The audience

Ok. Today's bit of thinking due for a makeover is this word: audience. The folks who sit back and listen and appreciate the performance of the professionals. The folks we send our messages out to/at...

i. Adam Morgan long ago pointed out that it's foolish to assume our marketing audiences are actually listening (or even there for the show we've worked so hard to put on). We get little glimpses of the real life they live as they pass our media 'channel' windows, but no more than this...

ii. Whether they are paying attention at all, the passive nature of an 'audience' seems a recent and very North European innovation: twas only first in the late middle ages, c/o the Catholic Church and then later by the Protestant Reformers, the idea of a passive audience in church was really instigated. In most other cultures, the idea of a passive religious congregation is anathema (or at least unusual). An audience that participates and creates the ritual as much as the priests is not unusual in other religiouns and cultures (whatever the vested interests would have you believe). Or indeed in our own culture: go to the footie this weekend and see what happens there....(yes, even at the Lane)

iii. Again in Northern Europe we've disassociated the body from the mind/spirit in thinking about audiences: the priest/marketer sends messages but the audience just receives intellectually or at least without moving. The medieval church worked really hard to extirpate dancing from religious celebrations (as well as secular ones) for similar reasons that later Calvinists (and even later missionaries to the 3rd World) did: they all saw the energy created by physical, collective worship as unpredictable, dangerous (and plain ungodly-in-the-sense-they-understood-it...).

No wonder our notion of marketing (or employee) audiences is less than helpful: it's based on a wilful denial of our nature and what we know about ourselves, deep down...

And it just doesn't fit with our capacity for collective enthusiasm...