- 06 Feb 2012
Uncovering your sexy chimp
Winston Churchill said, “It’s not what you don’t know that will get you into trouble. It is what you know absolutely for certain.” The same can be said for marketing.
Self-diagnosis based on perceptions about your audience, product and message can be the most damaging thing to your business. It’s hard to read the label on the bottle when you are inside it.
I was reminded of this point this week when I learned about the sexiest primate you have never heard about: the Bonobos. I was surprised to learn that humans have two equally close relatives: the Chimpanzee AND the Bonobos.
You would think that you would know more about Bonobos. We share about 99 per cent of our DNA with them. Compared to Chimpanzees, Bonobos look more like humans, walk more upright, show more emotions and have more distinct faces like humans. As I read more I felt the foundations of my knowledge about our ancestry shift a little. Why hadn’t I heard about Bonobos before? Then I figured out why they were censored from the story.
You see, the trouble with Bonobos is that they have sex...a lot. They have sex as a greeting, sex as a conflict resolution mechanism, and well... sex just for fun. Not just males and females – but in all sorts of combinations best left to the imagination. They are a pretty free-loving bunch. Footage of Bonobos in the wild is not a wise Google search at work.
It gets worse: something that may have rivalled the sex thing at the time they were discovered in the 1950’s: Bonobos are a matriarchal society where women dominate the men. (Mock gasp!)
The notion that humans were closely related to a “sexy-time” species run by women didn’t exactly fit with the “Father Knows Best” morality of the time. So the story of Bonobos was surreptitiously suppressed from the zeitgeist and a key foundation of our self-perception stayed rooted in a half-truth.
We continue to work from the presumption that our closest ancestor is the more violent, aggressive, and patriarchal chimpanzee – yet that is only half the story. We are equally the sensual, sensitive and sexual Bonobos.
Luckily the truth is a hard secret to keep. You can see the duality in our nature in the world we live in every day. You even see it in the choices at the movie theatre – racy rom-coms for the Bonobos, and shoot-em-ups for the chimps. To be totally meta, Lord of the Flies could be remade as Bonobos Versus the Chimpanzees and you could cover both bases.
This same truth about our nature also shows up in good advertising – where the product, the message and the medium match the primate you are aiming for.
My point isn’t that we are all bipolar – my point is that when you uncover something new you often see the world in a different way. It provides clarity to a direction that may have been just a hunch before.
At Look Matters, we have a process called the “Uncovery”. It is the start of every client relationship. It’s a deep dive to the bottom of who you are as a company or organization and what you are trying to achieve with your marketing.
Sometimes the truth we find can be awkward (like the Bonobos), but it is better than relying on things that you think you know “absolutely for certain”.
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Twitter: @andrewrathwell
More Resources on Bonobos
Ted Talk: Susan Savage-Rumbaugh: The real-life culture of bonobos
Wikipedia (Photo source)
