It was 'The Drunken Hiccups' and a night's sleep that brought it all together for me - the connection between 'The Crying of Lot 49' and account planning.
Certain artistic expressions - literary, musical, visual - pierce the tapestry of reason through which our perception is filtered.
Clifford Geertz in 'The Interpretation of Cultures' alluded to the same phenomenon more eloquently: '[M]an is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself as spun.'
Getting further into 'The Crying of Lot 49' I came across the following passage:
In the early '60's a Yoyodyne executive living near L.A. and located someplace in the corporate root-system above supervisor but below vice-president, found himself, at age 39, automated out of a job. Having been since age 7 rigidly instructed in an eschatology that pointed nowhere but to a presidency and death, trained to do absolutely nothing but sign his name to specialized memoranda he could not begin to understand and to take blame for the running-amok of specialized programs that failed for specialized reasons he had to have explained to him, the executive's first thoughts were naturally of suicide. But previous training getting the better of him: he could not make the decision without first hearing the ideas of a committee. [Emphasis added.]
Brilliant in its hyperbole, Thomas Pynchon describes a man who has progressed from begin suspended in his webs of significance to the point of being paralyzed by them. He cannot see beyond the possibilities of his own experience - beyond the experiential connections of his limited web. He cannot expand his vision to the larger cultural web of which his personal web is both a subset and a byproduct. He would take his own life but for the limitations of his personal web, which does not include a silk stand leading in the direction of the risks and joys of decision making.
There is a huge winter storm that is supposed to hit NY tomorrow, but I will not be camped out the woods somewhere with my camera in gloved hand. Rather, I'll be getting to JFK two hours prior to my 8AM flight to Miami to present the findings of a qualitative study we recently conducted. As a result, the silk strand between my professional and artistic life will grow even more tenuous. The much belabored point I'm making is that all of us who hold down jobs do so at the expense of limiting our personal webs.
This is where Pynchon's hypodermically-fed, urban American landscape and account planning come together. The herd behavior of urbanization is akin to a mass substitution of rural for metropolitan webs of cultural values. That is why I was so struck by the Pynchon quotation I referenced on February 22nd: because it is one of those artistic expressions that pierced my filter of reason and made me aware of the larger cultural webs of which my web is but a part.
And this is the essence of account planning: To recognize the limited webs most of us traverse and that result in recognizable, ritualistically repeated behavioral patterns, and then to inspire people (our customers) to alter their behavior by extend their personal webs to include the webs of our brands.
Put another way, planners must find ways to introduce what may be a foreign or even unwelcome element (our brand) into the well worn behavioral patterns of a herd (our customers) in ways that will inspire it to welcome our brand and make our brand part of their collective lives - to extend one of a gossamer strand of silk from the web that represent the sum total of a herd's significant life experiences to the unfamiliar web of our brand. If the web of our brand resonates with that of the herd, the silk strand will strengthen over time, and our customer's lives will be richer as a result.
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