If everything is performative, then everything is marketing
so what does that mean for brands?
Written by: Remi Dooley
Performative dressing, performative reading, performative male/female.
It seems everything is performative in this age of the internet and everyone is becoming very self-aware of it. ID Magazines article “Everything is Performative”, showed last year google searches for performative reached an all time high in August and that interest has continued to stay high.
To be performative is seen as bad, but in this era of the internet it seems inescapable. As always when I’m grappling with existential questions, I turn to reddit to see what the discussion was about there. What I kept seeing were threads about how people now design their lives for social media. Authenticity has turned into a performance. Instead of living, we’re proving we lived. And a growing number of people are asking the same question: how do I stop living a performative life?
This made me think: if everything online is a performance, which I tend to agree with, then everything that exists online is basically marketing including personal accounts.
When there’s no distinction between living and documenting life, every action becomes a potential signal. And signals are marketing. You’re not posting your book to share - you’re signalling you’re the type of person who reads.
This is managing your perception which is essentially what is at the heart of marketing. It’s all about selling the dream.
This creates a problem for traditional brands. If everyone is always marketing themselves, what happens to actual brands trying to market? You’re competing with every person’s brand for attention. And people are often better at marketing themselves than brands are at marketing products.
The influencer sharing their morning routine, the founder posting about their journey, the freelancer documenting their process - they’re all running sophisticated marketing operations that don’t look like marketing. They look like life.
So how does one operate when EVERYTHING is marketing?
Your audience knows it’s content. Stop pretending they don’t.
Create content that’s high value. When I say high value, that means - Is your audience learning something in an engaging way? (about you, your product, the world), is it something your audience will see themself in? or is it a high production storytelling piece?
Nude Project does this very well, they are still selling content but in a way that entertains. Like their spin on the Marty Supreme marketing. Or Opals Olivia Unplugged who educates audiences on how to get time back for their screen therapy app.
If you are producing utility for the people on the internet instead of just trying to be quote-unquote relatable, you will see a lot more resonance. Stop trying to fool people. Make something worth their attention even though they know exactly what it is.
Community has become a euphemism for the audience. Know the difference.
A community should not be created by a brand. Only facilitated. Brands call them communities because customers sound transactional and the audience sounds one directional.
Create something that people love so much and then create spaces for them to converse. Brand communities at their hearts are groups of people who share affinity for a product or company. So for this to work brands need obsessed customers and/or brand super fans. Create a product/universe that encourages that then build the spaces for those people to find each other.
The problem is when brands try to manufacture the intimacy of friendship while operating as a business. The brands that actually build community? They give their members power, platforms, and voice.
Owned channels are the only thing you control, so stop treating them like billboards.
Most brands treat their emails like a one way sales channel. Your mailing list is actually one of the core media channels that you as a business own that isn’t subject to algorithms.
Nourish this list with content, updates and personality. Instead of just using it to push, use it to inform, educate and create content within. Whether it’s cultural insights, brand updates with personal edge, product first looks. Think about with the same logic you would socials: why someone would send this on or recommend signing up to a friend?
Treat it like a channel people actually want to be part of, not just a sales pipeline. Because if TikTok decides your content isn’t relevant anymore, you’ve still got that open rate.
Everything on the internet is performative because we are digital natives. As much as we all want the old internet back it’s simply impossible - it’s us who have changed. Unperformative social media was that way because we didn’t know how to use the tool that is the internet yet.
The brands that will matter know that it’s a performance and figure out how to be the ones worth paying attention to. The ones who stop apologising for being brands and start delivering something actually worth showing up for.
Performative word count: 11 (including this mention, feels like it should be higher)
Love,
Remi