September 1, 2004
been tweaking the hughtrain
Been tweaking The Hughtrain:
THE HUGHTRAIN: “THE MARKET FOR SOMETHING TO BELIEVE IN IS INFINITE.”
We are here to find meaning. We are here to help other people do the same. Everything else is secondary.
We humans want to believe in our own species. And we want people, companies and products in our lives that make it easier to do so. That is human nature.
Product benefit doesn’t excite us. Belief in humanity and human potential excites us.
Think less about what your product does, and think more about human potential.
What statement about humanity does your product make?
The bigger the statement, the bigger the idea, the bigger your brand will become…
(Read more…)
It’s a work in progress. Expect more tweaking etc.
UPDATE: Yeah. I know. I ditched the word “Manifesto”. About bloody time; it had been bugging me for a while. As a term, it worked fine in the 1990s. Then again, so did “Mission Statement”.
Thanks to Primus for the suggestion.
UPDATE: Yeah. I know.
The word “Branding” will offend the spiritual people.
The word “Spiritual” will offend the marketing people.
Both parties, offended in equal measure. Hurrah!
For the record, I don’t believe that some new happy happy joy joy marketing schpiel is going to somehow usher in a new dawn in human conciousness.
There is a new dawn in human conciousness happening whether we want it to or not. All marketing folk like myself are doing is just reacting to it, same as everyone else.
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As much as I love (and agree with) where you’re taking the hughtrain these days, this cartoon ranks right up there with the best of the lot. I do hope you’re planning to offer this one as a blogcard. It makes me want to get drunk and hand it out at bars just for fun.
I like it. Maslow popularized the term “self-actualization” and the pyramid of the “hierarchy of needs.”
Toward the end of his career, Maslow added a sixth level which was transcendence and is deeply transpersonal.
So I’m saying spiritually speaking beyond self-actualization comes something more akin to Self-realization. But either way, bingo, people are yearning for much more than molecules and to fill up the gaping void (pun intended).
OK, Evelyn has shamed me into trying to make an intelligent comment on more than just the cartoon. I’ve only recently discovered gapingvoid, and have just read a couple posts of Evelyn’s blog (will read more soon), and I’m frankly still digesting everything. My initial reaction is to just be blown away by the fact that there are marketers thinking this way. I’ve always had a certain outsider’s disdain for the industry, but now I’m beginning to see the depth of my ignorance. Utterly fascinating stuff.
Can we just leave the title of this manifesto as “The Hugtrain”?? It’s so much better.
Thanks Nina =)
Evelyn, you rock.
Primus, funny… I’ve been having the very same thought lately…
Evelyn’s generous portal to Daniel Pink’s speech suggests that the path to expressing transcendence is design, story, symphony, empathy, play, and maybe more. It’s all a hologram of the new [commercial] mind. Very cool.
And I can stomach “hugtrain” for maybe 90 seconds….
90 seconds? That’s far more than I can
so is it hugtrain or hughtrain?