The Marketer Who Went Off Consumption

Welcome to The Marketer Who Went Off Consumption! Subscribe to my combined feed in a feed reader or by e-mail and you'll never miss a single post. Thanks for visiting!

Paul Carr in The Guardian  (via Rithwik) –

In Tim Ferris’s book, The Four Hour Work Week, he discusses a concept called “Geographic Arbitrage”, or Geo-arbitrage. In a nutshell, the concept explains how you can achieve a significant real-terms increase in your earnings by being paid in one currency, say US dollars, but spending that money on goods and services from a much cheaper foreign country. The concept has become more and more realistic in recent years as advances in technology mean it’s possible to work from anywhere in the world with a laptop, a mobile and a broadband connection.

Sure, it wouldn’t work for everyone – if you work in a shop or have to manage people in an office then you’ll struggle to do that from a South American beach. But if your work primarily involves computers, telephones or “creativity” – if you’re, say, a writer – then it’s ideal.

Rob Walker on this Ad Age article –

Anyways, here’s the thing that caught my attention: The debut episode (of “The Style Series, presented by Diet Coke”) includes “the exclusive premiere of Rihanna’s new e-film for Gucci.”

So, let’s just get this straight. One of the featured guests on the branded entertainment post-TV program was there to tell us about her latest post-TV branded-entertainment deal?

Maybe there’s a clue in here of what Leno’s new show ought to be, or what the future of talk shows in general might look like: How about a branded show that is exclusively devoted to the touting and discussion of the latest exciting new developments in branded entertainment? Instead of stars flacking their new movies, they’ll simply discuss their latest endorsements. Indie directors will premiere the latest commercial work they’re doing to pay the bills. Reality-show stars will talk about products placed in whatever series has made them “famous.” And so on.

Very exciting to live in the “post-advertising era,” no?

Rob Walker in NYT –

As the financial crisis snowballed this year, retail sales fell sharply, and government figures showed the first across-the-board decline in consumer spending since 1991. Curiously, many assessments of this development treated it as an exciting new trend — and maybe even an overnight realignment of where and how Americans find meaning and satisfaction in life. The lower-spending shopper of 2008 was promptly cited as evidence of a “new frugality” or a “saving is cool” mentality. “It’s a whole new reassessment of values,” one commentator suggested, while another posited that “America’s love affair with shopping” may be over.

Yeah? That seems like a lot to infer from data points in a government report, particularly when it suggests that yesterday we were vacuous shopping-bots and today we are virtuously sober citizens. At this stage, the evident hesitation to spend seems more like a function of fear than of frugality. Consumers, spooked by reports of declining spending, are deciding not to spend.

The video of my talk at Interesting New York is finally up (the slides are here) –

You can see the other videos at the Interesting New York website.

Yesterday, I spoke about my off consumption experiment at the Mandala NYC “performance party” organized by my new friend David Friedlander.

Inspired by the TED conference, David organized the first Mandala NYC event in August with the intent to kick off meaningful conversations about ideas that matter in an informal, accessible, and affordable setting. Since then, David has hosted an impressive list of speakers (August, September and October) and created a small but engaged community of regular attendees. David’s next event, under its new branding — Lucid NYC — is on 20th November and, if you are in NYC, you must not miss it.

At yesterday’s well attended event, my fellow speakers were relationship coach Michael Jascz, artist Steven Hirsch (do check out his Courthouse Confessions project) and green energy enthusiast Jonathan Colby.

I once again used my story about little girls who own a hundred dolls to explain my off consumption experiment to the audience and the story is becoming a sure hit with women at conferences –

Here’s the video of the presentation –

– and here’s the slideshow –

Seth Godin offers some old-fashioned advice on how to make your own luck — go off consumption –

1. Delete 120 minutes a day of ’spare time’ from your life. This can include TV, reading the newspaper, commuting, wasting time in social networks and meetings. Up to you.

2. Spend the 120 minutes doing this instead:

- Exercise for thirty minutes.
- Read relevant non-fiction.
- Send three thank you notes.
- Learn new digital techniques.
- Volunteer.
- Blog for five minutes about something you learned.
- Give a speech once a month about something you don’t currently know a lot about.

3. Spend at least one weekend day doing absolutely nothing but being with people you love.

4. Only spend money, for one year, on things you absolutely need to get by. Save the rest, relentlessly.

Almost eighteen months back, I decided to live my life more purposefully, when I made my 30-by-30 list. Since then, I have tried to live my life on the same back-to-the-basics principles that Seth writes about. It hasn’t always been easy, and I haven’t always managed to stay on course, but these simple changes have transformed my life.

In a guest post on Drew McLellan’s blog The Marketing Minute, I talk about marketing to consumers who define themselves by their anti-consumerism –

An increasing number of consumers are rejecting their roles as consumers and refusing to define themselves by the things they buy. Instead, they are choosing to define their identities from the experiences they have, the relationships they build, and the meaning they create by expressing themselves creatively.

If you are a marketer, you can react to these trends in two ways. You can ignore them until they hit you, or you can immerse yourself in them, like I have chosen to.

After studying these trends for almost six months, I see that there is a way for brands to stay relevant, even if the seven social trends I talked about move closer to the mainstream.

Simplicity, authenticity and community are the three themes that run through the seven social trends that are changing consumption. Brands that help us clear the clutter in our lives, or enable us to have authentic experiences, or assist us in forming and connecting with communities will become the most important necessities, the only things we can’t do without.

Given that hipsterdom has been reduced to empty trend-hunting, it’s difficult to remember that the original hipsters were the original advocates of minimalistic consumption –

It’s really ironic that a subculture with a liberal/ anti-establishment/ anti-brand philosophy has transformed into become a an empty, recursive, self-referential focus group for marketers.

In Chapter 2 of ‘Hip: The History’, John Leland lays out the history of this connection between being hip and saying no to consumption —

Within hip’s juggernaut is a quest for the real, a belief that enlightenment involves stripping away sophistication, not adding it… Hip promises truth received, not constructed… This call to primitive experience resists (America’s) cult of progress. In place of status or achievement, the writers offer non-material values by which people could define themselves. This impetus — repeated by bohemians, beboppers, action painters, hippies, punks, hip-hoppers etc. — has been remarkably resilient over American history. Though we often think of these as discrete responses to the mainstream, they are really an ongoing part of what makes America American. They are not footnotes; they belong to the story. By our rebellions are we sometimes best known.

Riddhi Shah, who has earlier done two stories (1 and 2) on my off consumption experiment in Hindustan Times follows them up with a story on some other young people who are trying to find happiness by going off the work-watch-spend treadmill –

There are some really interesting stories in here, stories that tell me that I’m doing too little myself. I know one or two of these people, but I wish I had the time to know the rest of them before I left.

The Buck Stops Here

India may be in the throes of consumerism, but a growing number of young people are making a conscious effort to stay away from the high life.

By Riddi Shah, riddhi.shah@hindustantimes.com
Hindustan Times, Mumbai, Sunday, August 3, 2008

Question: But why do you need packers when you are giving everything away?

Answer: I’m moving to Washington DC for a year and I’m giving away almost everything I own to three five strangers.

Giving away my stuff, I have learned, is more, not less, work than moving it from one city to another or putting it in storage.

Moving, so far, has been a simple two step process –

- At the old house, I pack everything I need for two weeks into a bag or two to carry with myself and indiscriminately stuff everything else I own into boxes and load them into a truck.
- At the new house, I unload the boxes from the truck and transfer all my stuff straight into cupboards so that I don’t have to look at it again.

So far, I have never really had to worry about the stuff that’s in the boxes. I have never had to ask myself if I really needed it at all.

In every city I have stayed in, I have bought more stuff than I have discarded. As a result, every time I have moved, there is even more stuff in the boxes and even less incentive to sort through it.