The cost of being relationally boring.

• Author: Hall, Robert
• Position: MARKETING SOLUTIONS

ONE OF THE BIG CHALLENGES FOR MARKETING is to break through customer and marketplace boredom with your products, customer experience and your company. In the helter of life, sometimes people most need solutions that solve problems, save time and have no surprises. Sometimes they need problems, excitement, connection and the unknown to liven things up. It's hard to know which.

A few organizations are good at bringing drama, excitement and spice to our fives: Apple produces exciting products-iPods, i Phones and iPads. Facebook has produced all kinds of drama around their recent IPO after creating a whole new way of spending our time. According to National Review's Rich Lowry, "Facebook founder Mark Zuck-erberg is to goofing off what Henry Fold was to the automobile." Facebook is clearly a place where a lot of people go to fight boredom. Talk radio and cable television hosts (Rush Limbaugh, Chris Matthews, Glenn Beck, Keith Olbermann) have become the Jerry Springer of political discourse serving up generous portions of uncivil disagreements, accusations and arguments designed to evoke emotion. Mad Men and Downton Abby are examples of television that has excited through the use of boredom-killing entertainment. Finally, reality television and spectator sports are for many an unfolding drama that allows people to vicariously experience conflict, elimination of players and winner take all--or nearly all. Notice in the examples cited, all are vicarious (or enable vicarious) rather than in-person, face-to-face experiences. It is as if we have outsourced emotion. Why has the appetite for vicarious drama and excitement grown? How does it impact the challenge of marketing to elicit excitement, engagement and interest on the part of our customers?

Much entertainment is now vicarious

Clearly, the advancement of technology now allows us to experience vicariously a number of things that used to be more experiential. Everything from watching a big league baseball game, attending a movie, playing a game, to buying a book at the bookstore used to be a matter of going somewhere, often with people, to interact with other people. So much of our entertainment involved direct engagement with others. Now that has changed dramatically as increasingly our entertainment and even our purchasing and service activities can be done alone, in privacy and isolation. The meteoric rise in technology-delivered pornography is a dramatic example of a vicarious stimulus that...