And if all that just sounded like a lot of marketing doubletalk, Terry Schmidt told the Focus Group with an air of someone loosening his tie after something public’s end, maybe the easiest example of what R.S.B. was talking about in terms of intramarket influences was probably say for instance teenage kids and the fashions and fads that swept like wildfire through markets comprised mostly of kids, meaning high-school and college kids and markets such as for instance popular music, clothing fashions, etcetera. If the members saw a lot of teenage kids these days wearing pants that looked way too big for them and rode low and had cuffs that dragged on the ground, for one obvious example, Schmidt said as if plucking an example at random out of the air, or if as was surely the case with some of the more senior men in the room (two, in fact) they themselves had kids who’d taken in the last couple years to suddenly wanting and wearing clothes that were far too big for them and made them look like urchins in Victorian novels even though as the men probably knew all too well, with a grim chuckle, the clothes cost a pretty penny indeed over at the Gap or Structure. And if you wondered why your kid was wearing them of course the majority of the answer was simply that other kids were wearing them, for of course kids as a demographic market today were notoriously herdlike and their individual choices in consumption were overwhelmingly influenced by other kids’ consumption-choices and so on in a fadlike pattern that spread like wildfire and usually then abruptly and mysteriously vanished or changed into something else. This was the most simple and obvious example of the sort of complex system of large groups’ intragroup preferences influencing one another and building exponentially on one another, much more like a nuclear chain reaction or an epidemiological transmission grid than a simple case of each individual consumer deciding privately for himself what he wanted and then going out and judiciously spending his disposable income on it. The wonks in Demographics’ buzzword for this phenomenon was Metastatic Consumption Pattern or MCP, Schmidt told the Focus Group, rolling his eyes in a way that invited those who were listening to laugh with him at the statisticians’ jargon. Granted, the facilitator went on, this model he was so rapidly sketching for them was overly simplistic — e.g., it left out advertising and the media, which in today’s hypercomplex business environment sought always to anticipate and fuel these sudden proliferating movements in group choice, aiming for a tipping point at which a product or brand achieved such ubiquitous popularity that it became like unto actual cultural news and-slash-or fodder for cultural critics and comedians, plus also a plausible placement-prop for mass entertainment that sought to look real and in-the-now, and so thereupon a product or style that got hot at a certain ideal apex of the MCP graph ceased to require much paid advertising at all, the hot brand becoming as it were a piece of cultural information or an element of the way the market wished to see itself, which — Schmidt gave them a wistful smile — was a rare and prized phenomenon and was considered in marketing to be something like winning the World Series.
Of the 67 % of the twelve true Focus Group members who were still concentrating on listening closely to Terry Schmidt, two now wore the expressions of men who were trying to decide whether to be slightly offended; both these men were over 40. Also, some of the individual adults across the conference table from one another began to exchange glances, and since (Schmidt believed) these men had no prior acquaintance or connection on which to base meaningful eye-contact, it seemed probable that the looks were in reaction to the facilitator’s analogy to teen fashion fads. One of the group’s members had classic peckerwood sideburns that came all the way down to his mandibles and ended in sharp points. Of the room’s three youngest men, none were attending closely, and two were still established in postures and facial configurations designed to make this apparent. The third had removed his fourth Felony! from the table’s display and was dismantling the wrapper as quietly as possible, looking furtively around to determine whether anyone cared that he’d exceeded his technical product-share. Schmidt, improvising slightly, was saying, ‘I’m talking here about juvenile fads, of course, only because it’s the simplest, most intuitive sort of example. The marketing people at Mister Squishy know full well that you gentlemen aren’t kids,’ with a small slight smile at the younger members, all three of whom could after all vote, purchase alcohol, and enlist in the armed forces; ‘or nor that there’s anything like a real herd mentality we’re trying to spark here by leaving you alone to confer amongst yourselves qua group. If nothing else, keep in mind that soft-confection marketing doesn’t work this way; it’s much more complicated, and the group dynamics of the market are much harder to really talk about without computer modeling and all sorts of ugly math up on the board that we wouldn’t even dream of trying to get you to sit still for.’