I attended Adam Morgan’s excellent presentation at the Marketing Society’s breakfast this week. He has dusted down the legendary Eat the Big Fish (which has probably earned its author more consulting fees than any other marketing book) and focused very cleverly on how challenger behaviour can help brands survive the recession.
He described what could be considered a perfect Crowd Surfing technique - rallying a community in support of a brand or business by ’creating a monster.’ In an article on the Marketing Society’s website he describes his theory: “a monster is a threat to the larger community. This is what brings the community together: however disparate, divided or simply indolent the community had been up to that point, the presence of a monster brings them together in unity against it. And in fighting the monster, the hero is thus fighting not just for themselves, but as the champion of the community as a whole.”
Monster creators identified by Morgan include Dove, with its attack on the damages caused by the global beauty industry to women’s sense of self-esteem, and of course Virgin … “Richard Branson’s brilliance has been to convince us that his personal business enemies such as BA are in fact monsters, working against the interests of us all.” In addition to these well-thumbed case studies, Morgan also praises Method – the US home cleaning products company – which has created the ‘monster’ of toxic chemicals in the home to mobilise its customers.
The technique Morgan describes has been used by political leaders over the centuries to win and safeguard power: identify an external or internal threat – ‘Reds under the bed’, EU expansion, WOMD etc. - to create a shared sense of danger and mobilise community action. The danger comes when these monsters have no basis in reality and are merely phantoms, dreamed up by people, who are either pandering to popular prejudice and xenophobia or simply using scare tactics.