"We" and "I"

There is something about the 'We' that is different from the 'I'.

For starters, somehow "We" tends to surge, while "I" tends to stand.

To dive deeper... I once heard a political scientist remark that collectivism is great for movements but bad for accountability. And then of course Psychology is replete with explanations for the basis of unification. Roughly speaking, for two people to unite in a static state, all that is required is that they stand on the same geography! But when people have to move in unision, they either need a common enemy or a common goal. Or as the famed McKinsey 7S framework puts it - 'shared values'. But it is this last one that is the toughest, because while it looks right from a 'framework'-of-management perspective, it sits poorly when it comes to human psychology.

Will anyone want to scale a vast plateau at 8848 m? Clearly No. But the summit of Everest at the same height is a different case altogether. A summit is a goal, a single converged point, a pinnacle that leaves no scope for more. Goals have to be high and narrow. They can't be generalisations. Imagine a company vision that reads: "We will be the most preferred manufacturer of three wheelers in the north east part of south west Delhi"

The 'goal' legitimises the purpose. Remember images of the first version of the Standard Chartered Marathon? Well, the very first version of this was actually societal and not commercial. It really was Gandhi's Dandi march that started it all! At the end of it, it was just a fistful of native salt, symbolism at its very best - the very basis of any movement - without which it would remain no more than a static statement of intent akin to a huge number of people standing or sitting in the same geography.

Now this is where Marketing comes in. Marketing is directional. It is a vector, for direction without magnitude is no more than a platitude. So it often suffers (but withstands) invasions of oversimplifications. When all the dust of oversimplifications have settled, Marketing must brush it off, gather itself with its related disciplines of social science, psychology and anthropology and set about the task of creating a surround around the product, a Venn diagram of sorts, in which the consumer alternates his existence within the many layers of the brand world. The world itself is no more than just four concentric circles with the innermost (or bullseye) being about the core value of the brand and the others being the rituals, the role models and the symbols associated with it. Like just about any popular religion.

Now this is exactly the point where the road diverges into two different methodologies. The first one is the weaker one that defines the target audience in singular terms, adds it mathematically ignoring the simple insight that the behaviour of a human being alters when collectivism happens. In other words each individual when affected by the "We" phenomena, behaves differently than how he would have behaved all alone as an "I".
If each person was asked to separately do his own Dandi march, or if Gandhi chose one person at a time - the idea seems unfathomable!
It is like the television reportage of the human chain. the order is that first we marvel at the fact there is a human chain. And then we rationalise with a 'cause', which is just symbolic and not transformational.
So we first run the marathon simply because others are running it and then we defend our action with a laundry list of justifications ranging from good health to charity. The number of people who run together is surely more than the simple addition of each individual running by himself, before the marathon. The effect of collectivism is to snowball. A few lose snowflakes gather more in their wake and assume the shocking proportion of a monstrous avalanche.
Perhaps only part of the credit of building a cult brand called Harley Davidson should go to Harley Davidson; the other part should go to its customers who snowballed its appeal collectively, so much so that now consumers were getting consumers through multiplication and not addition.
The dictionary has a way of leaning on history to invent words that represent a phenomenon. The word 'Solidarity' was the name of an independent Polish trade union founded in 1980 that went on to play the lion's role in the ouster of communism. The dictionary, an incorrigibly plagiarist of history writes the meaning of "solidarity" as " a union or fellowship arising from common responsibilities and interests, as between members of a group or between classes of people".
So "classes of people" may unite either against other classes of people or may march towards a fistful of salt. Or in their corporate avataar, grow straggly beards and big muscles, don a bandana and evil black clothes and speak in booming voices and then sit on a cruiser caller Harley Davidson that growls away into a long dusty American sunset. What a cause! Or when 'men' collectively form a class implicitly turned against 'women' as a class and wield a lasso, astride a horse, with a stetson shadowing strong jaw lines, in the Marlboro country.
This is not the typical target audience definition and thankfully has no baggage of SEC A & B. It is psychological and societal and easy to develop in hindsight, but actually possible only through a philosophical bent of mind without which observation is hampered. And without observation, insight is impossible.

"We the people of India" while having united to fight a common enemy called the British are now facing the problem of accountability. Can the "I" please return?