The happiness ratio, part 2

When some clever creative director takes a sacred tarot card, removes the Kabbalistic iconography from the center and replaces it with the picture of his client’s product, a sanitary napkin, we know it’s high time for the marketing community to take pause.

As I said in my last blog entry, when it comes to capturing the upscale 50+ woman’s heart and soul, attempting to bridge the worlds of spirituality and marketing is an act of courage to be undertaken at your own peril. On the other hand, if the marketer doesn’t make the effort to connect with this demographic on the deeper levels, their efforts will fail to mobilize her into action.

Think this maxi-pad ad is the exception not the rule? Consider State Farm’s billboard “Insurance is Bliss” or Aveeno’s promise of a lotion that will help you “be at peace with your skin.” Advertising is full of spiritual references—many used casually, ironically or the most dangerous of all, thoughtlessly. In fact, it took an extended sabbatical from marketing in service of a Ph.D. in the History and Critical Theory of Religion, for me to be able to put into words what my gut instinctively knows about the uneasy marriage between spirituality and marketing. (I’ll share what I discovered this Wednesday, November 19, at 11 a.m. EST in a webinar for marketers sponsored by the International Mature Marketing Network titled In Search of Meaning: The Intersection Between Marketing and Spirituality in the Boomer Marketplace.)

Harvard’s Professor John Quelch recently wrote: “The affluent consumer is increasingly skeptical in the face of a financial meltdown that it was all worth the effort. Out will go luxury purchase, conspicuous consumption, and a trophy culture. Tomorrow’s consumer will buy more ephemeral, less cluttering stuff.”

But money will be spent on: 5-star spiritual/spa retreats and expensive adventure travel, musical instruments (think garage rock bands) and yes, when our kids have gone back to boiling water for tea, it will still be our generation who will be shelling out the big bucks for a cup of Starbucks. Put a spiritual slogan on a jar of make-up (Philosophy) or blouse (Flax) and it will sell.

Those of us who will be feeling our success will be practitioners of what I have termed “The Happiness Ratio”: In Stephen’s blog entry on the McKinsey study, he quotes Charles Dickens’ Mr. Macawber (from David Copperfield), defining happiness as having income greater than your expenses. Picking up on Mr. Dickens’ insight, I believe that many of us will grow to realize that the most efficient route to peace and joy is simply this: lower your expectations. We will, as the popular book of the 60’s promised, once again “Be Living Poor With Style.”

In the words of Boomer/author Candace Talmadge: “There will be a groundswell of spiritual expression as the economy deterioriates…Spirituality is the only certainty.”

But Boomers have known so many different versions of spirituality. Which one will win out in the 2010s? I will go out on a limb here and predict what I think will be the dominant motif of our era: The New Anti-Materialism. Think the kind of acceptance and surrender taught by eastern philosophy, a generation-wide cleansing of personal guilt or shame; a return to the spiritual/economic values of the 60’s, extolling the virtues of balance and limitation, and the disengagement from an assessment of how one is doing in life from both the judgment of the divine and obsession with one’s self-esteem.
So now, when it comes to affluence in the present and future tense, welcome to the era of plain, dumb luck.