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04.05.2002

“HartBeat” is The Hartman Group's FREE online newsletter, providing insight, analysis, information and strategy to give business leaders the knowledge and vision to build sustainable brands.

This issue of HartBeat is excerpted from the recent book by Harvey Hartman and The Hartman Group, Marketing in the Soul Age: Building Lifestyle Worlds.

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Seeing The Future; Seeing What's There

SECTION ONE. Change is consumer driven.

Everywhere you turn there's a new book coming out about how to manage inchaos, how to live in chaos, love chaos, thrive in chaos. But is chaos reallythe issue? Or is it that things may be moving meaningfully but according to alogic we do not yet understand? The movement, whatever we may eventuallyunderstand it to be, is like a big, galloping elephant. Some of us have a firmgrasp on the trunk and others on the tail, some are holding tight at its knees,and others are hanging from its ears. We all know something about it fromour different holding points, but it's moving too fast and we're too concernedwith just hanging on to have much of a sense of the beast as a whole. Wewant to talk about how this beast looks from our perspective as long-termobservers and analysts of trends in the natural products industry. We believethat what is happening in the natural products and wellness marketplaces isa very strong indicator about what is happening in the culture at large.

Our experience at The Hartman Group has led us to understand that there isone fundamental constant regardless of how chaotic and fast moving themarketplace may seem: Change in the marketplace is consumer driven. Thisshould be for most obvious, but the implications may not be. For in order forbusiness people to be proactive, they need to understand that consumers lead, and the only way to understandwhere your customers are going is to understand the forces that drive their movement.

The forces driving your customers are complex, but they come into clearer view when you stop looking at theindividual consumer as an isolated unit and start looking at him or her as participating in larger lifestyle or cultureworlds. A basic assumption that lies at the foundation is that consumers donot operate in a vacuum. They operate within the larger social context we call culture, and culture shapes lifestyle.The forces shaping lifestyle and the product worlds that serve them are the forces shaping our culture as a whole.

This has always been true, and it will always be true. But the marketing task now differs from the task as it wasunderstood in the post-war mass market of the 50s and 60s, because the culture is different. The most importantdifference is structural - it's simply no longer as homogeneous as it was then. It has broken into a wide variety ofsubcultures, and along with them, a wide variety of lifestyles. So the mass market you think you are designing yourproduct for doesn't exist. The more you understand about your customers operating in this fragmented marketplace,the clearer it becomes that there are fewer and fewer hot buttons to push that have the mass appeal that worked soeffectively in decades past.

SECTION TWO. New Methods for the New Consumer.

Our research over the past ten years has taught us that because the consumers who are driving changes in this newmarketplace are evolving, you cannot isolate and study them at a fixed point in time. The butterfly you pin in thedisplay case for examination is no longer the one that can help you, because it is dead. We are not studying lifeless,abstract consumers without faces. We are studying a living, evolving process. So our goal is to explainthe approach we have developed to better understand consumers in this fragmented culture that has generated whatwe characterize as the Lifestyle Marketplace.

We have developed a different model to help us to understand and to more effectively target consumers in thisevolving lifestyle marketplace. Our goal in this approach is, in part, to describe what's happening now. We've notabandoned the traditional market research tools that do a fair job of telling us what consumers are doing andthinking. But most consumers don't know what they will want a year from now. They're often pretty confused aboutwhat they think they want now. Consumers are just as confused about what's happening in the culture as thebusinesses that seek to serve them.

So what's happening now, as soon as it is described, is old news. In a market as dynamic as the one we areconfronting, we need to understand where things are going and to understand what's driving that movement. Aswe've already suggested, we believe that the mass market is dead, and it's being gradually replaced by a complexamalgam of highly differentiated niche markets in which businesses will succeed to the degree that they understandconsumer lifestyle preferences. It has been our business in the last decade to understand how these lifestyle factorsdrive how consumers live, where they shop and what they buy.

Our efforts to understand these factors have led us to develop what we call the Hartman Model, utilizing the worldperspective. We developed this model because our research continuously brought usup against the fact that most people don't fit neatly into traditional market segments. We saw that we needed anotherway to understand how consumers move in the marketplace, and our model works as a very powerful tool to helpmarketers envision consumers as they evolve within a given lifestyle-shaped product world.

We don't profess absolute certainty about where consumers are going, but we feel confident that we have a betterhandle on this than anyone else in this field. We offer a process, and we feel that this process is better because itgoes beyond the conventional attitudes and usage approach.

Stay tuned for Part Two of "Seeing the Future, Seeing What's There," next Friday...

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