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10.31.2003

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Patchwork Consumption: 12 Principles For Understanding Consumer Lifestyle Crafting

We see today's consumer as a patchwork quilter, one who constantly updates her quilt to reflect altering lifestyle commitments. These quilts capture, in woven assemblages of patches, the passions, goals, language, purchasing strategies, products and brands that support specific niche lifestyles

Today's consumers interweave multiple niche lifestyles, or theme-oriented ways of living, into their everyday routines. In many cases, these elaborated hobbies/amateur fields of interest coexist along with a general, or foundational, lifestyle. The latter is defined largely by our choice of work, natal family influences, residual social class orientations (also learned very young) and our manner of formal/informal education. And it includes a whole host of consumer habits that most likely do not respond to niche lifestyle marketing approaches (e.g., are you still using the same brand of toothpaste your Mom bought you in high school?) In other cases, niche lifestyles quickly become part of our foundational lifestyle orientation. For example, organic foods eaten for long-term health may begin as a small element of a consumer's overall behavioral pattern but can quickly become foundational over time. These are what we call highly adaptable niche lifestyles. Companies that serve these lifestyle orientations honestly can expect mainstream success, though not overnight.
Over the consumer's life course, some niche lifestyles become slowly forsaken, some are relegated to the past (yet influence the present through memory), while others are added in an ever-unfolding creative process. Companies can not expect long-term loyalty if, for example, their products are consumed only within the framework of a niche lifestyle with many cultural barriers to participation. Examples of lifestyles likely to be abandoned in this way might include lifecycle-related hobbies (cartoon trading cards among pre-adolescent boys) or lifestyles involving physical endangerment, such as mountain biking. The former loses influence with transition to adulthood and the latter may weaken after having kids and an increased feeling of social responsibility takes over. Long-term loyalty is best achieved when products become part and parcel of highly adaptable lifestyles, such as eating organics. Whatever the initial trigger, organic foods easily become socially reinforced within an everyday cultural activity: eating.
Within each lifestyle, consumers play various roles supported by brands, products and shared behavioral patterns of consumption. Consumer goods are like props or costumes for most of us. They help us play certain lifestyle roles in our daily lives. Would anyone believe your claim to be an avid mountain hiker, if you showed up at a trailhead wearing tennis shoes and an ankle brace? We doubt it. You need the right shoe on your foot to play the role convincingly. Brands and products absorbed into niche lifestyle communities facilitate highly dramatic forms of social play that may not last long in a consumer's life but may draw large sums from their wallets as long as they do. Price insensitivity is common within these niche lifestyles, especially after consumers get over their sense of being novices and develop more intense social commitments to the communities generated within them. For example, the sticker shock most entry-level mountain bikers experience often rapidly (even with a few months) becomes replaced by a view that, say, investing a $1,000+ a year into one's bike is simply necessary.
Consumers shift into a lifestyle role when they enter specific social settings or occasions. When they leave those occasions, they may consume very differently. Context is everything. This is not the sign of a multiple personality disorder but rather the very playful heart of 21st century living in a time beyond monolithic lifestyle traditions (even for those who claim to be reviving tradition). This is why traditional segmentation based on age, income and zip code are poor predictors of most consumption patterns. This kind of data rests on misplaced assumptions of a uniform lifecycle and foundational lifestyle among the consumers it neatly divides into spreadsheet boxes.
These roles vary according to the intensity of consumers' commitment to specific lifestyles. At The Hartman Group, our world model captures this concept and allows companies to plot their brands and products within lifestyle-specific landscapes of commitment, from the periphery to the core. This is a fancy way of reminding ourselves that not everyone in a lifestyle is really as "into it" as its cutting-edge leaders (the core) are. But the dabblers (the periphery) also buy stuff and shouldn't be ignored.
How people consume products, brands and services within a lifestyle varies according to the relative intensity of the role they currently play within it. This variation is best captured in what we call dimensions of consumption. They could be anything from price, convenience, product durability, whatever best captures the shared, learned mindset of consumers buying things to support their role in that specific lifestyle. What's often confusing is that the same consumer may care a lot about price when buying his toothpaste but not when shopping for mountain bike parts. There's no such thing as a consumer who is universally "cheap." Know the lifestyle you want to market to well, and you can avoid pitching the wrong argument for buying your product or service.
Companies in a variety of industries need to understand the dimensions of consumption that will reach various kinds of roles within the lifestyle or lifestyles that incorporate their brands, products, services. Marketing to novices is different than marketing to the core of a lifestyle community. Most companies marketing to niche lifestyle communities only know the latter's perspective. They bank on the fact that the newbies aspire to the same values and goals as the core. They're wrong. Marketing efforts banking on core knowledge alone will surely alienate a potential mainstream market. The more idealistic a company or brand is, the more difficult it is to let go.
Lifestyles are as much about emotion, shared expectations/desires and learned behaviors as they are about rational, strategic, goal-oriented thinking. Passion and logic aren't mutually exclusive. This is mainstream marketing's oldest error. After all, what else does the phrase "winning your love" mean other than some one logically, strategically pursuing their desire? Logical thoughts and the deeds they inspire live embedded in arbitrary passions...and these are the soul of all niche lifestyles. The key is to understand how consumers assemble purchasing strategies to pursue their lifestyle desires, whether logical or illogical. Learning these purchase strategies will make your communications resonate well with just the right consumers for your products.
Consumers want to buy into brands that foster and support the lifestyle-oriented communities they value. They want to interface with companies at the level of interpersonal relationships. This means several things. 1) Consumers want to know producers more intimately. They prefer that the companies they buy lifestyle-oriented products from be founded by people who share that lifestyle interest. When this is the case, marketing efforts become more likely friendly advice from a peer than weak hype from people who don't really care about the products they sell. 2) Consumers also want to meet their lifestyle peers within retail environments. No sales reps or bored college kids allowed.
Consumers actively market brands within their own lifestyle-oriented social networks. This is much more effective than conventional marketing tools such as advertising. Consumers may hate direct mail, aggressive ad campaigns and the cold veneer of big business, but that doesn't mean they hate consumer capitalism itself. What consumers want are companies that get them what they need. What they don't want is companies telling them what they need or seducing them into seeing a luxury as a burning necessity. Products that support the enjoyment of niche lifestyles avoid this nasty confrontation altogether. They have easy buy-in as necessities, if they are marketed directly through consumers' social networks.
Retail experiences are a focal point of any brand's community building efforts and need to resonate with the language and shared behaviors of specific lifestyles. Lifestyle-specific retail environments need to capture the playfulness and the passion of the very lifestyle itself. Again, staff need to be participants in the lifestyle, not leering sales grunts.
Companies, where possible, should speak in the colloquial language of real human communities. Neither stilted ad copy nor grammar school language will do. Companies need to mix colloquial language and the relevant technical slang of niche lifestyles themselves into their packaging. Earn your consumers' respect by doing your homework.

The consumer as a patchwork quilter captures the complexity people are adding to their everyday lives primarily through their amateur ventures, their niche lifestyle behaviors. Consumers find these patches within their social networks, the single greatest influencer of their purchasing decisions. As certain niche lifestyles become abandoned, relevant portions of a consumer's quilt become fixed, relegated to memory, nostalgia and storytelling. The most active areas connect directly to the lifestyle orientations consumers share with others in their current social networks. These are marketing hot spots.

The overarching lesson this metaphor teaches us is that, in many cases, it is critical to create products and retail environments that are complementary patches on a consumer's quilt, that fit well into one or more lifestyle sections on it. What no longer matters is the quilter herself as a demographic data point. Age, income, weight, zip code won't tell you which consumer quilts your product and brand will look good on.

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