Jon Alexander

Building on a career in brand strategy with organisations like Sainsbury’s and the National Trust, Jon Alexander co-founded the New Citizenship Project with Irenie Ekkeshis. Defined as “a social innovation lab, established in 2014 to help catalyse the shift to a more participatory society”, Jon captured the organisation’s philosophy in a TEDx talk at UCL and in the #CitizenShift report. 

The idea of citizenship over consumption has been a recurring theme in the interviews I’ve done so far, and I was keen to catch up with Jon to understand what the transition he’s identified means for marketers, who have always had a symbiotic relationship with ‘consumers’. It’s particularly pertinent now, in a world of great upheaval, and re-reading our conversation, I kept thinking about the quote by Gramsci: "The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born. In this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear."

Martin: I was keen to chat to you, because in the interviews I’ve done to date, I always seem to find myself talking about you, because conversations often come round to the idea of citizenship, so you’re clearly on to something here. I love the idea that we’ve moved from seeing ourselves as Subjects, to Consumers and hopefully now to Citizens. How did you start thinking this way?

Jon: Two things happened at once in about 2011. I was working with a guy called Tom Crompton, a Change Strategist at WWF. I was doing a Masters in Responsibility and Business Practice at Bath and it was really while I was doing that that I began asking these questions about what the role of advertising was in society. I came across a piece that Tom had written about consumerism and the role of advertising and he and I started working together and we published a report in 2011 called ‘Think of Me as Evil: Opening the Ethical Debate in Advertising’, published by the WWF, among others, and the course of writing that got me quite a long way into digging into what consumerism is and does, and got me to this point of asking the question: What are we doing to ourselves when we tell ourselves we’re consumers 3000-odd times a day? Beyond the qualitative impact that people talk about, what does that fundamental quantity of messaging that surrounds us, at an unconscious level, what is that doing?

And then the other thing that happened that year is that, on the back of writing the report, I left the advertising industry and went to work for the National Trust, and one of the ideas I took in to the Trust was an idea called My Farm, which is where we tried to hand over decision making on a real working farm to the public via an online debate and vote. And the interesting thing about it was whether you can use the same sort of skills that are in the advertising industry but to involve people in something rather than just sell them something. And where that got me to was the question of how can you use the same creativity to speak to people as citizens, as participants, rather than consumers who are limited to buying, to choosing between stuff. 

I had the distinction in my head then, and I also came across a set of studies that were published under the title of ‘Cuing Consumerism’ the following year by a Professor from NorthWestern University called Galen Bodenhausen. Those studies did things like putting the word ‘consumer’ or the word ‘citizen’ on the front cover of surveys of environmental and social attitudes and seeing how that affected responses and showing that even the word ‘consumer’ can prime people to think differently.

Then I left the National Trust in 2013 to do a Masters in Philosophy to dig into this a bit more, and that’s when I really dug deep into it and went ‘Hang on, this is a big thing’ and started to think about these words not just as words but as identity constructs and moral ideas. And it was when I was doing that work that I started to think that I’d started with this opposition of ‘consumer’ and ‘citizen’ and that didn’t feel quite right - there are good things about the consumer and following what came before, it was clearly a freeing idea. Before that was the idea of people as ‘subjects’, and then suddenly it all clicked into place. Now I’ve got these three ideas that feel like they line up, I can understand and appreciate the gifts of the idea of the consumer, but I can also see the limitations of it. And in the work we’re doing now, you can overlay those three phases on to almost anything, and I can see another way that this could be, and it’s really exciting.

Martin: I’ve been reading recently Dominic Sandbrook’s history of post-war Britain, Never Had It So Good, and he talks about how consumer goods really did improve people’s lives, if you think about things like washing machines and central heating and fridges replacing washhouses and coal fires and pantries. Ha-Joon Chang said the washing machine has changed the world more than the internet. So you can see how it had a positive effect but the question is, has it gone too far? Perhaps we’ve let it run rampant, and like anything, without control it goes too far?

Jon: Hotpoint released a washing machine called the Liberator! I kind of agree, but I’d see it slightly differently. If you’re saying consumerism can be good but we’ve got too much of it, I’d come at it from more of a systems perspective, which is that the idea of the consumer was the right notion for its time and place, and the next step on from what we were before, which was ‘subjects’, but what there is now is the opportunity for another step on from that. I feel that it’s more like a ratchet point than it is an overflow. We can now do better, rather than this is out of control.

Martin: When you look at the ideas of ‘subject’ and ‘consumer’, I can see that a shift has taken place in the past, so it’s a great time to consider if we’re on the verge of another shift.

Jon: Have you come across the Berkana Institute? A lot of our theory of change is based on this, particularly their two loops model, and I think it speaks to where we are right now. They talk about how fundamental paradigm systems change happens. They talk about how, at any given time, there’s a dominant story in a system, but these stories kind of rise and fall, and in some periods, while the dominant story is falling, the new story is forming, but isn’t quite ready to take over. And in those periods of time, the work to be done in the world is about trying to close the gap, but also trying to help the old system almost die with dignity – they talk about ‘hospicing’. And then it’s about naming and illustrating a path forward for the new system, and a lot of the things we try and do are based on that. I think the shift from ‘subject’ to ‘consumer’ happened in a similar way, so is there an opportunity moment now?

A lot of people are talking about echoes of the 1930s right now, but what I see more, when I look around, are echoes of the 1900s, pre-World War I rather than pre-World War II. I think that part of the story of World War I was the collapse of the story of the ‘subject’. What was going on then was a massive professionalisation of bureaucracy and a rise of the middle class, and in that world, the idea that there was the upper class and the working class couldn’t hold any more, and as a result society kind of didn’t make sense, and things fall apart. World War I is almost a symptom of that fracture in the story we lived in. I think that’s where we are now – the story of the consumer doesn’t fit any more with who we are, how we could live, what we’re capable of, and the means of interaction we have, and yet that story is still dominant, so the world doesn’t make sense to us, we don’t know what the right thing to do is any more. And we have all these alluring simplicities offered. And the great cautionary tale coming out of World War I was that we didn’t take the opportunity to create the new story, and it was only after World War II that you had a conscious effort by people like Keynes - the articulation of new ideas of what the success of a society was and what the role of the individual was - that we actually moved on. This is right at the edge of my thinking and learning at the moment – what can we learn from the shift from ‘subject’ to ‘consumer’ for this possible, potential shift that I would argue is emerging now: from ‘consumer’ to ‘citizen’.

Martin: And is this going to happen naturally, or does it need to be nursed into existence? And do you think marketers have a role to play?

Jon: I don’t think it’s inevitable; I think it’s entirely possible – there are some deep underlying trends that we might get there but we could easily fall at this point and things could go horribly wrong. There’s a really big question about how much strife we’ll go through before we might enter into this story fully anyway, even if it were to be considered inevitable at some level. And therefore I think there is an enormous task right now, and what we’re trying to apply ourselves to is ‘How do you make this happen as quickly as possible and with as little discontinuity as possible, as little strife as possible?’ And I still consider myself a marketer, and I think marketers have a huge amount of agency in this, and therefore a huge amount of responsibility. I actually think it’s deeply irresponsible for any marketing agency or any marketer to not be asking ‘What’s the purpose of this organisation? Why does this exist? How can it work with people?’

One of the ways we talk about the New Citizenship Project is we say that we’re an innovation consultancy, we help organisations come up with better ideas because we think of people differently. If you think of people as consumers then the only stuff you come up with is stuff people can buy from you. If you think of people as citizens you start by asking ‘What’s the point of this organisation? Why does it exist?’ And then you ask ‘How can people help us deliver on that purpose?’ rather than just ‘What can people buy from us?’ You ask ‘How can people be part of it?’ And I suppose I’d like to think that in a way we’re a kind of pioneer of what really everyone should be doing. I would love the New Citizenship Project to become irrelevant because actually every marketing agency and every marketer is thinking ‘Obviously that’s the question we should be asking’.

Martin: Yes, Tim Smit says something similar about the Eden Project – it’ll have been a success when it makes itself obsolete. But it’s an interesting challenge for marketers, isn’t it, because we were born out of this consumer world, and if you’re right, then we’d have to find a new role for ourselves.

Jon: One of the ways I’ve thought about this is that advertising agencies and marketers are essentially a kind of priesthood of consumerism. If you think of consumerism as a religion – and I kind of do, actually – consumerism’s churchbells are advertising, and it underpins the structure of society and funds society in much the same way as the church used to. But there’s something really interesting in that analogy because the people who are closest to a religion have always been the one’s who unpick it and understand it. Without getting too lofty, Copernicus and Galileo were churchmen who told a different story. It’s marketers who understand what consumerism truly is. One of the things that frustrates me is how lazily people use words like ‘consumerism’ and ‘the consumer’ and how little thought goes into it, how little recognition of what those things actually are. And I mean that on both sides. There’s so much more to be done.

Martin: I remember from your TED talk you mention ‘consumer’ and ‘consume’ as being incredibly powerful words but with different meanings.

Jon: Yes the noun is so much more important than the verb.

Martin: How important is the move to digital marketing in making this shift? John Grant was talking about ‘monitory democracy’ and how digital tools are giving citizens more control, and so technology is helping to shift society. Are you in a similar place?

Jon: Someone recently sent me the question ‘Is politics impossible in a digital society?’ which is quite fun to consider. So, yes and no. I come at this through the lens of Marshall McLuhan’s aphorisms. There are two things that McLuhan said. One is the famous one: ‘The medium is the message’ and the second one he said was ‘First we shape our tools and then our tools shape us’. So, as I understand the first one, the dominant medium or technology of a society comes to shape how all the interactions in that society work, that don’t involve the medium itself. And the way I read that is, in a society dominated by television, we kind of became consumers because the means of interaction with a television is that you choose between the channels, you choose between stuff, you can flip between, but you don’t actually control it. You don’t have an input channel. So what you get is a one-to-many society where there are few producers but many many consumers. In a society dominated by the internet, you have that kind of network diagram, many producers, many consumers, many different interactions, and fundamentally you have a many-to-many society. I’m with the analysis that digital technology is making this possible. 

The flip side comes with the second one. The internet was born into a society where the dominant story of the individual is the consumer, and as such, what we’ve turned it into is a marketplace. And if we stay in that world…. We did a thing about, at the level of the individual the internet is currently destroying us; there are studies that show that a week off Facebook raises self-esteem. At the level of politics, it’s clearly destroying us because of the echo chamber phenomenon, where if we are in ourselves as consumers, we only read the things that agree with us, that we want to read. If we are in ourselves as consumers on Facebook then we present the Facebook version of our lives, and everyone thinks that everybody else is happier than them because they’re presenting a kind of polished version. And at the global level, the internet, because it makes purchase and consumption of stuff so much more efficient and easy, if we are in ourselves as consumers in the digital age in that way, then we’re just going to chase ourselves off a cliff through stuff and absence of work and so on.

But the many-to-many society is also, at the same time, starting to shape us into what I describe as citizens. But it isn’t inevitable, and right now the pattern seems to be heading in entirely the opposite direction. So it’s such an important moment in time because we have this new potential. And back to your thing about marketers, we all have agency in that, and we have to take that agency now, because otherwise we’re going to be in a seriously dark place in the next few years. 

Martin: You mention in your TED talk about how democracy is the wisdom of the crowd, and that should work well when we’re all thinking about how to change society, but the events of 2016 suggest that people were more concerned about their own situations. Where do we go from here, because that seems like a setback?

Jon: It’s back to Berkana’s two loops idea, the theory of change. A lot of what’s happening around us at the moment I see as the kind of necessary crumbling of the era of the consumer, the infrastructure falling apart to be replaced. But let’s not need two world wars to get through this!

(Image: The New Citizenship Project)

Martin: I love your chart where you show how language shifts as we move from ‘subject’ to ‘consumer’ to ‘citizen’. You’ve got the words ‘obey’, ‘demand’ and ‘participate’. A topic that always comes up is that of growth, and the need for companies to grow. And that word ‘demand’ – we talk about marketers’ role as ‘driving demand’. As we move to ‘participate’, are we going to measure corporate success differently?

Jon: Yes is the short answer. I love the example of ShareAction and the work they’re doing which is essentially about shareholders becoming citizens rather than just consumers, and starting to hold companies to account in terms of values, rather than simply in terms of financial return. And the B Corporation and so on. Those are early signals of something that could be really massive. Jonathan Wise’s Comms Lab report Reclaiming Agency is well worth a look, and I helped write that as well. There’s a lot of really interesting ideas and analysis in there. That report is based on a really deep complexity theory-based analysis of where marketing is going and what its role is, and particularly from the perspective of the advertising industry within marketing, but I think you’ll really enjoy that. 

It’s funny, when I wrote those words specifically - ‘obey’, ‘demand’ and ‘participate’ - I was thinking much more about the role of the individual, but you’re right, there’s a really interesting thing about ‘I wonder what the words would be if you were thinking about what the key concepts for a company are. Is it ‘tax to the crown’, then ‘growth for shareholders’, then ‘citizens as the primary stakeholders’? This is what I get so excited about – we have just stumbled on it, and I want to formulate this thinking into something a bit more solid – but it’s so different from starting from that end point. If you start talking about capitalism then I get stuck very quickly because the implicit task is that you have to design a whole system and know exactly how everything’s going to work later. And I suppose this would be my answer to your question. What feels so liberating and joyful about this subject (the ‘consumer/citizen’ story) is that is doesn’t say ‘Right, we have to know exactly how it’s going to work’; instead it goes ‘Right, we can all orient ourselves differently and if we do that then different ways of working, different systems, we’ll piece those together’. It’s like looking through the opposite end of the telescope. Paul Mason writes a book called Post-Capitalism and everyone goes ‘Right… how?’ whereas we’re saying ‘Just flip the telescope round and if we all orient ourselves as citizens, we will create, we will evolve these structures that are around us’. And that’s the order it’ll happen in; it’s not going to be a small group of people going off and designing what the next great system’s going to look like.

Martin: And I think you’ve captured something here that is very optimistic. The starting point for this project of mine was a concerned comment from Tim Smit, but now we’re looking forward in a positive way. The next transition will look pretty positive. If there’s evidence that it’s already happening, as you say, then I guess the role of marketers is to fan the flames. Is it about using our communication skills, or strategic skills to help bring about that shift?

Jon: It’s interesting you talk about the Dominic Sandbrook stuff . The great thing that we have to let go of is that we have to stop being defensive of consumerism. You can say ‘Yes consumerism was a good thing, from what came before, and now we can move beyond it’, and those two things don’t have to be in contradiction. That, I think, is the key task for marketers, it’s to be able to say ‘Look we did some good stuff’. I saw the new Advertising Association chairman speak and it was like going back thirty years - he was doing all the spiel about how advertising is good for the economy because it drives economic growth and creates jobs. We have to grow up and get beyond that and go ‘Right, how do we catalyse a new way of being?’ - because we can. And there are more and more people doing it. And I love what Jonathan and Ella are doing in creating that space for smart marketers to think differently. Yes, there are huge things that marketers can do, but there is also some stuff that we’re going to have to let go of as well. And unless we can do that, we’ll end up being a barrier to it, rather than an enabler of it.

Martin: You talk a lot about purpose, which is a subject that is growing in interest. Simon Sinek, another TED speaker, wrote Start With Why. Rowan Williams talked about moving away from the profit motive to more of a sense that what we’re doing is worthwhile. So many businesses start with identifying a solution to a problem, and then shift into thinking about growth and profit and pure numbers and losing sight of where they started.

Jon: Have you read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance? Pirsig talks about the concept of a Copernican inversion – how Copernicus’s revelation was a moment where two things are in relation, it’s just that we’ve got the relationship between the two the wrong way round. The sun and the Earth are in relation, it’s just that we thought the sun revolved around the Earth whereas actually the Earth revolves around the sun. And I think that’s where we are with profit and purpose. I think the underlying theory of consumerism is that purpose revolves around profit, and that really is what Milton Friedman was writing in that article saying that the social responsibility of business is to maximise its profits. His moral argument, and it is a moral argument, is that by maximising profit businesses maximise their social return. But he’s wrong. It’s a Copernican inversion. By maximising purpose business will maximise its financial return. That’s the way round it has to be, and that’s the flip that I believe will happen in the shift from ‘consumer’ to ‘citizen’. We’ll still have financially viable businesses making money, but they will do so in service of, and as a means to an end of, delivering on purpose, rather than vice versa.

I think that’s what people like Paul Polman are already talking about. The other guy you should look up for this project is Andy Last who runs a PR agency called Salt, and he’s done a lot of work with Unilever over the years. He’s a lovely bloke, and he’s just published a book called Business on a Mission.

Martin: So perhaps marketing was the Devil’s art originally, but maybe it’s the angel’s art going forward, and be a catalyst for positive change?

Jon: I wonder what is the moment of choice between angel and devil? There must be stories of letting go of something in order to become the fullest self you can be.

Martin: Maybe society is growing up, evolving.

Jon: One of my favourite moments when we were doing that table of words that you were talking about was the top line – ‘dependent’/‘independent’/‘interdependent’. The first time I presented that someone pointed out that those are the three stages of childhood development, which is really interesting.

Martin: When I interviewed Rowan Williams I was referring to a Giles Fraser article in the Guardian about comments made by the Pope about capitalism being a child-like state, and we almost have to grow up from it.

Jon: And it’s so interesting when you look at people like Farage and Trump, how puerile, how childish they are, and yet at the moment we’re being dragged down to that level.

Martin: Playground stuff?

Jon: Yeah. And it’s how do you combat that? How do you get above that?

Martin: And then there’s the whole ‘Had enough of experts’ sentiment.

Jon: That’s a really interesting phrase because to some extent I agree with it. There’s a thing about we trust each other, we want to be trusted ourselves rather than be told what to do. In quite a lot of the work we do, we’re working with organisations where we’re telling them they’re going to have to let go of something. In the art world, for example, the curators are the experts. But art is losing traffic, losing audience, and part of it is because these experts have become the right way of doing things, and that was never the core idea of art. There’s a gang called 64 Million Artists, and it’s all about the idea that everyone is an artist with a small ‘A’ if not a capital ‘A’, and finding that creative capacity in all of us is a really key part of the shift from consumer to citizen, I think.

Martin: You have ‘receive’/’choose’/’create’ as three of the words, and there’s something there about the freedom to be…

Jon: Or the freedom to be and do, rather than the freedom to have and choose, yeah.

Martin: The other phrase of the moment is ‘post-truth’. I’ve heard it expressed as opinions seem to be more important than facts.

Jon: It’s back to that thing about how would it be to own ourselves as citizens and what could organisations do to help us do that. How could The Guardian or the BBC create a different kind of space that isn’t about consumers choosing whatever content they happen to want to consume at any given time. One of my favourite organisations that I’ve come across recently is a Dutch news brand called The Correspondent. They’ve got a really good set of articles in English about medium, about what they’re doing. They were set up by a guy who was the youngest ever editor of a Dutch national daily, and he got this job on the back of writing a book called Nietzsche & Kant Read the News out of university, and his thesis was essentially that news has become entertainment for consumers rather than equipment and empowerment for citizens, and he started to steer the editorial line at this paper towards what we all need to know and understand in order to be equipped as citizens. And the ratings were doing fine, but this was too threatening, and he got fired, so he started a crowdfunding campaign to start a new news brand, and within a week he got something like $1.7 million and started this thing six months later. And now, apparently, if you scale the population of Holland to the population of America, it would be bigger than the New York Times. In one of the articles about the medium, about their structures, they say we don’t call them journalists we call them conversation leaders, and we don’t call them readers, we call them expert contributors. And the idea is that every piece they write is essentially an ongoing and developing enquiry, run with contributors, readers, rather than delivered unto them by a journalist. It’s really fascinating.

Martin: There was a piece in the Guardian recently saying, I think, that TV is losing something like 3% of its viewers every year and the biggest news medium is Facebook, which is an issue because a) it’s controlled by their news algorithm and b) a lot of it’s false anyway. So a key role of established, trusted news outlets in the future has to be furnishing us with the facts, so we can make informed decisions as citizens. That’s something that arguably we failed to do with Brexit, where it was much more of an emotional appeal, from both sides actually, than it was an informed one.

Jon: My take on Brexit is that I can kind of understand that. I’ve been spending a lot of time in Macclesfield recently, and I’m sure Cornwall is an interesting place to think about this stuff too, but I’ve been wondering about how we got into a position where this was a consumer choice between two quite shit options. And wouldn’t the citizen way of doing this have been to invest an awful lot more of the money – it cost the country something like £140m to run that referendum – what if a significant proportion of that had been invested in a deliberative civic process to engage people in envisioning the relationship we wanted to have with Europe? Up front.

Martin: And for everyone to be informed about what we get from Europe. Remain was all about the terrible things that would happen if we left, and Leave was all about the amazing things that would happen if we go, and no-one was saying ‘Here are the amazing things that would happen if we stay’.

Jon: Yes, and let’s ask the question of how we can build on this. Appreciative enquiry would have been a really interesting way to play it.

Martin: Marketing professor Mark Ritson predicted the result in Marketing Week, because he felt Leave were winning the emotional battle. And whether you agree with it or not, at least Leave put forward a positive vision of their position – although inaccurate, it turns out - whereas Remain put forward a negative vision of theirs. There was no rational discourse.

Jon: Though I’m not really talking about a rational discourse. If we’re citizens, then we participate much earlier in the process. We shape the options, rather than just choose between them.

Martin: Before it gets emotional?

Jon: Exactly. And you make an emotional process out of creating and imagining rather than an emotional process out of choosing.

Martin: That seems a great way of approaching it. If only we’d done that!

Jon: Well at least we haven’t started the first of the two world wars yet, so we’ve still got time to do things a bit differently!

Martin: That’s true! I think you’re doing a terrific job of articulating where we are and what it means for businesses, so all power to your elbow! Thanks so much for giving me some time.

Jon: My pleasure.