All of this could be yours

On hyperpalatable marketing and parasocial relationships

The perfectly optimised human presents: your hopes and dreams on a screen

Those blessed with good genetics, financial stability, and a far simpler 24 hours in a day than most offer your dreams on a platter. For the small price of your attention, affiliate links, and the course they’ve recently launched to help you do better, eat better, earn better, be better.

Now, of course, there are many people who have worked extremely hard to earn their success. I’m not suggesting that being a content creator is an easy job. It’s a fucking minefield of a profession with little to no legal or financial protection.

What I’m here to talk about it the market of relatability.

The epidemic of relatable marketing

In 2014, I began my marketing career in an agency specialising in luxury hospitality. I walked into a meeting with the creative director to the first website and branding project I’d be directly involved in the creative process for.

We look at brand archetypes to begin the process of establishing their tone of voice. What I noticed over the following 4 years at the agency, is how often the “everyman” archetype was chosen.

This was the hay day of innocent smoothies as a marketing machine. Widely considered to be the best marketers out there with their conversational tone, oddball humour, and live tweet-alongs of The Great British Bake Off.

They didn’t invent personable marketing, but they certainly perfected it. And it didn’t take long for this to snowball out to brands across a huge range of industries.

While I don’t use brand archetypes with my clients now as a freelancer, it strikes me just how often people describe the vibe of their business (I ask them to do this in 3 words) as personable, approachable, or friendly. These are all great things to be, but in a world where everyone is a brand, personable, approachable, and friendly have the same depth of meaning as “nice” or “interesting”.

The era of hyper relatable marketing will be one of the cringiest things my generation is remembered for.

The democratisation of content creation

I left that agency for an in-house marketing job at a B2B company just as influencer marketing was becoming a thing. So I watched its evolution from the outside.

Influencer marketing feels like the pinnacle of the American Dream. The idea that someone with so little could migrate to a place they’ve seen but never been present in, and build an empire from nothing.

And that’s what the democratisation of content creation has done. Created a society where the hopes and dreams of kids across the world is to become an influencer. For a while, back in the early 2010s, the rising star of childhood dreams was becoming a YouTuber. Before that, in the early 2000s, the dream was simply to be famous.

But what happens to us as individuals when we stake our success on our identities? Our purchases, our practices, our world views, our faces and bodies?

When we make ourselves the consumable objects that satiates the hungry masses.

You and me, we’re the same

Well first, we have to get people to like us and trust us. This is marketing 101. And now that every person is a personal brand, we all have to follow or throw out this rule book. If you have any presence online, like it or not, you have a brand.

So in the commodification of the self, how do we relate to others? We either lead from a place of authority, like the classic hustle bro. Or we invite people in with a sense of false friendship like the community-loving girl boss.

We watch as people we’ve grown attached to online begin getting PR gifts and paid sponsorships. We observe their carefully curated lives thinking about how relatable they are, how we’d be friends if we knew them in real life.

I am by no means immune to this. There are 3 content creators online at the moment that I have felt this strong connection to, at times sure that if we were to meet we’d get along great because we have so many principles, world views, and interests in common.

But it’s not real.

Through this falsehood of one-way friendship, teacher-student dynamics, or suspiciously profitable “community”, we trap ourselves in the never ending echo chamber of “people like us”. Our views become more aligned with theirs. Their goals, passions, tastes, habits, and hobbies become ours. We live vicariously through their lives. And none of it is real.

The nagging urge for self improvement

So often, we go online searching for ways to better ourselves. And we find relatable, often well-meaning content from folks online who are “just like us”. YouTube video essays about how to organise your life, TikTok videos about the ultimate fitness routine to XYZ goals. Substack articles about disconnecting from social media.

Since 2020, when lockdown after lockdown forced so many of us to take a good, long look at our lives and what actually matters, the self-improvement industry has been in overdrive. What started as a fascination with homemade banana bread and whipped coffee snowballed into content about fitness, veganism, home cooked meals, trad wives, hustle bros, business podcasts, what I eat in a day, the BEST coffee machine, the I-can’t-believe-this-only-cost-$2-from-TikTok-shop slop that fills our FYPs.

And yes, plenty of people in these online spaces genuinely mean well. They provide educational content for free to help people. But how many of us obsessively consume and never actually act?

The perfectly optimised person

As we slip further into fascism, western culture has become more obsessed with binary gender presentation. Trad wives, wellness culture, milkmaid dresses, skinny bodies, minimalism and the reduction of self expression are in for women. We are being told to shrink. Gym lifestyle, glorified eating disorders, alpha males rhetoric, power, strength, and growth at all costs are in for men.

And the people who don’t fit that binary? They’re being erased. In this never ending need to optimise our lives and shove ourselves into neat perfectly categorised little binary boxes, what happens to the people who don’t fit the mold? Who exist in the liminal space between man and woman, hustle bro and girlboss, muscle man and skinny girl.

Super relatable marketing of the self is the linchpin of late stage capitalism. We’re splitting off into our monetisable communities of homemakers, business builders, gym goers, bread makers, climbers, academics, readers, crafters, queers, scientists, conspiracy theorists, mums, teachers, wellness gurus.

We’re so keen to fit ourselves into categories that so often, social media bios will be filled with a few simple statements:

Entrepreneur. Bitcoin millionaire. Podcast host.

Mum of 4. Wife to Jason. Cleaning aficionado.

Queer. Neurodivergent. Aries. Bookworm.

For easy access and understanding. So someone knows, in a couple of seconds, the very essence of who you are. Perfectly optimised. Perfectly palatable. Ready to be sold and watched and validated at your earliest convenience.