What Can We Learn From Socks?

I love this question (paraphrased from the link above):

Is it a good use of marketing to come up with good ways to sell socks or shirts or notebooks or shoes or is that not the best use of people's time? Is there a modern equivalent for past marketing strategies that engendered a sense of belonging?

For 3 reasons:

It gets deep
It focuses on serving the customer
I'm a Seth stan

I love the direction of the answer as well:

12 year old girls don't have a sock problem, they have a belonging problem. They have a culture problem. A problem of status and affiliation.

"Wanna see my socks," is a reasonably inexpensive way for a girl to indulge her desire to be part of something—maybe to one up a friend, have a conversation about fashion—for not a lot of money.

Lots of things in marketing exist not to do what it looks like they do, but to solve our emotional problems.

Not all of us are going to change the world or save lives. The rest of us might just be able to put a smile on someone's face. Produce something with a reduced set of side effects, that has effects that we can point to and say 'I made that.'

Marketing has its place. Not when it manipulates people or hustles them or hypes something. It has its place when it brings tension to the table in service of better.

Are you selling socks or are you selling solutions? (And no, this isn't just about socks.)