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

The status dynamic is always at work
Once seen, it can’t be unseen. Say a cop pulls over a motorist for running a
stop sign. Who has status in that situation?
That same motorist goes on to the office, where he barks orders at the
receptionist. Who has status?
A clash of status roles happens in any bureaucracy that only knows how
to measure today’s status changes.
The roles we easily adopt at school—the class clown, the big man on
campus, the A student—are status roles. And remember how hard we
defended those roles, even when we had a chance to change them.

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When the marketer shows up with her new idea, her opportunity, the
offer to make change happen—every time, it’s a challenge to our status. We
have the choice to accept (and move up or down, depending on the story we
tell ourselves) or to turn down the offer and live with the tension of walking
away.
It’s a mistake to believe that everyone wants to make their status higher.
In fact, few people do. It’s also a mistake to believe that no one wants to
make their status lower. If you’ve been conditioned to see yourself in a
certain status role, you might fight to maintain and even lower your status.
The smart marketer begins to realize that some people are open and
hungry for a shift in status (up or down), while others will fight like crazy
to maintain their roles.
Status is not the same as wealth
In some circles, a Pulitzer-winning columnist has far more status than I do.
A doctor in charge of a prestigious hospital might have more status than a
wealthy plastic surgeon. And the penniless yogi in a little village in India
has more status than the richest man in town, at least to some of his peers.
In the last few decades, we’ve gotten lazier in our nuance of awarding
status, preferring it to be related to either the dollars in a bank account or
the number of followers online. But status continues to take many forms.