Emerging Consumers: Fact or Fiction?
As a futurist spending much of my time assessing emerging developments and their implications across an array of industry sectors, I am frequently asked for a view on ‘consumer trends’. Common questions are ‘what will consumers want in the future?’ ‘Does our product (service) have a place?’ ‘What is driving consumer behaviour?’ ‘How can we get ahead of the changing marketplace?’ and so on. But what if they’re the WRONG questions? For anyone who has seen me facilitate a public session, you’ll know that I play part court jester, part voice of conscience to provoke they way people think. So allow me a little provocation for you:
Consumers are NOT changing. Instead what we are seeing is the removal of the ‘blinkers’ most organisations are wearing that have hidden from view the hundreds or thousands of potential customers within their sights. Whilst methods of information gathering are shifting for consumers, that is just a tool, not a process. The intended outcome is very much the same – find out what I need to know.
Which means that even though technology is acceleraing the speed at which a consumer can gather information, it is Companies that are emerging out of the woodwork. It is as if the smog is clearing and businesses are finally seeing that there is (and in fact has ALWAYS been) a myriad of potential consumer dynamics in the marketplace. The most significant impact of this new awareness on behalf of companies, is the collapse of the validity of A-B-C consumers, of age based demographic targeting.
These approaches still have a role to play but they are not the be all and end all of marketing activity. Instead Companies are becoming increasingly aware that some consumers prefer fast paced snippets, some in depth commentary, and others prefer to go their own way. Some need to be guided, others prompted, some provoked. And this happens across age groups and across geographic locations and across income levels.
So are there Emerging Consumers? – kind of. And for the case of playing the Court Jester role, let me suggest that the emergence is on the part of Organisations who are at last, shaking off their delusion that you can ‘cookie cutter’ their marketing and branding. Sure tastes may change and for now Emerging Consumers are probably Faction than Fact
I’m going to come back to an idea I first floated back in 2004. By and large it is hard to change societal perceptions. Doing so requires on going effort, time and often resources like money to create marketing campaigns of some description. Unless you have a crisis. And right now it might be fair…
Read More >Whilst I appreciate the efforts that Greenpeace, Sea Shepherd and the various Australian Governments have given regarding their aims to have the Japanese cease their annual whale harvests, I’m not quite sure they are tackling the issue through the best means available. Sure the confrontational approach of ramming ships, climbing aboard vessels, getting in the…
Read More >I’ve just read an article about Corporate Visions and getting employees on the same page. And as happens so often, I shook my head because it offered the same flawed advice about what a leader needs to do to get their employees to buy into the Vision. And therein lays the fatal flaw You CANNOT…
Read More >As the drought in California continues to bite hard on the lives of millions, a recent article on Triple Pundit suggested that many people want to help save water, they just don’t know what else to do. Which is why California needs to look beyond its borders to the driest inhabited continent on the planet…
Read More >With the moderately surprising news that Christine Milne had decided to step out of her current political life, Dr Richard Di Natale moved into the driver’s seat for the Greens. And I flag that this spells trouble for the National Party because this shift, this change in voice and style, connected to similar passions, will…
Read More >In fact I’ll go one step further and say that many Strategic Plans are DELIBERATE methods for NOT Progressing. In far too many organisations, the process of Strategic Planning is about compliance to a process of ‘having a plan’ and typically it has nothing to do with achievement of the outcomes listed in the Strategic…
Read More >Around Australia and parts of the world like the USA, some governments and especially many large scale power utilities, are pursuing a campaign to prevent domestic solar from being fed back into (sold to) the grid. I’m assuming that the (fundamentally flawed) thinking is that by denying additional energy production points, they’ll prop up or…
Read More >I’m male. You may like to take that into consideration with the rest of what you read as, a) I’m part of the problem b) Whatever I say cannot, no matter how well intentioned, be in anyway able to represent women I’m prompted to write this particular piece following on from the ABC’s…
Read More >On a day when The Age front page ran a story of mass disconnections of householders struggling to pay their domestic electricity bill, Futurist Marcus Barber and ABC Goulburn Murray’s Joseph Thomsen discuss the future of energy – what’s happening now, what are we going to see in the future and what can consumers…
Read More >With Farmland across NSW, Queensland, & the Northern Territory under pressure from the mining sector, the quality of discussion as to which land use is of best outcome or most suitable seems to go astray. I’ve been flagging the ‘Eat’ OR ‘Extract’ challenge for a few years now and this radio interview is one example…
Read More >