To recognize people as whole persons

Nora Bag: Today, let's talk about Kotler's "Marketing 3.0."

Namikawa: Yes. Kotler is the brilliant person who coined the term CSR, right?

Nora Bag: If "Marketing 1.0" viewed consumers merely as entities to be consumed, then "Marketing 2.0" saw them as categories defined by age and preferences.
If marketing up until recently was this "Marketing 2.0," then future marketing—"Marketing 3.0"—will view people as "whole persons."

Namikawa: A whole person...

Nora Bag: Exactly. It means seeing people as people. In target segmentation, people were classified entities, but that's not the case. Well, when you really think about it, people classifying people isn't exactly a pleasant feeling, is it?

Namikawa: But don't most people actually like being told what type they are?

Norabukuro: That's just at the "pretend" level, right? Real human beings... well, it's weird for me to talk about what real human beings are, but real human beings are much more complex.

Namikawa: Complex... Yeah. I'm involved in social contribution activities while also running a planning team called Gal Lab.

Norabukuro: That's what being human is all about! The philosopher Charles Fourier said this:
Human desires have three levels.
Level 1 desires are appetite and sexual desire. Animalistic desires.
Level 2 desires are the desire to "achieve something" and the desire to "love with single-minded devotion." Around this level, they become human desires, not animal ones.
And Level 3 desires are the three: "Composite," "Papillon," and "Kabbalah." These, Fourier says, are the higher-level desires as a human being.

Namikawa: "Composite," "Papillon," "Kabbalah"! What does that mean?

Nora-bukuro: "Composite" is the desire to love complex, chaotic things over simple ones. In Japanese, it's "messy" or "cluttered." "Papillon" is the desire to be restless, fluttering about like a butterfly, constantly changing and transforming into various things. In Japanese, it's "fluttering." "Kabbalah" is the desire to betray what should naturally unfold, to go against the expected path. In Japanese, it's "the opposite."

Namikawa: So the highest human desires are "messiness," "fluttering," and "the opposite"! It's strangely similar to Kotler's "Marketing 1.0," "Marketing 2.0," "Marketing 3.0" and Fourier's human desire levels 1, 2, and 3.

Nora-bukuro: Returning to our initial point, people are complex, elusive beings. Just when you think you've got them figured out, they want to do the opposite. Recognizing this as their nature is the starting point for future marketing – that's the essence of "Marketing 3.0."
People have desires to do socially good things, and they also have desires to be fashionable. Faced with such complex human beings, companies must engage them not as flat, single-character entities, but as complex "people" with multiple facets. After all, companies are made up of "people" too.

Namikawa: I see. Summarizing this shift, it's moving from "viewing people through classifications" to "viewing people as whole, complete individuals."

Next time, the final episode!