People talk about Francis Bacon as the last person to know everything. Apparently, these people don't know any 15-year-old girls. Because these girls know everything. And they just can't believe we don't. And parents! Don't get them started. Plus, 15-year-olds are preternaturally alert. Nothing gets past them.
I was reminded of this at MTV recently, where I ran into Nick Shore, a brilliant guy with whom I worked years ago. Back then, we were working as consultants for a big American brand and we wanted to talk to teens, teen girls specifically. Nick and I knew one thing for certain: old-fashioned, beat-the-drum marketing was not going to work here. Traditional branding would just bounce off of them.
So we created a fictional character, Sophie. We designed Sophie to be half mortal, half goddess. She lived in Washington with her dad, a member of the American diplomatic corps, and as he traveled on assignment, so did she. Istanbul, Sydney, Cheng Du, Ottawa, Helsinki — Sophie had grown up all over the place.
The human side of Sophie was industrious, playful, thoughtful, questing, a relatively standard-issue adolescent. She kept a journal. She read to Sammie, the family cat. She made dinner for her dad on Friday nights. She was interested in the usual things (clothes, boys, celebrities, celebrity boys) and some things that weren't so usual (rock climbing, theater sets, volcanic minerals).
Sophie was also a goddess. We never figured out why Sophie was part goddess. We didn't want to. After all, the best goddesses are sublime and therefore inscrutable to the language and logic of mortals! It's for the goddess to know and for us to find out... and we can't.
Of course, we'll try. And we knew that teen girls would try very hard indeed and that the results were bound to be interesting. The less we said about Sophie the more she would belong to the girls. Fan fiction (aka fan fic) hadn't been invented yet. But that's the sort of thing that we were hoping for: a wave of ingenuity, as girls speculated, invented, and imagined — and in the process, Sophie would fluoresce.
The question was: what would we use as our starter kit, to use the language of that other kind of culture, the tiny amount of yogurt from which more yogurt comes? What small artifacts could we push into the world as inducements for Sophie speculation and Sophie construction?
One idea was to put Sophie's home online, the terraced Washington home she shared with her dad. This was the early days of the Internet, so the home was going to feel more like a sketch than an habitable space. What we wanted was something that visitors could visit and scrutinize. Naturally, neither Sophie nor her dad would be home, so the visitor was free to have a good look around, examining furnishings, art, books, food in the cupboard, things in the fridge. The idea was to encourage the visitor to use this evidence as a chance to construct Sophie and her dad "from the material evidence."
Dog-eared magazines would be left around the place, indicating a passage that Sophie found particularly interesting. Books lay open, with passages underlined. Sophie's journal was there for reading. The answering machine had several incoming messages. There were stereos and Walkmans with musical taste on display. There were movies with more taste to be decoded.
But this was just for starters. We were also interested in the idea that Sophie liked to "manifest" in the world. I found a fountain in Mexico City dedicated to Diana, the huntress. Perfect, I thought. If teenage girls are going to find classical inspiration, they can't do much better than Diana. The idea: send in a team and light the surface of the pool. We would do this in the middle of the night, invite the press, and make a spectacle. We wanted to be completely secretive about the details. We wanted the press to report this sensation as a perfect mystery.
All our plans for Sophie had this quality. Mysterious things would happen all over the world — Istanbul, Sydney, Chengdu, Ottawa, Helsinki. The press would always be invited to attend but no details, explanations or expositions would be forthcoming. We wanted the press to report the mystery and nothing more.
Our hope was that 15-year-olds would hear of these mysteries and reach their own conclusions. Especially after looking at Sophie's Diana books, the airline ticket stubs, and her passport stamps. We assumed that the girls would eventually conclude that this was Sophie manifesting in the world.
In each case, the manifestation would be accompanied by some extravagant gift to a shelter for the homeless or a local food bank. Was Sophie lighting up fountains to point out a homeless shelter? Or was a homeless shelter suddenly awash in donations to point out the Diana fountain? Was Sophie engaged in self-celebration or random acts of kindness? We wouldn't say. Again, because we were pretty certain that any 15-year-old, and especially thousands of 15-years-olds, could come up with better ideas than the two of us.
As it turned out, Sophie never made it off of the drawing board. But she was for me an opportunity to rethink branding and marketing. She was built for a consumer who was too smart for the usual "beat-the-drum" marketing. She embodied a less-is-more proposition, opening up an opportunity for the consumer to participate in the creation of the brand. She helped point out the shift from a passive to an active consumer, from a world in which the consumer waits to be told what to think, to one in which the consumers are now only willing to bond with brands that respect their powers of engagement and ingenuity.
Sophie also served as a Culturematic because she was a "what if..." experiment. We had no idea if she would create a response in the world. Things were changing, and we thought we could glimpse a segment that would respond to Sophie. And we thought we saw the cultural winds on which Sophie would travel, if she traveled. Like all Culturematics, the whole thing was designed to be a bit of a gamble. The good news: none of this was going to cost very much, so we could afford to be wrong. As with all Culturematics, Sophie carried the promise of an enormous return on investment. If she worked, Sophie would distinguish the brand from every other brand. She would recruit new consumers and thrill existing ones. Like every Culturematic, Sophie promised to create meaning and extract value in a big way. One of these days, I hope someone will get her off that drawing board. A goddess has gotta breathe!
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