THE MARKETING OF CRYONICS
Fostering
Death In A Culture Of Life:
The
Ambiguous Legacy Of The Marketing Of Cryonics
David Pascal
FIND BELOW:
1. Copyright Notice And
Information
2. Abstract Of The Article
3. Short Bio Of David Pascal
4. The Article Itself
1. Copyright
Notice And Information
Death And
Anti-Death, Volume 9:
One Hundred Years After Wilhelm
Dilthey (1833-1911)
Charles
Tandy, Editor
FIRST PUBLISHED IN HARDBACK AND
PAPERBACK 2011
PUBLISHED BY
Distributed
by Ingram
Available
from most bookstores and all Espresso Book Machines
Copyright © 2011 by Charles Tandy
Hardback/Hardcover ISBN-13: 978-1-934297-13-5
Paperback/Softcover ISBN-13: 978-1-934297-14-3
2. Abstract Of The Article
Abstract Of
Pages 175-198
CHAPTER EIGHT
Fostering Death In
A Culture Of Life:
The Ambiguous Legacy Of
The Marketing Of Cryonics
David
Pascal
What makes a thing socially
acceptable? Sometimes
tradition. Sometimes
timing. Sometimes
sheer accident. But quite often,
nowadays, things become popular because there’s an industry and a body of
techniques actively dedicated to making things socially acceptable and
popular. It’s called marketing. The
paper argues that it’s purely and simply the neglect by the cryonics movement
of what could be learned from the marketing industry that has kept cryonics,
rather than the public, in a frozen state.
To be precise, it is the mis-marketing,
the active support of repellent, off-putting presentations of cryonics, that has led to this long destructive impasse.
KEYWORDS: biostasis; business ethics; cryogenics; cryonic;
cryonic hibernation; cryonic suspension; cryonics; cryopreservation; marketing;
public relations; suspended animation
3. Short Bio
Of David Pascal
David Pascal
David Pascal is a marketing consultant
living in Upstate New York. Formerly Member Relations and Public
Relations Coordinator at the Cryonics Institute, David is currently Secretary
of the Cryonics Society, an independent non-profit organization dedicated to
the better promotion of cryonics. More information about the Cryonics Society
is available online at <www.CryonicsSociety.org>. More information about David and
about marketing is available at his web site at <www.davidpascal.com>.
4. The
Article Itself
CHAPTER EIGHT
Fostering Death In
A Culture Of Life:
The Ambiguous Legacy Of
The Marketing Of Cryonics
David Pascal
In
December 1987, nanotechnology was still widely derided as borderline science
fiction. Vitrification had yet to take
on its current importance for cryonics.
Cryonics had been publicly declared by noted scientific figures to be an impossibility and an absurdity. A recently suspended patient at Alcor, Dora Kent, had done so in a glare of negative
publicity and the law responded predictably, quickly and harshly, with actions
threatening not only the new patient but Alcor
itself, as legal efforts were undertaken to interfere with all patients and
with Alcor operations itself. Court battles followed. Alcor survived.
In
July 2002, nanotechnology had taken the scientific world by storm, and its
founder had gone on public record as an Alcor member
and cryonics advocate. Vitrification
techniques were being hailed in peer-reviewed cryobiological
journals, and rabbit kidneys would soon successfully be vitrified,
cryopreserved, restored and transplanted.
Cryosurgery and the cryopreservation of embryos was becoming a highly
successful socially acceptable commonplace medical practice. Scientists and doctors by the dozens had come
out publicly in support of cryonics. As
if to cap this meteoric rise, one of
And instead?
An even more furious explosion of media fury exploded. The law responded predictably, quickly and
harshly. Actions were taken threatening
not only Williams but, again, Alcor itself, as legal
efforts were undertaken to remove Williams’ cryopreserved remains from Alcor control and interfere with Alcor
operations. At the Cryonics Institute –
which had nothing whatever to do with the Williams suspension – similar efforts
did interfere with operations,
temporarily halting suspension services altogether, and ultimately forcing the
organization to legally redefine itself as a cemetery. Court battles followed. Alcor and the Cryonics
Institute survived.
The
technology of cryonics had risen from fantasy to plausibility in little more
than a decade. But public and government
reaction had, if anything, regressed.
Many
a cryonics advocate responded with a litany many in the movement have long
heard. “What can we expect? We live in a culture of death. The ‘deathists’,” that is, virtually anyone who is not a cryonicist, “have been indoctrinated by priests and imams
and gurus and highly paid government bioethicists. They have been conditioned to think that
death is inevitable – that death is good!
They are told that death is a positive social benefit that keeps excess
population down, removes the strain on global food production, and eases the
pressure on unstable failed states unable to manage their poor and
overpopulated masses. Acceptance of
death is mature, sober, an acknowledgment of existential finitude, a mark of
adulthood, the final liberation from life’s unending woes. We should embrace death, embrace it
joyfully! At the very least we should
repudiate if not criminalize mad-scientist con-artist-driven attempts to extend
it.”
This
cold realpolitik,
in allegiance with mystical gobbledygook, and a species-long tradition of
having to come to terms with death, are all said to
combine to produce a mental environment where even to countenance technological
life extension is simply not psychologically possible. Some even posit a ‘death gene’: just as our bodies are genetically programmed
to deteriorate and die physically, who can say that there is no corresponding
psychological mechanism driving humans one and all into the grave?
The
short answer to both these suggestions is simple observation. Obviously the overwhelming majority of people
do not choose death. Suicide is so rare statistically as to be a
percentage of a percent. If man as a
species is programmed with the drive to die, individual men and women clearly
make the most remarkable efforts not to do so.
Many make heroic, strenuous efforts to live in the face of immensely
challenging and destructive conditions.
Even in cultures like the Scandinavian, where suicide is as close to
social acceptability, with even tacit governmental assistance, as anywhere in
the world, the number who commit suicide are a vanishingly small percentage of
the whole. (Contrary to pop sociology,
Science,
medicine, surgery, pharmaceuticals – massive industries exist on all sides
relentlessly working to find ways to extend life. The sale of anti-aging products involving
nutrition, physical fitness, skin care,
vitamins, supplements and herbs is a global industry generating roughly
$50 billion annually in the US market alone, despite the fact that – like
cryonics – many reputable medical experts state that the use of virtually all
such products work trivially and often not at all.
But
unlike cryonics, they sell. And that is
the puzzle. Clearly there is massive interest in extending life using every
conceivable method imaginable, from discredited ones like healing crystals and
homeopathy to data-driven approaches like calorie restriction and hormone
therapy. Why then is cryonics – the one approach that could conceivably
extend life the farthest, the approach that has been the subject of decades of
massive media coverage, the approach that grows scientifically more viable with
each passing day – also the approach
that comparatively speaking, has received virtually no governmental or
institutional support, no research funding, no supporters, and no
customers? What does the apparently
universal rejection of cryonics tell us?
What
it should tell us is that there is a
vast difference between what is technologically possible and what is socially
acceptable. And it should remind us that
what is not socially acceptable remains on the
fringes. If it’s
allowed to exist at all.
Marketing Cryonics
What
makes a thing socially acceptable? Sometimes tradition. Sometimes timing. Sometimes sheer accident.
But quite often, nowadays, things become popular because there’s an
industry and a body of techniques actively dedicated to making things socially
acceptable and popular. It’s called
marketing.
I
believe that it’s purely and simply the neglect by the cryonics movement of
what could be learned from that industry that has kept cryonics, rather than
the public, in a frozen state. To be
precise, it is the mis-marketing, the
active support of repellent, off-putting presentations of cryonics,
that has led to this long destructive impasse.
Understanding Marketing
But what is marketing?
How does it function? How has it been mis-applied? And how might
we apply it successfully?
As with cryonics
itself, the first step in understanding it is to put away common
misunderstandings.
First of
all: marketing is not advertising.
It is not about getting press attention or media coverage or even about better
public relations. Yes, those things are sometimes – not always – elements
in a marketing campaign. But the core of marketing lies in
specialized processes of information-gathering, and in using that information
to shape what one offers to the market, and how one presents that offer.
It isn’t about
presenting something you want and
promoting the reasons that you want
it. It’s about asking the public what they want, and providing and presenting
it in ways to which they respond.
How is
professional marketing structured and applied?
Essentially it involves six steps.
The first step
is defining your goals. It isn’t always
a matter of pursuing growth in every sense and every way. Rolls-Royce, aimed at a tiny niche market, is
a thriving success. Does an organization
want more customers or more income? Does
it want prestige or notoriety? Either
can be achieved, but the first step involves detail: what and where
specifically do you want your organization to be?
Answering such
questions shapes what subsequent research targets. Once research goals are set, marketers next
gather as much relevant information as they can about the consumers they're
targeting. Common tools are surveys, questionnaires, focus groups,
interviews, and covert or direct observation.
Sample markets
need not be huge – Gallup Polls of nationwide accuracy require no more than
1500 people, though even that population must be carefully balanced and
selected. Fifteen hundred individuals at random attending a Billy Graham
rally, or kindergarten, will not be representative. Once a representative
sample is determined and explored, however, something priceless results: hard
data about that target market’s likes, dislikes, concerns, preferences – all
the relevant factors that go into their behavior as a consumer.
The
next step? Marketers
apply that information to shaping or packaging the product in a way that
satisfies consumer criteria for making a purchase. This step is critical.
Again, and contrary to rumor, marketers do not
ram unwanted products onto the public through relentless repetition. It
is far safer, easier, and more effective simply to find out the consumers’
preferences, and then create or present products that satisfy those
preferences.
When an
appealing product or approach is thus crafted, and when tests show samples of
the public responding positively, then mass
promotional approaches are crafted. This is where advertising often
comes in. Although alternative means of
promotion are common too, such as word-of-mouth marketing, telemarketing,
direct sales, 'stealth' or viral or social media marketing, and so on.
Once this
carefully-designed product is presented to the public, the fifth step begins:
monitoring the reaction of the market to the tentative presentation and getting
feedback.
And the last
step? The last step is to incorporate that feedback, loop it back into
the beginning of the process, and go through the whole process again, so that
the product is continually being
upgraded and re-configured to mesh as tightly as possible with consumer
preferences.
Of course, this
is a greatly oversimplified picture of a complex set of concrete
practices. But the principle is simple: marketing is the systematic
discovery of what the market wants
and how the market likes to be
approached. It then shapes and re-shapes the product and/or its
presentation until those wants are satisfied.
That's why the
process is so powerful. It doesn't push things people don’t want. It finds out
what they do want and then gives it to them. Resisting good
marketing means resisting the things we don’t want to resist. Very few people can do that. Very few
want to.
And what
particularly makes it powerful is the fact that it is not rooted in
speculation, but in hard data. It’s easy enough to sit around a table and
express one’s gut feeling as to what the market may want. But an
expressive gut is not a marketing tool. Market researchers do not
speculate. They gather data until they
can make statistically valid predictions about consumer behavior.
The Rational
Case And Irrational Objections
Is simple
polling, and then re-packaging the responses, what it’s all about? Far from it. Casual information-gathering often misleads
as much as it informs. Good qualitative research probes deeper market
preferences. Consumers often don’t really know what motivates them to
buy, and the reasons they give when they’re asked have little – although not
nothing – to do with it.
Political
marketers know this well. In interviews and focus groups, respondents
often select the more politically correct candidate because that’s the choice
that’s socially approved. Yet once in the ballet box, votes go to the
hard-liner who calls for criminals to hang.
This isn’t
simple hypocrisy. People’s reports about themselves are honest ones. Respondents really do believe that health
food is healthy and junk food is junk.
Unfortunately they go out and buy the junk food anyway. And
marketing is concerned with what they do, not what they say.
How does this
affect cryonics? Greatly. Simply put, the
rational case has failed. Cryonicists have made a very rational case for decades,
and the case could not be stronger. If
cryonics works, you live – perhaps for a very, very long time. If it
doesn’t, you remain no deader than you would have been otherwise. Using
life insurance funding makes it an affordable option. It would seem to be a viable choice with
potentially tremendous gain and nothing to lose.
Yet, the choice
for cryonics has been made by only a microscopic percentage of the world’s
population, despite decades of global publicity. Press someone to sign
up, and objections arise. No sooner do
objections come up than they are easily shot down – to no effect. 'No
reputable scientist supports cryonics.' Drexler, Minsky,
Merkle, Fahy, Wowk, de Grey, Harris, Kurzweil.
'It’s too expensive.' Life insurance can make cryopreservation as
affordable as Home Cable – more
affordable. 'You can’t raise the dead.' What about the thousands who die on operating tables annually and are revived? The embryos that have been frozen, implanted,
and brought to term?
Each objection has
an answer. And when all the objections are answered – the listener still
creeps away. Clearly there are aversions to cryonics that have nothing to
do with the reasons given.
Good reasons,
and the practice of educating the public, certainly remain important.
Advertising icon David Ogilvy expressed this perfectly when he said that buyers
have a very deep need for rational reasons – to justify the irrational urges
that really drive their choices.
Can marketing
techniques unearth those deeper, less obvious reasons? Of
course. Entire branches are devoted precisely to uncovering
visceral and unconscious reactions. Marketing analysts such as Harvard’s
Dr. Gerald Zaltmann 2 and
What might such
factors be in cryonics? They may well be related to subjective fears
involving helplessness and dependency while in a vulnerable state. Or fears of social condemnation. Or the result of
childhood phobias relating to fears of defying God or the ‘natural order of
things.’ Or quite probably something which we don't, at
the moment, even suspect. Which reasons are central? How can
they best be addressed? You simply don’t know until you do the
research.
But do we do the available research? No.
Money for technical research is always available. Money for social marketing research into
making cryonics acceptable, so that mass support and donations might then fund
technical research more powerfully than ever before, is never available.
Social
Psychology
Semi-rational
factors explored by both qualitative and quantitative research are part of the
discipline of social psychology. Academic researchers from Stanley Milgram 4 to
Robert Cialdini 5 have shown decisively that many of our most
important choices are made because of social influence. We see others making a choice or taking an
action, and we are more inclined ourselves to make that choice or take that
action. Humans are an imitative species, deeply predisposed to group
pressure and peer influence. I suspect this has affected the acceptance
of cryonics profoundly.
Consider only
existing cryonics members. Their numbers
are microscopic, yet globally dispersed.
Many members have no one in their immediate social circle – in their
entire city or region! – who shares their choice. Many members prefer to be anonymous, fearing
ridicule or job discrimination. Few advertise the affiliation.
Fewer still are public role models or even commonly known names. Most
Americans are not moved by Eric Drexler’s or Marvin Minsky’s
choice for cryonics because most Americans do not know who these worthy
gentlemen are. If they saw a Tom Hanks, a Danny De Vito, a Tiger Woods
opting for cryopreservation and liking it, would they be more inclined to sign
too? The studies predict yes. But where Scientologists actively
recruit figures like Tom Cruise or John Travolta, cryonics organizations don’t. In the case of Ted Williams they initially,
and disastrously, even refused to admit that membership exists.
The vast majority of potential cryonics members don’t know, see, or
associate with anyone who has chosen the cryonics option. To choose
cryonics is often to stand alone – and to face the social criticism and implied
social alienation that accrues to anyone who does something outside the
ordinary, something felt to be socially condemned. Social psychology
predicts that very few people indeed will take such a singular option.
The history of cryonics confirms it.
One recent trend
has been the growth of family memberships in cryonics. I’m pleased to say that that trend resulted
from a conscious marketing decision made while I was at the Cryonics Institute. It was proposed, and accepted by vote, that
members be allowed to give free memberships at no cost to small children, and
at reduced cost to relatives. It
worked. Memberships grew, and not only
among those favored with a lower entry fee – although that marketing technique
worked as well. Why did it work? Because it is simply a given that we do more
easily what we see others do. So when
children and spouses and siblings see significant, similar, respected family
members or even friends making the choice for cryonics, they begin to the same
choice too. And the more connected, and inter-connected, families are,
the more the effect spreads.
But equally as
important is the question of why did it take over twenty years to be made available? Every cinema in the country says, “Bring The Kids,” and nearly every one adds, “Half off!” too. Why does it take a generation for a similar
insight to penetrate to organizations presumably dedicated to marketing?
Another social
psychology principle is cognitive dissonance. Get people supporting an
idea intellectually, behaviorally, even without
commitment, and commitment follows. People who are asked to make a
positive case for something end up convincing themselves.
One marketing idea I suggested – never taken up, like so many
others – was to blanket as many universities as possible with the annual offer
of a thousand dollars in scholarship funds for a winning essay about why one
should sign up for cryonics. The organization would look good for
supporting education; students would benefit; and many of them would be
thinking and arguing strongly in favor of cryonics membership. Theory
suggests memberships would burgeon. Practice confirms it – Charles Platt
once remarked to me that a magazine contest offering a free cryonic suspension
to the best essay on why the writer wanted to be suspended resulted in fifty later memberships from those
writing losing entries. They failed to
win, but their own writing had convinced them.
Marketing Mistakes
Can
cryonics be successfully marketed? I
have no doubt that it can. My certainty
isn’t theoretical – a marketing orientation was taken by the Cryonics Institute
from between 1998 to 2001. Membership
jumped threefold. Cryonics can be
marketed. But as a rule it isn’t. Once can point out that
cryonics organizations have obviously marketed themselves badly – indeed
disastrously, violating some very basic principles. A simple look at the record will confirm
that. I contend that those poor approaches
and their predictable results are at the heart of the failure of cryonics to
win more hearts and minds. But why are
those approaches so poor? It’s not that
the marketing departments at the major cryonics organizations are under-funded
or staffed with non-professionals. There
are no marketing departments. There is
no funding. There isn’t any staff.
That
isn’t to say nothing is done. Certainly
marketing decisions and efforts are made – that is an unavoidable aspect of the
operations of any firm which deals with the public. But they’re not as a rule perceived to be
marketing decisions or efforts. Events
may be held, YouTube videos posted, journalist interviews given. But targeted goals for those efforts are not
framed, alternatives are not tested, effects are not gauged, and accrued data
does not reshape future efforts. We keep
repeating the phrase, “Many are cold, but few are frozen,” because we think
it’s witty. Does anyone else? Does anyone else sign up because we repeat
that few are frozen? No. But we continue doing and saying what does
not work.
“But
that’s just one trivial example,” you may say.
Granted.
But graver errors are legion. Let
me review a few, and indicate some alternative strategies.
The GaGa
Principle
Perhaps
the worst media error the cryonics movement has made is to adopt what I think
of as the GaGa principle,
named after its most egregious current practitioner, Lady GaGa.
This principle states that press notice is always desirable no matter what the
press actually says. Get your name in
the paper at all costs and wallow in the subsequent notoriety. Any and all media attention is good. Of
course things don’t always work that way.
Hitler gets media attention, but Nazi party membership is not
swelling. The reason why is no
mystery: Hitler is not presented in a
terribly appealing way.
So with cryonics. News coverage may present a
lucid ten-second sound byte of Max More on the subject. But if it then brackets it with several
minutes of disdainful cryobiologists saying cryonics
will never work? Of scholarly ethicists
shaking their heads at such self-centered defiance of God and Nature? Of video clips of a wild-haired Dr.
Frankenstein in his lab raising the dead as thunder crashes? Well, what kind of a reaction can you
expect?
We
assume that if millions fail to get the message and one lone soul does, he or
she may sign up and the cryonics movement is ahead one point. And if those millions simply miss the message, that might be
true. But what if those millions are
actively repelled by what they see? What
if thousands, tens of thousands, millions, might react positively to a
different presentation, but now slide instead into an anti-cryonics mindset
almost by default, and rant in fury when they see someone they revere, like a
Ted Williams, desecrated? If we say cryonics is saving his life, and hundreds of columnists say otherwise,
blasting cryonics organizations for slipshod processes and a scam-like image,
why should we be surprised at the storm that follows? But do we actively cultivate columnists,
journalists, media figures, makers of opinion?
Of course not.
That takes time, effort, expertise, a dedicated
professional staff – money. Far better
to spend it on “Cryo-Feasts” and “Cryo-Gatherings,”
where we only talk to one another, than on attempts to better address the
world.
One
of the greatest problems in marketing cryonics is that we do not begin on a
level playing field. Cryonics is in the
position once held by women, blacks and gays, dealing with a public that for
decades has been drenched in negative and demeaning treatments and images. It isn’t a matter of launching a new product,
but of re-launching a tainted and discredited one. Can that be done? It has been in other cases. But not by sending the same
ineffective counter-productive message over and over.
The
solution is simple. Control the
message. The first and best way to do
that is to send your own. The Cryonics
Society, for instance, took a significant step in this direction when it sent a
direct-mail message to roughly thirty-five thousand individuals. (The huge public outcry in
that case? No abusive responses at all were received from the public.)
If you can’t control the message directly, or approach
the messenger with professional staff? Then at least approach the
messenger, the press, in a controlled manner.
Know beforehand the message you want to get across, and the impression
you want to make. Above all, watch and
see what the public responds to positively and what it responds to
negatively. Use the information to craft
a stronger message next time.
Unless
we can be very sure that the message going out is a good one, we should think
long about sending it, and probably decline.
No news can be good news, and people who hear a small series of good
things about us will respond better than people who hear a lot of bad.
Customer-Centered Cryonics
Marketing
in cryonics has often been a game of trying to get press attention from a press
that’s more concerned with sensationalizing and demonizing cryonics than with
presenting it fairly. That may well be
the strongest factor that has put cryonics where it is today.
But
the next strongest is a problem affecting all marketing efforts: the sheer simple lack of familiarity and
dialogue with consumers and clients.
It’s not simply that there are
no professional marketing analyses – no segmentation studies, no focus groups,
no psychographic profiles, no controls. It’s not even that the cryonics organizations
don’t pool data. It’s that customers are
distant entities who show up once in a very long while at an annual gathering
or an event, and are otherwise allowed to drift away on their own.
What
does the customer want? How does the
customer perceive the product? What
obstacles does the customer face? What
objections does the customer have?
Customer-centered organizations tailor the product to customer
needs. To do that you need to know those
needs and address them in the customer’s terms.
The
following example is not data-driven, but I think illuminating nonetheless. I once raised the subject of cryonics to a
person many would regard as an extreme Christian fundamentalist. The response, as you may imagine, was not
positive. His objections were clear and
simple: (a) the people involved in
cryonics were obviously godless unbelievers, best avoided; (b) the dead are
taken to the bosom of God directly and their bodies down here stay dead,
period; and, (c) besides, why would someone even want to remain here rather than go to Heaven? Cryonics was a flight from God, not a means
to His service.
My
response was equally clear. I pointed
out that cryonicists were not in fact
all unbelievers, that many were Christians like himself – indeed, that a former
head of Alcor was an active Seventh-Day
Adventist. I pointed out that people who
die on operating tables are regularly revived, that hearts are stopped during
cryosurgery for fifteen to twenty minutes and more, and that embryos – whom my
anti-abortion listener considered to be full-fledged human beings – had been
frozen and maintained for years before being brought to term. The decayed and dispersed dead might stay
dead, but the relatively intact dead seem increasingly resilient.
But
then I stopped playing the rational game, and engaged him as a person – spoke
to his concerns. I asked him about his hopes as a
Christian. What did he feel the Lord
wanted him to do? What as a believer did
he want to achieve? His answer was, to
build his Church, to bring all the souls he could to Jesus. The man was in his late fifties, so I pointed
out that he could only give a limited amount of time to those goals. But a comparatively brief nap in a dewar might allow him to devote
decades – centuries! – to bringing thousands to the
faith. He might well be able to spread
the faith to other worlds! Perhaps God
in His wisdom had allowed cryonics to be developed precisely in order for Godly
believers like him to be able to serve The Lord as never before. Rather than looking at cryonics as an affront
to the faith, had he ever taken the time to ask himself how cryonics might serve his faith? Might he not be failing in his duty as a
Christian by failing even to ask?
A
surprised facial expression replaced the earlier negative one, and the talk
moved closer toward interested dialogue rather than hostile dismissal. Why not?
His views were not being
treated with hostility and dismissal, as he had assumed they would be. He’d seen cryonics presented in a way he
hadn’t seen before. A
way that fit his values and advanced his goals, rather than offended and
hindered them, as a great deal of cryonics commentary is very ready to do.
This
is what a customer-centered approach is all about. It’s not about making a case with reasons
that sound compelling not necessarily to you, but to the customer. How can cryonics be presented in a way that
fulfills their needs, their goals? You won’t sell a man a used car if you ask
him to abandon his religion as a down payment, and you can’t sell cryonics that
way either.
This
is not a religious issue. It is a marketing
one. The above approach would fall flat
on a secular target market. The point is
to probe each market segment, and tailor the approach. I once spoke about cryonics to a woman
working with Alzheimer’s victims. Her
interest in theology, pro or con, was
nil. Her concern was a cruel disease and
its equally cruel residual effects. The
affected persons would lose their life savings, their dignity and their
independence. In some cases the costs of
care would leave their loved ones destitute.
Those affected would increasingly monopolize the attention of care
givers, medical personnel, family members – entire networks of people all
around them were too.
I
said that perhaps one day something like cryonics might be an alternative. By comparison the option would strain fewer
resources, put no one through the agony of mental decline, burden no loved ones
with care-taking that in some cases they simply could not afford or provide,
and even give the person a hope of recovery, however small. She agreed that that might very well be a
good thing.
Another convert? No. Simply another person who
could suddenly see how cryonics could advance their agenda, instead of the agenda of cryonics activists.
This
approach takes on genuine sophistication in developed marketing plans. Studies, interviews, focus groups,
demographic and psychographic analyses of separate segmented target markets are
run in depth, all with a common focus:
finding the key ways in which a given product can fit in with the goals,
hopes, views and lifestyle of various market segments. And when the matches are found? Sales follow.
We
don’t yet have a customer-centered cryonics.
We have a product that looks good to us,
and we bellow out the reasons that make us
like it. We don’t pay attention to
whether that message gets through, or whether it works, or whether the reasons
we give might be pushing people away rather than attracting them. We haven’t objectively studied the effects of
our approaches, or framed or experimented with other more effective
approaches. But they’re there. Ready to be applied.
Making It Easier
Let’s
say cryonics organizations found a way to generate greater positive public
interest. What comes next? The classic marketing
problems – converting the customer from prospect to buyer, maintaining the
customer, and developing the customer to use more products and/or bring in more
sales.
What
does a person need to do to take that first step from interest in cryonics to
membership? At the
moment, a lot.
Say
a person in your town is interested in cryonics. What does he do about it? Well, he has to make an active effort to
pursue that interest, and he often has to do it alone. No cryonics salesman will come and call. Unless you’re living in
If
he or she gets through all these barriers and decides, say, to actually join a
cryonics organization? Then the person
has to undergo a long and dispiriting obstacle course of dealing with
paperwork, speaking to lawyers, making funding arrangements with insurance
companies, talking to funeral directors, breaking the news to friends and
family members and people some of whom will surely try to argue the person out
of it, etc. etc.
In
short: it’s very hard to sign
up. Which is why even
sympathetic and interested people don’t do it. And why many who do, drop out along the
way.
The User Experience
The
study of consumer behavior owes a great deal to Harvard psychologist Dr. B. F.
Skinner. Skinner’s studies definitively
showed the priority of proximal rather than distal reinforcement – less
pedantically, that we are much more affected by things that make us feel good
now rather than later.
Why
do people smoke, drink, and have casual unprotected sex? Because cigarettes,
alcohol, and sex feel good now; whereas lung cancer, cirrhosis of the liver,
and AIDS feel bad many years later.
Immediacy profoundly affects our behavior.
Businesses
know this. Which is
why your credit card, on which you are paying 29% interest now, came to you
with 0% interest for the first six months.
In
cryonics there is a tendency to think of a member as someone far away who needs
no attention till death knocks at the door.
At that point further service is called for, not before. This is not the approach growing businesses
take. Successful businesses work to
ensure that the experience of being a customer is positive, that a devotion to
the company or brand is instilled, and that customers spread positive word
about the service that attracts others.
What
is the experience of being a cryonics member like? How do current members feel about it? What do they like or dislike about it? What could be done to improve that
experience? To foster recommendations
and referrals and testimonials – what has been called ‘customer
evangelism’?
I
realize that this too – like several marketing concepts – requires a shift of
perspective. ‘Customer satisfaction’ is
not a cryonics concept: we tend to think
that the customer will be satisfied when he emerges from cryostasis, and not
before.
But
this is a limiting perspective – and, from the perspective of recruiting and
maintaining customers, a fatal one. What
cryonics delivers will not arrive for several decades at the earliest. But we have actual and potential customers
here and now. We need to craft customer
value and satisfactions that work here and now.
Life
insurance is a good model. No one (other
than cryonicists) buy life insurance because they expect to personally profit
from it. The check arrives only when the
customer is too dead to collect. So why is it almost universally purchased? The answer is that insurance salesmen sell
immediate emotional satisfactions.
Insurance lets you feel that your children are cared for, your parents
will have some means of support, that charities which
mattered to you will prosper. You feel better now. You do so because the
salesman reminds you now. And keeps reminding you.
What
is there about being a member of a specific cryonics provider that makes one
feel good now?
Does
membership push the fear of death back?
Does it take you out of dull workaday life and give you a sense of one
day being the hero of a great science fiction adventure? Do you like being a member of a small circle
that includes a Drexler, a Minsky, a
de Grey? Does it make you feel like an
insightful radical in a world of conservative fools?
The
smart cryonics organization will find the answers that most move the main
segments of its target markets. And it
will send them that message repeatedly.
Seeing Cryonics As
A Business
To
some, much of what I’ve written will be intrinsically distasteful. That reaction itself is one of the greatest
obstacles faced by any attempt to marketing cryonics successfully – a distaste for business and marketing as such.
Here
I must speak personally. I once recall
chatting with the head of a cryonics organization who told me of his visceral
disgust for marketing people. Not
rational concern over the cost-versus-benefit effects of marketing – but
physical disgust. Not surprisingly, one
of that firm’s first steps was reducing its marketing efforts. Not surprisingly, that firm’s membership rate
has been essentially stagnant for a decade.
Another
time I had the quite stunning experience of presenting a company offer to store
a large amount of DNA with a cryonics organization. The fee to store it was huge. The money could have funded any number of
valuable initiatives (as well as helped ease an existing financial
crunch). The only catch was that the
deal was contingent on the organization showing reasonable industry standard
guidelines for competent service, which should have been in place regardless of
the offer. As the firm was facing a
number of financial challenges at the time, I presented the announcement
expecting a triumphant reception. The
head of the firm, incensed, simply shouted it down. In true Stalinist fashion, a show of hands
instantly and unanimously voted it into oblivion. The reason for the leader’s
rejection? It was “not cryonics.” It was “another
business!”
So
it was. A successful
business. A
well-funded one. With research facilities, state-of-the-art equipment, competent
personnel in a related field, promising extensive industry connections, and a
way to provide needed income. It
was indeed not cryonics.
For
a long time I just did not understand the reasons behind what I saw as a
disastrous business decision. But then I
realized that the people making it were not businessmen and did not see
themselves making business decisions or running a business at all. These were budding immortals, evolving toward
the biological transcendence, pioneers of a new immortal humanity replacing the
void left by non-existent Gods. The
nuts-and-bolts of making a sale and pulling in fresh customers was – well,
distasteful; an unfortunate temporary necessity at best.
The
cryonics movement did not begin as a business, and to this day does not see
itself as such. It began as a small
group of individuals banding together to save their own lives. To carry that process through, it gradually
became necessary to take on business trappings and business practices. But to build a successful business, to
promote, to sell, was never the point.
To save one’s self was the point. To
devote time and effort to corporate growth, or even to saving as many others as
possible, was a secondary concern – if a concern at all. Far better indeed to stay
small, lest the boorish vox populi roar
our cryopreserved bodies back to dust.
Press attention proved irresistible, as self-advertising and vanity
invariably do, so press attention was never rejected, despite the occasionally
grotesquely destructive effects. But
decades of existing on the social fringe followed, despite an intermittent media
spotlight, and the same sad self-destructive fringe mentality the attitudes
persist, crippling service, crippling growth, and preventing cryonics from
developing.
Is
there a plus side to that mentality?
Alas there is, for a critical few who are deeply involved. Evolutionary psychologists like David Sloan
Wilson 6 and philosophers like Daniel Dennett 7 have long studied the dynamics of religion
and have come to see a major feature of its success in what is called in-group
out-group valuation. Simply put, small
groups evaluate their members more highly than members outside that group. Internal praise and external demonization
helps the group cohere more strongly, and raises self-valuation ever
higher. Indeed the more outrageous or offensive the group’s views or statements, the more they act to drive outsiders away,
the tighter and stronger the tiny group becomes and the better members feel
about themselves.
Does
the history of cryonics not beautifully illustrate this phenomenon? Have not some cryonicists presented their
little networks as a band of emerging immortals, men into science fiction
supermen, smarter than the scientists, more far-seeing than the cryobiologists and the doctors, struggling heroically for
true eternal life in a hostile world of deluded religiosity, mindless distraction,
and socially conditioned Liebestod? How much more satisfying it is to be an
evolving god, than a salesman, a pollster, a cheap huckster! How pleasant it is, to fantasize majestically
than do one single effective concrete thing to advance a worthwhile goal.
Well
– too bad. This is a world of global capitalism now, cryonics is a business operation, and if it and we survive at all it will be
because cryonics finally learns how to operate as a business properly, instead
of puttering along dependent on donations from wealthy members, and flirting
with periodic threats of government shutdown in the wake of unnecessary
repeated media debacles. Fantasias of
godhood are all well and good, but bills and taxes and operating expenses need
to be paid, or that money needs to come in from somewhere. A business,
for-profit or non-profit, follows time-tested practices. It works and sometimes partners with other
businesses. It creates products and
provides services and attracts capital.
It undergoes inspections and reviews processes. And it engages in regular and professional
marketing.
The
most surprising obstacle I’ve encountered in marketing cryonics is not customer
reluctance – understandable enough, given the way cryonics has sometimes
presented to the public – but the reluctance on the part of cryonicists to
engage any customers as customers, to
view themselves as a business at all.
True believers beat the public up for being ‘deathists’
and preen themselves as futurist revolutionaries rather than service
providers. The only problem is that when
you don’t provide an attractive service, people don’t buy, the business
falters, and everyone dies. Who are the
“deathists” then?
Even
today cryonics regrettably holds to an insular, anti-business, anti-marketing
mindset. No, it doesn’t permeate every
single individual in the movement. But
while every company in the Fortune 1000 has large and influential and richly
funded professional marketing departments, cryonics organizations – after over
forty years – still have none. Not
surprisingly, we’re not on the Fortune 1000.
And we won’t be, until we realize that the way to grow as a business is
to think and act and function like a business.
Anticipating The
Future
So
why hasn’t the public responded to cryonics?
Because we’re unwilling to stop repeating messages that don’t work and
don’t move them, or to spend the time and money needed to learn what will. The struggle for individual survival may be cryonics’ lasting refrain, but its music
has drowned out the greater insight that the only viable path to individual
survival is social acceptance.
Charles
Platt, with typical penetration, once said that while cryonics organizations
were in theory businesses, in practices they were far closer in spirit to
non-profit charitable organizations, deeply dependent on wealthy benefactors
and donations and bequests, and drawing on a base of underpaid and overworked
staff, and unpaid volunteer efforts.
Of
such organizations, the best that can be said is that they survive. And cryonics has. Worldwide, a tiny number of cryonics
providers have survived (all in the
But
the future is another story. Are we
really going to repeat the approaches we took when cryonics organizations were
tiny bands of a few dozen individuals?
We cannot afford to. A
bunker-style clubhouse mentality may work when the club is a small handful of
personal acquaintances, but we are reaching the point where patients are
entering into the hundreds and memberships into the thousands. The old
approaches are no longer tenable.
Historians
– perhaps, one hopes, revived cryonics patients – will
no doubt look back one day and debate whether the net impact of the cryonics
movement advanced cryonics or severely retarded it. I don’t know the answer to that question. Had the term never been coined nor the first
man frozen, might not cryobiological or corporate or
military research have progressed solidly and surely behind the scenes, and
made reversible cryopreservation a reality years
ago? It may well be. Cryonicists have struggled tenaciously and
bravely to save themselves and their loved ones, and
that is never to be faulted. But they
have not systematically and thoughtfully reached out to make their case to
others in terms that those others can understand and accept. And that failure has put the whole movement
not merely in jeopardy but in question.
Has
the cryonics movement been struggling for life in a “culture of death,” or has
it inadvertently been fostering death in a culture of life? The perhaps tragic answer to both questions
is yes. But the solution to the problems posed by both questions is the same: it is necessary to systematically open
oneself up to the culture within which we “live and move and have our being,”
whether it is a culture of life or
death. Not to attack it, or to flee it, or to disdain it, but to listen and enter into a productive
dialogue, not an on-going and self-serving monologue.
What
does this mean in practical terms? It
means marketing: systematically experimentally studying, probing and
interacting with the culture in which we live.
Existing cryonics groups have applied virtually none of the many
professional marketing approaches and resources available to building bridges
to target markets and consumer populations.
They simply have not thought in terms like that at all. That is why its history has been what it
is. That is why it’s time to change.
Sociologist
Max Weber lamented the growth of bureaucracy and organization, but large
business organizations in a global capitalist world is what we are becoming,
whether we like it or not. We can retard
that process, and in that respect we’ve done all that we can.
But
even the cryonics movement cannot stop the future from arriving. The future of cryonics organizations is a
business future, where data-driven customer-centered marketing is an integral
component. We can delay this inevitable transition, but it’s my strong hope
that we will have the courage and insight to accelerate it, and to accelerate a
swift new vital revival of cryonics – and, perhaps, of ourselves.
References
1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_suicide_rate
2.
Gerald
Zaltmann, Ph.D. – How Customers Think
3.
Clotaire Rappaille, Ph.D. – The Culture Code
4.
5.
Robert
B. Cialdini, Ph.D. – Influence
6.
David
Sloan Wilson, Ph.D. – Darwin’s Cathedral
7.
Daniel
Dennett, Ph.D. – Breaking The Spell