I stumbled across this blogpost, courtesy of Eugene Farber, DIYblogger.net, and wanted to smack the guy:
http://diyblogger.net/...
And then I saw what was mostly comments in support of what he wrote, including a comment from himself saying that his own great grandfather had survived the gulag, and I had to respond. I started to comment within the blog, then decided to turn it into a diary here.
Good Lord. You so completely and utterly don't get OWS. Sorry to say, but this reminds me why I hate the current incarnation of marketing (that's actually been around for too long). Used to be that marketing people understood the product first, researched it, respected the history of it, got right down into the underbelly of it, THEN developed strategies specific to that product to make it "sell". If in the process of marketing the product itself was modified so as to improve it, all the better. But what unfortunately happened, is that the marketing cart was planted before the product horse, spawning our age of pre-developed strategies slapped onto products. And sometimes — most times — the product is changed to fit the marketing strategy, not the other way around (which never made any sense to me). The result is, with a few exceptions, a generation full of diluted products that lack vision, trends that are simply a hashing and rehashing of the same junk, filling up our lives with stuff, but not meaning. And it didn't just happen in marketing, it happened in our whole culture (look up what a derivative is, and you see what I mean).
But this is essentially what you are doing with what might ultimately prove to be one of the most important movements of our time. I'm a designer and I'm politically active, and I've participated in OWS rallies. Participated. Not observed and judged from what you call a libertarian point of view, scoffing at the lack of message clarity. There you are, in the geographic heart of this movement. Something that spawned participation of the 800 people that showed up in Boulder last Saturday. Or the 110 people that showed up in the small town of Longmont last Monday. And all you can do is slap a trite, non-fact-oriented and tired marketing model on it. You just don't get it.
This is people-powered democracy in action, and democracy is messy. For all the topless girls and dread locked hippy types, there are also retired police officers, nurses, and 70 year old grandmothers. You've fallen into the media trap of asking individuals "what are they there for?", getting all these diverse answers and judging that without context. When your real answer is staring at you.
The movement is the thing. People stepping up and taking control. Not because it was financed by the Koch brothers, busing them in and handing out yellow plastic Don't Tread on Me flags. But because someone was in their about-to-be foreclosed home, or in their apartment with the electricity turned off, and they just...got...fed up. They grabbed a piece of scrap cardboard, and made a sign, went to Wall Street, and haven't given up yet. Did you even cover the fact that they have general assemblies and a system of organization and cooperation that came about — organically? Imagine that! You were too busy eating your chocolate crepe to actually interview more people than you did, to dig deeper before you started "branding". This movement is organic, very human, its commodity is not money or power or even "spin". However you market it can't follow anything that's been done before. In fact, maybe it's even beyond marketing at all. Maybe it's marketing that is completely new coupled with marketing that just hasn't been used in a long time because we got cynical and influenced by corporate-think.
It's a new animal because how do you "market" unity coexisting with diversity? Or ask someone like Milton Glaser to market it, a true master of a designer with a social conscience. (he's behind the buttons that The Nation magazine used to carry, "Secrecy promotes Tyranny", "Leave No CEO Behind", etc.)
But like a bell you can't unring, this movement is here to stay, whether or not you've engineered some sort of "spin". One person might say their "#1 thing" is overturning Citizens United, another might say it's making the uber-wealthy pay their fair share, but I'll guarantee you that you won't turn one person against another within the movement. And sure, you can disagree with strategy (maybe blocking streets is not good if it destabilizes the consistency of your presence). But with no mention in this article of respect for the historical precedent that led to those protesting in New York and 1300 cities — you kinda made it sound like it was a big joke to you — I personally wouldn't hire you to market it. Maybe you need to first ask, especially with the background of what your great grandfather courageously withstood in a gulag, is why you aren't there with them?