The Sovereign Consumer

The Great Recession has made

an indelible dent on the

consumer psyche

Are you feeling better about

your economic situation

(adults 18+)?

Yes 28%

No 71%

Are you starting to spend

more on discretionary items

(adults 18+)?

Yes 17%

No 82%

Source: BIGresearch

The brand value equation has been re-

thought by all socio-economic classes

Authentic

Value

Perceived

Value

Essential

Spending

Discretionary

Spending

Frugal-shifting is on

Store

brands

In-home

entertainment

Coupon clipping

Share-swaps

Eating at

home

Stay-cations

Declaring

bankruptcy

Doing without

Barter

Under-employment

Piracy

Marketers have been put on notice

Empathy for the consumer is now

intrinsic to the brand-value

formula

“Consumers are

not walking

wallets”

Mo Morales,

Provocateur

Even luxury brands are taking notice

“Coach has begun to

rebalance its collections

so that at least 50

percent of handbag

choices will fall into

the $200 to $300 range,

compared with 30 percent

previously”

Lew Frankfurt,

CEO Coach

“It has definitely

made us all reconsider

what we’re doing, how

we’re doing it, and

who we are trying to

reach as a customer.

In a way, it has been

a reality check for

all of us.”

Vera Wang

We need to tune-in meta-factors that

influence behavior and confer context

Technology

Religion

Health

Politics

Environment

Sexuality

Education

Culture

Nationality

CommunicationsLeisure

Economy

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 Cynicalof media and brands

Network Enabledon-demand influence

Needs CommunitySeeks sharing with peers

Owns Self-

Determinationdefines value on own terms

Promotes New

Social Contractexpects responsible pursuit of

profit

Commercially Engageddefined by brands selects/rejects

Privacy Disabledpersonal data out of control

Needs Anti-Communitydefined by what isn’t

Suffers Status

Anxietyaware of place in society

Ethically

AmbivalentSelective 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

Meaningful relationships require an

investment of time, care and ability to go

analog sometimes

“I've long believed that

printed matter will gain new

value in a digital world as

everyone begins to crave the

more physical / tactile /

emotional nature of printed

stuff.”

Tim Milne,

Creator Artomatic

and Matterbox

The Sovereign Consumer harbors

ambivalence towards open-source culture

because it requires the surrender of

privacy

“We have democratized

voyeurism on a global

scale.””

Paul Virilio,

Cultural Theorist

“It doesn’t matter who

you say you are.

Meaning = process of

discovery.”

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

Pic by Benjamin Reed

“Many of us will begin to

feel naked and somewhat

stupid out in public without

the web, the way we’d feel

out in public without our

clothes today.“

John Smart,

Founder, Acceleration Studies

Foundation

“Privacy is

expensive and

publicity is

cheap.”

Sovereign Consumers decide the

degree to which they allow

themselves to become an ad-unit

Sam Lessin,

CEO, drop.io

Pic: Dan Outram

“Understanding and

appreciating the public’s

increased awareness of its

own value to the marketer

is the first step to

formulating a marketing

strategy.”

KEMO,

Brand Revoltants

Scarce Components = $$$

Raised on a steady diet of samples,

schwag, loyalty points and file

sharing ; The Sovereign Consumer is

pushing business into freemium models

Infinite Components = Attention

“The reason monetization is

a dirty word is simple. It

blinds us to value

creation, at the expense of

value capture.”

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

Designer Lifestyle Augmented Living

Brand as ProstheticBrand as Semaphore

“Evolution, including genetic

progress in human nature and

human capacity, will be from

now on increasingly the

domain of science and

technology tempered by ethics

and political choice.”

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

Through virtualization, The

Sovereign Consumer gains awareness,

but becomes desensitized to harsh

realities

“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

“I often wonder whether real

conversation in real time may

eventually give way to these

sanitized and easier screen

dialogues, in much the same way

as killing, skinning and

butchering an animal to eat has

been replaced by the

convenience of packages of meat

on the supermarket shelf.”

Baroness Greenfield, Oxford

Neuroscientist

So how can we stay in-tune with

Sovereign Consumers?

Think with the box

People can exist independent of brands –

respect the current ecology of your

audience before you mess with it

“Suppliers can no longer just

compete by providing the best

product or best solution to a

defined requirement. They must

enter the customer’s world, and

understand it as a context-of-

use that conditions the nature

of the demands that the customer

makes.”

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.”

John Hagel III,

Co-Chairman,

Deloitte Center for

the Edge

When employing graphic design,

provoke sensation exploration

“It’s only if your willing to

be completely fucked up that

you’re going to do anything

important.”

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”?

Are brands really ushering in an

idyllic tomorrow?

“Today’s new technologies are

hardly more destabilizing than

the railroad, the automobile,

the airplane, steamships,

electricity, telephones, mass

production, antibiotics and

radio were in their day.”

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

Keith Gerr, Principal

Keith@krgmarketing.com

Thanks