually unites us.

“The Meter’s Running”

That’s the title of a book I started to write back in 2009. It sits, unfinished, but I still love the idea. The idea is that I’d take advantage of international travel by getting in normal cabs in Havana or Houston or Henderson or Hollywood or Huntsville, tell the driver about my project, have them initial a release, and then start the recorder and just ask questions. Then, at the end of the ride, I’d capture a photo of the driver leaning against his or her cab (I was using a Leica for this to pay off the journalistic feel). The book would have about 50 interviews, and I’d hope to connect some of the stories in interesting ways.

I absolutely love to sit and talk with regular people I meet, especially in a setting where we are unlikely to ever meet again, and thus can be pretty transparent. Some fun exchanges surfaced, too.

In one, a young female driver picked me up in Houston, but unusually there was an older male in the front passenger seat. I asked what was up with that, and he explained that she was in training and so he was riding with her that first day. I took out a hundred dollar bill and handed it to her and said, “Hey, I’m just giving you this so that you’ll remember what I’m going to say next. I’ll pay the fee and give you a tip when we are done—this is just extra. So I want you to remember this next statement I’m going to make, and it’ll make you a lot of money. The first thing you need to do when someone climbs in your car is to look for signals about how much your rider wants to talk or sit in silence. Then follow their lead. Forcing someone to engage in empty chit chat after they’ve had a bad day is not a good plan. Or short, perfunctory replies to an obvious desire to get to know you is equally surly. You are a driving psychologist, and this is your fun challenge in each ride.” I’ve always wondered how her career is going. Probably really well.

On another trip, before the days of Uber, I asked a driver if he’d pick me up later in the day at 4:30p to take me back to the airport. He picked me up at the hotel that morning, and he was a good driver with a clean car. He agreed, and seemed grateful for the extra fair. I then asked, “hey, how about if I go ahead and pay you for the return fare so that you don’t forget? Is that okay?” He turned around and looked at me funny, with his best version of what I thought of as a very responsible smile, and agreed. And sure enough, he came back, and that’s what we talked about on that second ride: what went through his head during the day and what he thought of the question.

I had so many interesting conversations. Mainly, I think, because I treated these fine people as people whose lives mattered. Who had stories to tell. Who had noticed their own patterns as they navigated life. Like this interview about how one driver in NOLA made money.

Why More Sonder?

This part is easy, and I’ll bet you can expand this list beyond the things that immediately come to mind:

• Our modern marketing world of ads about features and benefits is numbingly boring and doesn’t inspire much of anything. Marketing has become more data and analysis and simultaneously less human. The data and analysis is amazingly helpful, but how about building some human on top of it?
• I’ll never stop laughing at the notion of describing all these humans under one of a few personas and then assuming we have nailed the targeting question.
• Those of you from a partisan political persuasion, whichever side it’s on, have demonstrated a piss poor ability to understand the humanity of your perceived enemies.
• We’ve stratified people by their race or gender/sex or socio-economic standing or their attained educational level or whatever. And where, precisely, has that gotten us? Well, I’ll tell you what it has not done for us: given us the ability to see the common humanity in people and thus how fascinating they are…and get them to buy the things that they need or want.

I’d say we need a little bit less “pressing of the boundaries” and a little bit more “real human stories.”

Our Role

Here at Punctuation, we don’t help you be more creative. What we do is

• help you run more satisfying creative businesses to limit the distractions and help you serve from a position of strength, so that you can once again fall in love with the marketplace of humans you are trying to understand. And then
• move on from your firm when it’s time.

Until we see everyone as uniquely human and thus worth understanding, we’ll be less effective than we could be as marketers. Let’s sonder around and ask better questions!