You can see the trend in supermarkets everywhere—moms in aisles probing deeper and deeper into product labels. Knowing where something comes from and what it’s about is increasingly important to consumers. And a new survey says people are now more than willing to do the detective work to figure it all out.
Weber Shandwick recently surveyed consumers and business execs in the U.S., U.K., China, and Brazil and found that 70% of respondents stay away from a product if they don’t like its parent company. What’s more, transparency has become a necessity. 56% hesitate to buy a product if they can’t find information about the corporation behind it.
Though consumers and executives both agree that social and environmental responsibility are important talking points, consumers are also becoming quicker to point out the cognitive dissonances between what a brand says and what their parent corporation does.
A Fast Company story on the research singles out Kashi’s problems relating to its parent Kellogg: “One of the ingredients in Kellogg’s FiberPlus Berry Yogurt Crunch—the preservative BHT—gets a thumbs-down from Kashi’s Ingredient Decoder tool.” Can’t you just see your mom’s disapproving nod?
As customers, communities, and shareholders use new criteria to make their judgements, companies that are seen as irresponsible or creating products without purpose will get punished. And companies that get it right will get rewarded. Havas media documented that more than half of all consumers worldwide are prepared to reward responsible companies by choosing to buy their products—and that percentage keeps rising.
Of course, this reveals a huge opportunity for brands to distinguish themselves. Only 28% of consumers worldwide think that today’s companies are working hard enough to solve our social and environmental challenges.
How and where will businesses find responsible growth? Game Changers, an upcoming Wolff Olins report, looks at this issue from companies’ perspectives and highlights the key behaviors that are now shaping the future of business.
Which high-growth companies are stepping up to distinguish themselves by being both commercially and socially minded?
What will happen to brands that don’t innovate to create new value?
More to come. Stay tuned for Game Changers, coming soon to WolffOlins.com.
(This is the first in a monthly series of trend posts by WONY StrategistEmily Segal. You’ll see Wolff Olins’ established macrotrends called out with a hashtag.)
#The Internet of Things
What it is:
Bruce Sterling, cyberpunk fiction writer and prophet of the #Internet of Things, coined the portmanteau “Spime” in 2004, as a thought experiment.
“In July, Mexico’s attorney general became a smart object. Rafael Macedo de la Concha had an RFID chip implanted in his arm that can track and authenticate him…Of course, it’s his brain that makes him smart. It’s the chip that makes him an object: cataloged, searchable, and locatable in space and time. The same kind of upgrade is happening to brainless devices, tools, toys, and doodads all around us, creating a world that is Googleable. Ordinary items are being embedded with rudimentary communications and tied to databases….The future product that embodies these developments will be so radically different from today’s that it will need an entirely new name. So let’s give it one. Because it’s tracked precisely in space and time, let’s call it a spime.”
Now, just a few years later, the formerly science fiction vision of a ubiquitous network through which everyday objects embedded with chips, sensors, and “smarts”communicate information by themselves – is becoming an inexpensive mainstream reality.
According to a 2011 Cisco study, the number of devices connected to the internet last year outnumbered people on earth in 2008. Among these devices are the #Internet of Things – not Kindle Fires but microwaves, jewelry, and livestock that communicate autonomously, without human intervention. The way this is heading is the creation of ambient intelligence through mapping, tagging, and data gathering of regular stuff.
McKinsey describes the range of networked objects: “Pill-shaped microcameras already traverse the human digestive tract and send back thousands of images to pinpoint sources of illness. Precision farming equipment with wireless links to data collected from remote satellites and ground sensors can take into account crop conditions and adjust the way each individual part of a field is farmed—for instance, by spreading extra fertilizer on areas that need more nutrients.”
Examples:
The recently launched Twine is a little internet-connected box with censors for moisture, temperature, and vibration, with a dead-simple interface that lets you set it to text, email, or tweet you whenever it notices that your dog bowl is dry, your dryer’s stopped vibrating, your pipes are about to freeze (or whatever your heart desires).
WHEN current rises above 1A for 90 minutes THEN email “The kids have watched enough TV today.”
WHEN Bedside Lamp is turned off THEN tweet “Goodnight, John-Boy.”
Designed by MIT Media Lab alums David Carr and John Kestner, the Twine was a Kickstarter superstar, raising $556,541 on a $35,000 goal (the third largest Kickstarter campaign ever).
At $99 and built to be hacked/customized, it’s a bellwether of the #Internet of Things to come.
Twine also engages the trend #QuantifyMe: consumer hunger for metrics, dashboards, and data about their personal activities. As Nanveet Alang writes in a piece on Twine in the Toronto Standard: “I’d love to have a record of how many times I opened the fridge in the last two weeks of December (my guess: 9000).”
CES was teeming with new products that are part of this trend (though many of which seem woefully specific when compared to Twine):
·Samsung is offering awashing machine and dryerwhich is Wi-Fi enabled and can be controlled from inside or outside your home.
·Xperia SmartTagsareNFCchips that you can stick throughout your home and program with different actions and settings. When you enter the room and tap your phone to the SmartTags, your phone will automatically adjust to the profile you created.
What does this mean for business?
·New metrics: being able to instantly answer how many people laid on a particular mattress at Sleepy’s, as compared to how many people bought it, mean that engagement measurement can get a lot more granular, if not straight-up invasive
·New semantic search engines: ease for customers looking for particular objects, the next step in the vein of apps like Aisle411
·New accountability: “Hackers, activists, advocates, competitors, designers – all of us – can query the data-stream to find out what, for example, happens to the high-impact rubber on our sneakers’ soles at the end of their life – are they being recycled into schoolyard playgrounds or are they becoming aerosol carcinogens?”
How the game will change in the year ahead – our predictions, with links!
1. Profit from me > Pay me
As consumers’ engagement – even more than their money – becomes even more intensely coveted by brands, consumers will demand compensation, monetary or otherwise. The cat’s out of the bag: consumers have an ever-increasing suspicion of targeted online marketing and a sharp awareness that their participation is a crucial commodity for brands.
The age-old spaces of marketing, like bus stop shelters, will make way for interactive, shoppable walls, screens, and codes, as urban transit will develop into a key “3rd place” for retail. “Urban culture is retail culture”: as urbanization explodes globally, and shopping becomes increasingly ambient, mobility and retail will converge, with both consumers and shops on the move.
Groupon’s a funky brand - kind of - but is ‘collaborative consumption’ a new idea, or is it just a fashionable fad. The idea of collective bargaining has been around since – oh – at least 1834 and the Tolpuddle Martyrs so can we please, please get over it. And why are these “trends” always alliterative? And why are we taken in by them? ‘Conscious consumerism’ as opposed to what exactly?
“I’ve got the brains, you’ve got the looks, let’s make lots of money”
Is collaboration better than competition? I think it probably is when taken as a fundamental business operating system i.e. when brands that share a common belief get together to explore new opportunities together.
What we mean by collaboration as an operating model is a root and branch rethink of the way business actually works – away from a market share driven approach to something based around share of wallet.
Old school thinking:
Define a competitive position and defend it
Grow by increasing market share i.e. selling what you do to more people
Keep resources such as smarts, technology, talent to yourself (see them as a source of competitive advantage)
New school:
Define the role you play in people’s lives and seek out others who share that role
Grow by increasing share of wallet i.e. extend what you do in order to meet the needs of your constituents
Share resources with other like minded organisations who share the same belief system – who share your aims
Adidas + 2012 not Ebay + Skype Bono + RED not Will.I.am + Intel Tata Docomo not Nokia Microsoft
Maybe it’s a new way to think about collaboration – a match based on belief rather than capability. A union based on love rather than convenience?
IFTTT is a free new service that automates the internet for you. Building custom triggers upon existing channels like Facebook, Twitter, Craigslist, Google Reader, Email, Instapaper, Flickr, etc., one can create new automated commands to accommodate all kinds of needs. Some liken the system to the way Lego blocks work, while Linden Tibbets, Founder, likes to think of it as “digital duct tape if you will,” since it’s neither a programming language, nor a fancy new app building tool. It capitalizes on the capabilities of existing services and networks and combines them in original and unexpected ways. Basically, be your own online digital MacGyver.
For instance, you can call the service from your phone or Google Voice account and leave a message that will be transcribed into text and posted to your Twitter account. This can be accomplished via SMS too, although it’s available only in the US for now. IFTTT doesn’t target social media specifically. Can’t seem to remember your girlfriend’s birthday? Set up a trigger to send you a text message on that day to remind you. Or have the service send your workaholic friend a tweet at noon every day saying”remember to eat,“ so that…you know, they don’t forget to eat lunch.
With the internet already spawning many new ways of speaking, IFTTT further extends this continually growing relationship between communication and technology. Even the IFTTT Ideas blog (a blog where users can share new tasks generated through IFTTT) begins to speak a strange kind of internet generated programmer poetry of its own.
We’ve come a long way from Angela Bennett ordering pizza from her PC. Over a year ago, I was walking up Polk Street in San Francisco with my good friend Jesse Tane, now co-founder of IFTTT, as he explained to me Tibbet’s idea of a project still in its primordial state. From my vague recollection it was something along the notion of tagging (in a digital sense) everything you own and being able to access it through the web. I probably nodded my head and said, “Hmmm, interesting.” Suffice to say, my little brain didn’t have to go far beyond the idea of “everything on the internet” before it stopped working. But with more people (and “things” in general, devices, etc.) becoming part of the internet, you can envision a time not far away when the core idea of IFTTT is just a part of every day life. Having a hard time waking up during the dark winter mornings? Just make sure your web-enabled bedside lamp is synced with local weather feeds so it can turn on gradually and simulate sunrise at the right time. Left the air conditioner on during a hot summer day with no one home? What about logging in to your house with your smart phone, and turn down the internet-equipped thermostat? Everything on the internet. The internet on everything.
IFTTT is still in private beta right now, with many more invites going out every day. It is a fun thing to play around with, if you can get your hands on an invite. Now if only there was an easier way to say “IFTTT”…
Collaborative consumption describes the rapid explosion in swapping, sharing, bartering, trading and renting being reinvented through the latest technologies and peer-to-peer marketplaces in ways and on a scale never possible before.
The movement, pioneered by Rachel Botsman and Roo Rogers, came to notoriety through the book, What’s Mine Is Yours.
From DVDs to cars, collaborative consumption is redefining the concept of ownership. It is a profoundly important movement, marking a huge shift in the way people interact with brands and products but more importantly, how they interact with their own neighbourhood.
Rachel Botsman is giving a talk at the RSA in London today on ‘The Rise of Collaborative Consumption’ and Wolff Olins will be attending, so watch out for our live tweets on the @WolffOlins twitter feed.
To whet your appetite ahead of the main event, we thought we’d share three great examples of collaborative organisations:
The People’s Supermarket
This London cooperative is challenging the might of the big chain retailers that dominate the British retail space. In return for volunteering to work in the shop for 4 hours a month, members of the People’s Supermarket get a 20% discount in the store. So far there’s only one location on Lambs Conduit St but it’s a huge step in the right direction – providing honest, quality food at a reasonable price and fostering a community of like-minded shoppers in central London. Last month, The People’s Supermarket celebrated its 400th member and continues to grow.
Most urban dwellers are familiar with member car sharing services such as Streetcar and Zipcar, but few people are aware of brands like Whipcar.
Unlike Streetcar, which uses its own fleet of vehicles, Whipcar simply provides the infrastructure support to book, insure and pay for rental, but the vehicles belong to other Whipcar members.
Owners can set the rental price and availability of their car and make money from a vehicle that might usually be parked unused on a street for long periods. Renters get to choose from a wide variety of vehicles of makes, models, colours and sizes. What’s more, Whipcar is also a lot more personal than other car sharing services as you actually meet the car owner before you rent.
Why spend $100 on a power tool you only use for 10 minutes a year? Whether it’s power tools, baby toys, deckchairs, vacuum cleaners - almost anything can be rented or borrowed from people on NeighborGoods. Just type in your postal code and list items you want to rent or answer requests from those looking for specific items.
Back in the days when I was running a jeans business, every 6 months we would take part in trade shows.This was where you would ‘set out your stall’ and all of the cool stores would come and place their orders for next season.Our first shows ever were Coterie in New York and Project in Las Vegas.
The scale of these shows was incredible and Radcliffe was up against some of the richest denim brands in the US – opposite True Religion, who had built the equivalent of a western saloon bar, down the road Seven had recreated a Los Angeles Penthouse and Earnest Sewn I think had built an entire log cabin.Everyone had also spent a great deal on amazing models and imagery.
How wasa small British brand to compete?We had no money to build a trade stand, so instead creativity triumphed over budget.We found a beautiful photo of an English drawing room with windows looking out onto an English garden in full bloom, bathed in sunlight (we were selling spring summer).We blew this up into room size wallpaper and lined our trade stand with it, recreating effectively the drawing room of an English stately home.Anyway, it was very cheap and simple, but all the buyers were very enchanted…
I was reminded of this when I was looking at these 2 brilliant retail concepts.Both are clearly inexpensive but absolutely beautiful. The first is the Trading Museum from Comme des Garcons in Tokyo – the only shop fittings are display cabinets from the V&A – filled with CDG products.I will admit to being a bit of a display cabinet addict though…
The second pictured is a pop up from Aesop at the Merci store in Paris, in place for 1 month.Again, super simple, lots of brown boxes with Aesop on them contained within a fishing net.
Companies like to make things complicated for consumers. And when legal gets in the way of marketing, things become really complex and not consumer friendly. Think about banking for example, many banks are hindered by the profusion of legal procedures they have to follow in order to bring new products to market. Banking is one of many examples.
Unlike many other brands, Apple responded once again to consumers’ desire for simplicity. They recently introduced a summary of legal terms and conditions in plain English, helping the consumer navigate the new iTunes store (see picture). Simple, to the point, only the information you need, with words that everyone understands, Brilliant.
People need and desire simplicity. The recession is actually accelerating this trend for simplicity. Unlike consumers in previous recessions, who greeted the return of financial stability with a buying spree, current consumers entered the recession feeling bloated. When they regain their ability to spend, consumers will continue to buy simpler offerings with the greatest value. Brands that deliver simplicity will have a significant competitive advantage.
