Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Source: BIGresearch
The brand value equation has been re-
thought by all socio-economic classes
Authentic
Value
Discretionary Essential
Spending Spending
Perceived
Value
Frugal-shifting is on
Stay-cations
Share-swaps
Declaring Barter
bankruptcy
In-home
Eating at
entertainment
home
Coupon clipping
Store
brands Piracy
“Consumers are
not walking
wallets”
Mo Morales,
Provocateur
Even luxury brands are taking notice
Technology
Health
Leisure
Communications
Education Nationality
Religion
Politics
Economy
Sexuality
Energy
“Only those who are
grounded in the reality of
their consumers’ lives
will understand their
priorities. The consumers
themselves may not have
the ability to articulate
their needs.”
Idris Mootee,
CEO, Idea Couture
Meet The Sovereign Consumer: a first
world archetype that eludes demography
and exudes psychography
Extremely Cynical
of media and brands Commercially Engaged
defined by brands selects/rejects
Network Enabled
on-demand influence
Privacy Disabled
personal data out of control
Needs Community
Seeks sharing with peers Needs Anti-Community
defined by what isn’t
Owns Self-
Determination Suffers Status
defines value on own terms
Anxiety
aware of place in society
Promotes New
Social Contract Ethically
expects responsible pursuit of Ambivalent
profit Selective application of
values
“The ideological market has
become equivalent to a self-
service restaurant where
individuals can provide
themselves with single pieces
to put together their own
cosmology and have the feeling
of thinking for themselves.”
Marc Auge,
Anthropologist
The Sovereign Consumer desires a role
in the innovation journey –
commercially, politically, culturally
– and will compulsively syndicate
their experience
“Consumers are so acutely aware of
how media narratives themselves
operate, and of how their own
behavior fits into these narratives,
that their awareness feeds back
almost immediately into their
consumption itself.”
Bill Wasik,
Senior Editor, Harper’s
Magazine
The Sovereign Consumer doesn’t
necessarily think
digital connectivity = engagement
Tim Milne,
Creator Artomatic
and Matterbox
The Sovereign Consumer harbors
ambivalence towards open-source culture
because it requires the surrender of
privacy
Paul Virilio,
Cultural Theorist
The Sovereign Consumer lives life on
a spatial continuum that provides joy
rides into a remixed past, an
augmented now and a future that’s
been forwarded-by-a-friend
Tim Stock,
Managing Director,
ScenarioDNA
John Smart,
Founder, Acceleration Studies
Foundation
“Privacy is
expensive and
publicity is
cheap.”
Sam Lessin,
CEO, drop.io
KEMO,
Brand Revoltants
Raised on a steady diet of samples,
schwag, loyalty points and file
sharing ; The Sovereign Consumer is
pushing business into freemium models
Umair Haque,
Director, Havas Media Lab
On the shelf or in a landfill,
The Sovereign Consumer’s
impression of a brand is
holistically defined
“Let’s be honest. Design,
like marketing, is about
driving mass consumption, and
anything produced on a mass
scale contributes to
pollution and global
warming.”
Hartmut Esllinger
Founder, frog design
Opening doors of unknown
consequence, The Sovereign
Consumer invites symbiosis with
myth and machine
Edward O. Wilson
Biologist
The Sovereign Consumer is no
anarchist, as government provided
security and regulation are thought
necessary for a reasonably prosperous
and peaceful co-existence
“You’ll have lower
prices under
deregulation than
you will through
regulation”
Kenneth Lay,
Former CEO, Enron
“If it's a choice
between listening
to a teacher
lecture about
what's happening in
Darfur or playing
Darfur is Dying,
the serious game
wins hands down.”
Anastasia,
YPulse Blogger
Philip Boxer
Systems Researcher,
Carnegie Mellon University
Connection planning, over
media planning
It should be the goal of every company
to wane themselves off of paid-media and
re-direct those funds into product
innovation, customer service and
dialogue-intended outreach
“I'm convinced fat media
budgets help make people
lazy, and we've thought
about [whether we] should
cut media budgets on some
specific projects in order
to force people to come up
with ideas."
Simon Clift,
CMO Unilever
Interpret the never ending trail
of consumer-generated artifacts
Decode the stream of photos, videos,
songs, projections, gestures,
presentations, drawings etc. – to have
the broadest understanding of how your
brand is trafficked
“The right to use copyrighted
materials freely without payment
or permission for purposes such
as criticism, comment, news
reporting, teaching, scholarship
and research”
Copyright Act
of 1976,
Section 107
Don’t think that just because
someone bought your product that
they are part of your community
People cohort around mutual interests,
not brands – utilize permission-based
social graphs as intelligence filters to
deliver increasingly relevant value to
your customers
“The community begins to take
on its own branding power: it
begins to assume the
“certification” aspects of
branding that reassure buyers
that their purchase is likely
to be one they will be
satisfied with.”
Dan Wieden,
Co-Founder Wieden & Kennedy
Don’t perpetuate hype unless
your company truly believes it
to be true
Is it really “new and improved”?
Is the product really “the choice of a
new generation?” Are you really
powering “the human network”?
Matthew Stuart,
Author
Take privacy seriously
There’s a fine line between market
research and surveillance:
always get permission to collect data,
always provide co-ownership/access to
personal data,
set reasonable expiration dates on
personal data
“The Sovereign Consumer is
quickly morphing into the
Evasive Consumer.”
Keith Gerr,
Author of this
presentation
Thanks