THE CHAMELEON ON THE MIRROR

By Dr David Lewis

“In the second half of the 20th century, we have gradually learnt to talk and think of each other and ourselves less as workers, citizens, parents or teachers and more as consumers” Yiannis Gabriel and Tim Lang. The Unmanageable Consumer.

They are aspirational, unpredictable and growing more influential with each year that passes. As an ever increasing number of their basic needs are met, they have expanding amounts of disposable income to spend on luxury articles and services that offer a strong "feel good factor".

Quality and value for money are taken as ‘givens’ and they constantly shop around for the best possible services and added-on extras. With lifestyles dominated by high expectations, a demand for instant gratification and a passion for novelty, their span of both time and attention are shorter than at any time in the history of marketing.

Above all they are engaged in a quest for what is special and authentic, in order to make themselves feel special and more authentic.

I have named them the New Consumers.

New, because their attitudes, aspirations and motivations are radically different from those consumers of the recent past.

Consumers because these attitudes and assumptions influence every aspect of their consumption, from purchasing cans of beans in a supermarket to “buying into” social policies, religious beliefs and political ideologies.

If they have not already made themselves felt in your own markets it can only be a matter of time before they do. When that happens not merely will your company's prosperity crucially depend on their decisions to buy or not to buy, so too will its very survival.

For no matter what product you manufacture or what service you provide, a failure to understand the needs and obsessions of New Consumers will cause your marketing strategies to founder on the reefs of their disinterest and distrust.

As David Spangler, director of market research for the Levi brand put it in an American context: "They are going to take over the country. "

Growth of the New Consumers

New Consumers first emerged some forty years ago, a product of the social and economic upheavals which began transforming the Western democracies during the early 'sixties.

But it is only more recently, with the exponential growth of data handling, information technology and computer power that they have moved from niche market to commercial mainstream. As information was applied in an organised way to production and distribution consumers were presented, year on year, with rapidly expanding choice, quality and reliability.

"Mass production spews forth so much that there's a shift in emphasis away from the material desires that dominated the old economy," comments Michael Goldhaber, a scholar at the Institute for the Study of Social Change. "For many people in the US, Western Europe, Japan, and a growing list of other places, the materials needed for basic living are more than abundant.”

Today they have come to expect all these, plus instant delivery and easily available credit as an undisputed given in almost every commercial exchange. This is true to such an extent that the Western public and media now tend to be far more concerned with and about, “consumer rights” than any other form of human rights.

Among the host of converging factors responsible for shaping the wants, desires and purchasing behaviour of these New Consumers are:

• Globalisation & the emergence of new markets
• Rising disposable incomes
• An explosion of service industries and innovative products
• More flexible trade and labour arrangements
• Greater ethical and environmental awareness
• New shopping technologies and the networked economy

As a result, producers and service providers locked into the traditional methods of mass production, mass marketing and mass consumption began experiencing falling sales, soaring inventory and eroded brand value.

In 1999, for example, Levi's which only two years earlier had been rated the world's eighth greatest brand, announced it was to close half its North American factories, following a 13 per cent decline in sales.

The fact of the matter is that global empires like Levi Strauss, Kelloggs, Woolworth and even the mighty Coca-Cola - whose profits plummeted 27 per cent in the fourth quarter of 1999 - have paid insufficient attention to the radically different mind set of these New Consumers.

The New Engines of Expectations

1] The Search/Attention Economy.

Old consumers benefited from the economies of scale produced by mass-production, mass-marketing and mass consumption. The ultimate monuments to this achievement are vast discount superstores where a customer can browse a wide range of products at knockdown prices.

The New Consumer, thanks to computer technology, has discovered something far more stimulating - the search and attention economy.

Today it has never been easier to research prices and product information and find better deals than the old consumer could ever hope to obtain. No longer hostages to mass marketing they browse niche-magazines, surf and search the Net, and channel-hop.

As a result they have far greater control over how they spend the only truly scarce commodity in the developed world - their attention.

For it is a scarcity of attention, rather than as in the past of material products and disposable income, that is now emerging as one of three key scarcities that dominate the lives of New Consumers and those who serve them, the other two being scarcities of time and trust

2] Falling entry costs.

Sufficient numbers of consumers are now using the internet for it to influence other, 'real-world' selling especially in the areas of planning and decision-making. British catalogue-based high street retailer Argos thought that they had a failure on their hands when their web-site didn't generate many sales. On studying the problem, however, they found people were using the web to browse the Argos' selection before going into the shops to buy them.

With their margins at a historic low, traditional retailers are increasingly vulnerable to trends set by hyper-competitive net-based sellers. Since, on the Internet, being small is no barrier to entry, competition is vastly increased. In cyberspace a sprat with good idea has just as much chance of snapping up a fortune as the big fish. Not for nothing has the Internet has been described as a global copying machine which can reproduce ideas and products at the speed of light.

3] The Growth of 'Smart Spaces'.

Imagine a magical mirror that can answer your questions, remember your tastes, and habits and even peer inside your subconscious to discover things you didn't even know about yourself.

The computer can already do just that: It is now perfectly feasible to learn enough about consumers to offer every single one personalised products and services.

And this is just the start.

Since the late 1950s the power of computers has increased by a factor of 100,000 while costs have fallen by a factor of one thousand.

Which means that the cost effectiveness of computers has risen 100 million fold in the past half-century. Today, even those companies that have been accumulating extensive records on their consumers have barely started to exploit a fraction of the vast riches these digital storehouses contain.

What this all adds up to is an exponential growth in variety and an ever increasing number of consumer niche markets. In the travel industry, for example, one sees the emergence of no-frills low cost airlines such as BA's `Go!' and EasyJet, at the same time as expensive trips to view the wreck of the Titanic, expeditions to Antarctica and even plans for holidays in space.

We are rapidly entering an age of “mass customisation” where consumers will be able to order virtually any permutation of design and build in anything from cars to computers and homes to hi-fis and have them delivered at the same cost and with the same speed as a mass-produced item.

In the world of the new consumer, the marketplace and the consumer aren't really separate forces; they're part of the same system. The soul is the marketplace, the marketplace the soul.

Connectivity is the imperative of the new consumer era, just as productivity was in the old consumer era. As the new consumer is becoming more and more enmeshed with the producer, the stark distinctions between the two begin to look more indistinct.

In the past, all great trends and fashions required a network to spread them, whether it was television, cinema, or simple word-of mouth.

But as we start to connect everything with everything else our digitally suffused world is constantly reflecting our own images and behaviours back at us.

Author Kevin Kelly puts it this way: “Medieval life was remarkably unnarcissistic. Common folk had only vague notions of their own image in the broad sense.” Instead, says Kelly, rituals and traditions were the building blocks of identity.

“On the other hand, the modern world is being paved with mirrors. We have ubiquitous TV cameras, and ceaseless daily polling (“63 Percent of Us Are Divorced”) to mirror back to us every nuance of our collective action. A steady paper trail of bills, grades, pay stubs, and catalogues helps us create our individual identity. Pervasive digitalisation of the approaching future promises clearer, faster, and more omnipresent mirrors. Every consumer becomes both a reflector, a cause and an effect.”

If marketing is a mirror, then the New Consumer is becoming more and more like a chameleon on the mirror's surface.

In which case, asks Stuart Brand: " What colour is the consumer when you put him on the marketplace? Does he dip to the state of the lowest common denominator - a middle average consumer? Or does he oscillate in mad swings of forever trying to catch up with his own moving reflection?"

The point is that New Consumers are not only acutely aware of themselves but of other consumers as well. To predict which products and services will succeed with these consumers equally demands an accurate insight into how they think. Often this means that it takes a good consumer to be a good producer.

Consider, as an example, the astonishing career of UK based Ruben Singh. At the age of just seventeen and while still at school taking his final year exams, Ruben opened his first fashion shop, Miss Attitude. By the time he was twenty-one he had built an empire of one hundred shops which he then sold for a reported sum of £22m, making him the world’s youngest self-made millionaire.

The secret of his success?

“I was a teenager, all my friends were teenagers and that was my target market.”

What's so New about the New Consumers?

While, as I shall explain in a moment, individual Old and New Consumers can differ in a great many ways, the following seven characteristics represent the most universally found differences between them.

New Consumers are Active and Interactive:

Much of Old Consumer consumption is based on well-established habits and satisfactions. If they have always bought Product X which can be picked up easily and conveniently at the local supermarket and costs less than Product Y, which can only be tracked down in small, specialist shops, they can see no good reason to change. Even if Product Y is demonstrably more effective or efficient, it still takes a great deal or persuasion to cause Old Consumers to make the switch.

This is not to deny that economic necessity plays a role in many purchasing decisions, for both New and Old Consumers.

But cost alone is by no means always the major consideration. Even when there is no difference in price, or they could easily afford the extra cost, Old Consumers locked into traditional patterns of purchase are far less likely to do so than New ones. So far as they are concerned, if plastic costs half as much and lasts twice as long as wood, why waste time and money on timber?

New Consumers, by contrast, are more likely to seek out items that are different and in some ways special.

Because wood is natural, and therefore "authentic" – an important consideration that I shall discuss in greater detail in a moment – this will be their preferred material for a wide range of products.

Even when money is not an issue, Old Consumers are less likely to see any reason for spending extra on personal supervision.

Their desire for the authentic and novelty compels New Consumers to be active in their dealings with the market place. They must seek out products and services instead of passively accepting whatever is on offer. For many New Consumers, therefore, shopping has become an active search for the authenticity, which they see as implicit in healthier or more ethical products. This can turn every supermarket trip into an agony of doubts and dilemmas.

Are those eggs truly free-range, or merely labelled that way as a marketing ploy?

Are the organic vegetables really free from pesticides, insecticide and fungicides?

Have those clothes from the Third World been stitched by the sweated labour of children?

New Consumers check contents, compare prices, scrutinise promises, weigh options and raise questions to which they demand answers.

“The number of people reading labels is going up every year," confirms retail anthropologist Paco Underhill. " We’re reading nutritional labels. We’re looking at that label and figuring something out. In short, we are becoming better, more active, consumers."

As New Consumers become increasingly active and interactive, producers and service providers can no longer assume that they will passively respond – or even attend to - advertising slogans and brand messages. The “club culture” favoured by Old Consumers is coming to an end as the era of the individual dawns

New Consumers are Individuals

This is, of course, a necessary extension of their search for the authentic. A goal you can never achieve by consuming what everyone else is consuming. "The mythological homogeneous America is gone", says Joel Weiner, Senior Vice President Marketing, for Kraft Foods. "We are a mosaic of minorities."

Old Consumers were far more accepting of standardised products. They cheerfully bought homes in new developments where every house was a clone of the other. They drove standardised cars, wore standardised clothes and ate standardised fast food, where every burger and every bun was processed and packed with conveyor belt precision. Many of course still do and, perhaps rightly, see nothing odd or strange about this.

New Consumers' demand for individualisation affects all aspects of consumption from fashion to pop and motor manufacturing to the hair styling:

"This is the first period of the century without a distinctive new pop musical style, without a characteristic style of furniture, hair or clothing," comments Jaron Lanier, pioneer of Virtual Reality. "What's new about... (today's) style is not what it looks like, but how it's made. Artists of all kinds now work in digital tools. Style used to be an interaction between the human soul and tools that were limiting. In the digital era, it will have to come from the soul alone."

Without the metronome of industrial mass-institutions and media to synchronise them, the New Consumers march to their own drumbeat.

Selling anything to the New Consumer, from an ideology to a product will demand this need for individuality is taken into account. Even when an item is, in fact, mass-produced it must appear as having been made for that individual alone.

New Consumers are constantly engaged in what Yiannis Gabriel and Tim Lang in their book The Unmanageable Consumer describe as a discourse of difference:

“An exploration of " minute variations, of idiosyncrasies of style, products, brand, signs and meanings… the discovery of difference, the establishing of difference and the appropriation of difference."

Even small and subtle changes in the design or manufacture of a product - what Freud termed "the narcissism of minor differences" can be of great emotional and symbolical importance. The badge on a car that tells you it is a superior model from one that, to the untutored eye, appears virtually identical. The stitching of a shirt collar which makes it out as a genuine designer label to those who know. The shape of a shoe which proclaims "hand made". These secret codes are the new synchronisers of consumer behaviour.

Of special significance are distinctions to be made between individuals and groups, which are socially and geographically close to one another.

"In such situations," say Yiannis Gabriel and Tim Lang "group members are held together not by the force of shared ideals and powerful leadership, but rather through the signs which differentiate them from their immediate neighbours. It is to those little badges, emblems and colours that the groups and the individual's self-esteem become as Freud would put it, condensed."

New Consumers are Independent:

They want to make up their own minds instead of being told what to think and what to buy. The hard sell, the dogmatic assertion and the glib sales patter that was so often successful with Old Consumers, does little to attract or impress the New. One reason why long established political parties and religions are having such a hard time selling policies and making converts. In both instances New Consumers perceive their messages as prescriptive and excluding rather than innovative and including.

Old Consumers were far more willing to accept political, social, education and religious dogmas at face value. New Consumers assert their independence by challenging established thought and demanding dialogue not monologue.

The result is widespread and increasing antipathy towards entrenched views combined with interest in new political parties which offer greater grass-roots participation and religions which package ancient beliefs into a more appealing packages.

Old Consumers were synchronised. They tended to shop at the same time for much the same mass-produced products. They took their holidays at around the same time and went, by and large, to the same place as other consumers.

New Consumers prefer to make their own decisions about everything, from how they worship to where and when they can go shopping. According to the Future Foundation, a UK think-tank, pressure from these consumers will soon mean an end to time tyranny. Shops, surgeries, chemists, ands restaurant will no longer shut at a certain hour. Cinemas will stay open all night. Supermarkets will never close. The 24-hour society will have arrived.

Companies must go out to the customer rather than waiting for consumers to come to them. This may well mean making products and services available around the clock and virtually instantaneously.

New Consumers are Distrustful

The majority of Old Consumers sincerely believed big business, governments, the military and scientific establishments had their best interests at heart. New Consumers are far likely to be so credulous with a significant majority reporting a deep suspicion of all bureaucratic organisations.

In an era that promotes individuality, large groups of people in organisations are to be distrusted. The MORI market research company, which started measuring public attitudes towards business in the UK thirty years ago, has plotted a sharp decline approval ratings.

In 1970 a half (53%) of those questioned agreed with the proposition that "the profits of large British companies help make things better for everyone who buys their goods and services?" while only a quarter (25%) disagreed. When the same question was posed in 1999, those proportions had been reversed, with a quarter (25%) agreeing and half (52%) dissenting.

Easier access to information via the net will make it increasingly difficult for companies, governments and other organisations with guilty secrets to conceal them from the world.

New Consumers are Time Poor

New Consumers across all adult age ranges report having too little time in the day to meet all the demands made on them and claim these pressures are a significant cause of stress.

After decades of getting shorter the working week is now getting longer again - up to 44 hours per week, including commuting, from 40.6 in 1973. Professionals are working even harder, at 52 hours per week with owners of small businesses putting in around 57 hours. During the same period, leisure time has gone down by 40 per cent from 26 to 17 hours a week.

Time pressures and the ever growing volumes of information with which we are confronted on a daily basis, are also implicated in the greatly reduced span of attention identified in a number of reports and studies.

Organisations that cut down delays to a minimum will gain a loyal following among a significant proportion of these time poor New Consumers.

New Consumers Love Novelty

Fascinated by anything new and different, New Consumers are not only more faddish than old ones; they are also a lot more fickle. They'll fight to get their hands on something new on Monday and have forgotten about it by Friday.

Attempting to predict what products will appeal and which will fall flat, always a headache for corporate buyers and marketers has now taken on extra dimensions of uncertainty. Novelty creates fashion and fashion dictates what New Consumers, especially younger ones, will spend their money on.

"Asked what brands are cool, these teens rattle of a list their parents would blank on," reports Business Week."

The same pattern can be found not only in clothes, but toys, electronics, music and movies, blockbuster novels and CD's to television programmes.

Companies that fail to keep up with the changing tastes and interests of New Consumers are likely to miss major opportunities for growth and for profit. Business cycles have already come down from years to months and are likely to fall even further in some sectors. As with delivery times, speed in bringing a new product or service to the market place will, increasingly, prove central to success.

New Consumers Seek Authenticity

These six qualities, especially those of being proactive, seeking individuality and demanding greater independence of choice stem from an underlying quest for authenticity in a wide range of products and services.

“People are called to authenticity," comments British author Bryan Appleyard. "It has become the crucial moral orthodoxy of our time."

It is in this search for the real as opposed to the artificial, for the original rather than the replica and the natural in favour of the synthetic that New and Old Consumers differ most radically and importantly. Indeed, it is the unifying factor that drives many of the differences cited above.

Searching for the authentic - in everything from food to fashions and foreign holidays to furniture - obliges them to be active rather than passive.

It requires that they track down the individualised and reject the standardised.

It compels them to act independently rather than swimming with the tide of synchronised Old Consumers.

Underlying this passion for the authentic lies a dread in the soul of many New Consumers that they themselves are somehow lacking authenticity!

This vague sensation of psychic emptiness haunts many New Consumers. They often feel shut off in their own world, detached from society as a whole, and able to make genuine contact with others only sporadically. They may spend time with other people, but with their roles changing as often as the hour, they are deeply uncertain as to whom they really are.

"Whereas, for example, the nineteenth century was marked by the classical neuroses of hysteria and obsession, the twentieth century is characterised by narcissistic disorders, the "empty self," comments MIT historian Professor Bruce Mazlish.

Or as futurist writer Alvin Toffler put it: "Today we see millions desperately searching for their own shadows, devouring movies, plays, novels, and self help books, no matter how obscure, that promise to help them locate their missing identities."

Authenticity will, I predict, become the driving force for much consumption in the new millennium.

Businesses able to develop a product or service philosophy which enshrines some aspect of authenticity are set to prosper while those which fail to differentiate from their competitors in this crucial regard seem likely to fail.

The Japanese distinguish two types of quality. One, termed Atarimae hinshitsu describes a “quality that is expected” while the other Miryokuteki hinshitsu represents “a quality that fascinates”.

Where demanding and fickle New Consumer are concerned it is only the latter that can be expected to ensure long term survival and prosperity.