What is the golden quadrant and how does hopecore content help companies get there?
I’ve been reading recently about companies using a content trend called hopecore to attract consumer interest and generate sales. While hopecore can involve any content meant to be positive, happy, or awe-inspiring, these brands are focusing on a specific formula in which a poor person is given a large sum of money.
For example:
Pudgy Penguin draws attention to Twitch accounts with few followers, gaining them followers and payments, using the handle @ PudgyKindness
Chime partners with Zachery Dereniowski, aka @ MdMotivator, who went viral when he asked a poor graduate student for some money and then returned a far larger sum of money.
What’s in it for Chime and Pudgy Penguin?
Interestingly, the products and services offered by these for-profit companies aren’t related to hope or kindness. Pudgy Penguin sells stuffed animals; Chime is an online bank. I’m sure both would say they are motivated by genuine altruistism and that may be true. But they’ve also identified a path to the golden quadrant of the warmth-competence model.
According to this model, we perceive other people along two key dimensions: warmth and competence. Warmth is the extent to which they have positive, helpful intentions; competence is their ability to carry out their intentions (or not). When you combine warmth and competence, you get this 2x2 grid:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Stereotype_Content_Model.png
Our default perception is that warm people are not competent: your grandma who thinks you’re perfect and bakes you cookies but also doesn’t understand the internet or what you do for a living. We also assume that competent people are not warm: this is every Bond villain or evil genius—very smart, very bad, very effective.*
Even though companies aren’t people, there is a mountain of evidence that we think about them as if they were. This makes sense, because companies are a relatively recent addition on the evolutionary scene. We haven’t had time to develop a separate capacity for thinking about businesses or market transactions, so we just apply our social cognition.
The golden quadrant is the upper right-hand square of the graph above. It’s hard to get to this space, but it’s great for brand perceptions because the emotional response in that quadrant is pride and admiration. For-profit brands tend to be viewed as competent by default, but that also means they are seen as cold by default, too. After all, their motive is profit, not helping. However, by featuring hopecore content, Pudgy Penguin and Chime are showing that they’re both warm and competent. That leads people to admire them, to purchase from them, and to follow their example and support the people featured in their videos. That’s especially easily done on the internet, where all you need to do is click to follow or donate $5.
In contrast, nonprofits tend to be perceived as warm but not competent because their primary focus is helping, not profit. To get to the golden quadrant, nonprofits need to enhance perceptions of their competence. This can be done by emphasizing their expertise and effectiveness. For example, DonorsChoose helps fund the best projects put forward by teachers and schools. Doctors without Borders is run by highly trained medical personnel. Nonprofits marketing effectively is hopecore, which is nice but doesn’t attract the same kind of interest andattention as when for-profit companies do it.
Conclusion
My cynical take is that more businesses will take up the hopecore trend. Marketing and branding are faddish industries in which people replicate without thinking deeply about how or why it works or fits their situation.
Yet it could backfire, as there’s something vaguely manipulative about this content. Making people prove they are among deserving poor (by giving away their limited resources) is dehumanizing. The recipients also seem like they are being used by content creators to achieve viral reach, and for companies to sell products (albeit indirectly).
*Evolutionarily speaking, it's good practice to assume that people who intend to harm you are likely to succeed as you're likely to treat them with extreme caution. People who are warm don't need cautious treatment, because they are likely to be in-group members who are more trusted and more cooperative with us.