• MeowZedong@lemmygrad.ml
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    4 months ago

    I’m lacking sources on it right now that I can recall, but I feel like I read once that this was intentional in some way, the conjoining of “product” and “community.”

    If you find it, I’d appreciate a share. Any searches including the two words are poisoned by articles trying to tell you how to turn your brand into a community. Each search is just page after page of that shit.

    • amemorablename@lemmygrad.ml
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      4 months ago

      I’ll try to remember to if I can find it. Web searching has indeed become a pain. I tried to do some just now, but didn’t have much luck. Through a link in one article, I came upon one source that is vaguely related to what we’re talking about, but not really on the point of specifically combining product and community. It’s also sort of a shallow summary and may be stuff you’ve already heard of: https://www.businessinsider.com/birth-of-consumer-culture-2013-2

      These quotes from it specifically stand out to me:

      “We must shift America from a needs, to a desires culture,” wrote Paul Mazur of Lehman Brothers. “People must be trained to desire, to want new things even before the old had been entirely consumed. We must shape a new mentality in America. Man’s desires must overshadow his needs.”

      Bernays shattered the taboo against women smoking by persuading a group of debutantes to light up at a parade — an event he leaked to the media ahead of time with the phrase “Torches Of Freedom” — thereby linking smoking with challenging male authority.

      But, this isn’t really the specificity of intent I thought I had found something on before. Maybe I confused someone extrapolating intent from outcomes in the past, or it’s just out there in the mass of the internet somewhere and is hard to find.