X-Message-Number: 1737
From: 
Subject: CRYONICS Marketing thoughts
Date: Fri, 12 Feb 93 00:11:07 PST

In message #1734 Kevin Brown goes deeply into the problems of 
marketing cryonics.  Kevin's interest is a recurring theme.  When I 
first got interested in cryonics, I did considerable research into the 
closest previous example I could fine--life insurance.  It has been a 
long time (7 years or so) since I did the research, but several things 
stand out. 

Like cryonics, life insurance forces a person to think about what they 
want to think about least, their own mortality.  Unlike cryonics, 
(which is mostly for one's self) it works on raising a feeling of 
guilt because of a person's responsibilities to their family. 

Like cryonics, there were a number of early failures in the life 
insurance business.  Once it got well started, it grew for several 
decades along a nearly straight line on semi log paper.  Another 
interesting feature is that insurance acceptance started 20 years 
earlier in Great Briton, and 40 years later in France compared to the 
US experience. 

But the reason I backed off from further analogy was that I found the 
most significant factor behind the growth of insurance to be the 
invention of the dreaded *life insurance salesman*.  I suspect that 
the obnoxious cryonics salesman may be what we need to get people to 
pay attention to thoughts they don't like to think, but I don't want 
the responsibility for losing another such plague on the world.  :-) 

>Keith Henson has suggested that cryonics occupies the same memetic
>niche (ie. marketing position) as religion.

Well, sort of.  In more detail, I think the cryonics meme builds an 
"agent" in Minsky's terms whose main function is that of diverting/ 
modifying thoughts about personal mortality.  Religions and other 
related memes do much the same thing.  Agents of this class tend to be 
stable in most people (though there *are* plenty of exceptions). 

>Some even more common resolutions, though, have nothing to do with
>religion at all:
>      Denial & Self-Deception.    Follow-the-crowd.
>Until recently, these strategies actually made good sense.
>Why spend one's life fretting over something that you cannot do
>anything about anyway?  You would be better off just forgetting
>about it and getting on with your life (and death).  People who
>did exactly that produced a world full of people like them.
>Cryonicists are the misfits.

Agreed on all counts.  Cryonics (if it works) is very much an 
exception to the rules.
 
>If that is true, though, then how do life insurance agents ever sell
>life insurance?  Could it be in the name?  After all, they are really
>selling death insurance and calling it life insurance.  But cryonics
>is the only kind of life insurance that lives up to THAT name.  Since
>the name "life insurance" is taken, though, what do we call cryonics?
>Keep On Truckin' insurance?  Maybe some life (death) insurance agents
>have more insight into this.  Perhaps what they are really selling is
>Peace Of Mind: "Yes, sir, I agree that you aren't really going to die,
>but, just in case, wouldn't you like to know that your wife and kids
>will be well taken care of?"  If so, then what kind of Peace Of Mind
>can cryonics offer?  Perhaps that can be explored more thoroughly in 
>the next section. 

Heh, it occurs to me that cryonics salesmen could just call what they 
sell "life insurance" and rename what the other dudes sell as "death 
insurance." I guess we would need our own insurance company by then, 
because most of us use "death insurance" to fund our "life insurance." 

>  (1) Many, if not most, cryonics signups are from personal acquaintance
>      with someone who signed up.  Your personal example is the most
>      powerful statement you can make.

We need to do more research on this.  Being on the defeated side of 
the recent power struggles kind of killed my interest in making a lot 
of phone calls to new members, (they ask questions I can't answer) but 
before that happened I had called and interviewed 10 of the last 50 to 
join.  The number is too small to draw any conclusions, but I get the 
impression that media or books (especially Engines of Creation) are a 
large if not the majority source of initial interest in cryonics. 

>Finally, all this hype would be a lot more successful if we actually
>had a product to sell.  We need all the good research we can get so
>that "The Prospect of Immortality" becomes the reality of revival
>to an unbounded future.

As I have mentioned before, reviving a frozen mammal would be an 
amazing marketing coup for cryonics.  Unfortunately, the physics of 
the process may be against us.  I suspect (though I would be delighted 
to be proved wrong) that there is nothing short of nanotechnology 
which would revive a mammal frozen to LN2.  Even if we could, it would 
be of relatively little advantage to those we are freezing today 
because they have so many other problems.  Like the jump into space, 
the bypass through nanotechnology may be the *shortcut*. 

Keith Henson

Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=1737