This Is Marketing: You Cant Be Seen Until You Learn to See

Status lets us
Status is our position in the hierarchy.
It’s also our perception of that position.
Status protects us.
Status helps us get what we want.
Status gives us the leverage to make change happen.
Status is a place to hide.
Status can be a gift or a burden.
Status creates a narrative that changes our perceived options, alters our
choices, and undermines (or supports) our future.
And the desire to change our status, or to protect it, drives almost
everything we do.
Case Study: Lions and Maasai warriors
How do we save the lions of Kenya and Tanzania?
Conservation biologist Leela Hazzah saw how encroachments on their
environment were making it more difficult for the lions to survive. But she
also knew that among many Maasai, a rite of passage for adolescent males
was to singlehandedly kill a lion. This show of bravery was putting
significant pressure on the lion population. It’s estimated that there are only
thirty thousand lions in the region, down from two hundred thousand a
generation or two ago.
All the rational arguments in the world aren’t powerful enough to change
deeply held cultural beliefs, even in this community. The need for status (as
a parent, as a young adult) is within all of us. Instead, Dr. Hazzah and her

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team worked to create new cultural beliefs built on top of basic human
desires.
As we learned from the quarter-inch drill bit, the action isn’t always
obviously connected with the desired emotion. In the case of the Maasai,
the cultural goals are to bind the community to each other, to create feelings
of empowerment and possibility, to inculcate bravery and patience, and to
have a significant rite of passage. To raise the status of the boy as he
becomes a man.
None of these goals are directly related to killing a lion. That was simply
a historical artifact.
Working with and within the Maasai cultural systems, Dr. Hazzah and
her team introduced a new rite of passage and built cultural influences
around it. Instead of demonstrating bravery and patience by killing a lion,
the young members of the culture now demonstrate those skills by saving
one.
In their words, “Wildlife conservation has traditionally focused on
wildlife, not people. At Lion Guardians, we take the opposite approach. For
almost a decade, we have worked with local communities to protect lions
and improve . . . community conservation by blending traditional
knowledge and culture with science.”
Now, the Maasai find and name lions, track them, and use radio
telemetry to perform a census. Protecting a lion has become as much of a
rite of passage as killing one used to be.