Oikonomics: a social life of money: We are all individuals! "Monkey Shoulder": the choice of the Liquid Modern whisky drinker.

Spent a very pleasant evening in the company of my singular marketing claim to fame, namely that I invented a whisky called Monkey Shoulder. Monkey was the product of weeks of immersion, concept creation and research which ended up with 10 concepts I hated. I hated them because none of them had managed to break away from whisky’s own cultural inertia which was slowly condemning it to become a whisky that your dad drinks (or you drink when you are with your dad). So surfing on the internet I started to find Scottish drinking phrases, such as ‘furryboots’ (Aberdeen greeting for sailors meaning ‘where are you from?’) and lastly a repetitive strain injury which afflicted the turners of the barley after many years of toil with a wooden spade. So in the style of spinal tap I presented 11 not 10 concepts and the last one flew.

So there I am, surrounded by the ‘target audience’ being told about how great whisky is for mixing (dix points), how smooth it is so that you can’t taste the alcohol (dix points) and how cool the monkeys are (dix points – although credit there to the design agency for the great pack!). And there it is, branding is not a mystery, it is just a case of listening to what people want and giving them something that fits with the way they see the world. Marketing is not about persuasion any more, as if this group would listen to that approach, it is about understanding the meaning that people are trying to create in their lives.

To that end, whither the individual? Most people there was what I would call ‘glamorous’ at one level or another – staring out over the massed fashionistas basking in a mass "envy-in". Everyone there was performing ‘individuality’ and ‘authenticity’ as the ultimate tools of post modern glamour while drinking something which is both based on a truth (there really is such a thing as monkey shoulder and we asked one of the few survivors of the hand turned barley days whether he minded making a brand out of his painful industrial affliction, which of course he didn’t!) and a fiction – the idea of the ‘triple malt’ which is essentially a great way of using a distillery which Grant’s has never felt could hold its own against its other single malts.

Of course, like any brand it is the essence of Monkey Shoulder that its ‘truth’ provides a resolution or salvation for its consumer. In this case, it is a whisky that allows you to create your own way of drinking and tell a distinctive story to your mates about why you drink it that way. Its value is a function of it ability to turn a brown liquid into social and cultural currency.

But is the liquid modern individual in need of saving? Well the current politics of property envy is certainly not talking to this group’s aspirations and values. I doubt they care that bankers make lots of money any more than they believe that buying stuff makes you happy. However, just as property fills the gaps in our collective sense of material uncertainty (why Al Gore’s ‘inconvenient truth’ is so great for Walmart – the more uncertain we feel the more we consume in the present….) so the consumption of identity brands is a response to uncertainty and fluidity of the self; the big liquid modern problem. Everyone in this generation has a their own story, a unique destination, a point of difference and it is almost an exhausting and stressful state of being to maintain sufficient identity difference so that it has currency or value in their social life. So are our fashionable individuals still stuck in the catch 22 of happiness? – it is certainly the case that maintaining such 'happiness' requires constant change to stay one step ahead so as to invite the envy of others and confirm our own happiness quotient. As such identity is still a function of looking backwards not forwards, a succession of experiences collected, not plans laid for the future.

Perhaps the void which drives this generation is not ‘death’ or nothingness, but ‘invisibility’. We consume not to conform and be like (or liked) but to be different and thereby feel that in some small way we are in control of our lives. Invisibility is the death of a brand and so it is for the liquid modern individual whose cultural value is their personal ‘brand’. It isn’t wealth we are trying to project, but identity, it isn’t value we are trying to accumulate but proof of our own brand values.

However, this desire for control runs headlong into the fundamental ambiguity of ethics and nature which undermines the certainty of our choices and our confidence (which powers the projection of identity). The more politicians sell ‘uncertainty’ the more we will retreat to the world we feel we can control so that instead of pulling together we being to pull in our own individual direction leaving a void in the social world that needs to be filled if we are going to meet the collective challenges of the sustainability of our way of life.