home : hartbeat : seeing-the-future-seeing-what-there-part-two

04.12.2002

“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.

PART I
Click here for Part I of "Seeing the Future, Seeing What's There,"

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.

Archives »
Click here for an archive of past HartBeat articles

digg
del.icio.us

reddit
twitter

friendfeed

StumbleUpon

Seeing The Future; Seeing What's There - Part Two

SECTION ONE. Change is consumer driven.

Even if everyone, including the consumers, are confused about it, the market is still always driven by what people want, and now more than ever what people want is what drives things - it's not what the church wants, not what the government wants, not what the business and media establishments want. Sure, these institutions influence people's thinking and values, but more than at any time previously in history, there is no single major institutional force that shapes the culture. Individuals have a power and freedom to shape their lives that is unprecedented. They make their choices by moving in and out of many lifestyle worlds. In doing so they shape their individual worlds as they see fit.

So we are seeing on the one hand a diversity of social or sub-cultural groupings, and on the other hand, individuals who for the most part don't live in any one of them exclusively. They shape their individual lifestyles by picking and choosing from a diversity of lifestyle possibilities, and yet when they participate in any given lifestyle, they usually follow the rules or the codes that shape that particular lifestyle subculture.

This essential insight has led us to understand that you reach consumers not by expecting them to act consistently in all areas of their life, but by understanding the logic or the code of a particular lifestyle world, because at least while they participate in that world, they will follow the code as it has been formulated for that world. We want here to emphasize that you market to the world, not to the individual consumer or to groups of individuals aggregated according to demographic or other criteria.

We are, for instance, sympathetic with much of the work that Paul Ray has done concerning "Cultural Creatives." But we don't think that it's useful to think about them as a particular, well-defined market segment. Hardly anyone lives a consistent lifestyle that is shaped by the attitudes that Ray describes as typical for the Cultural Creative. But almost everybody is influenced and attracted to different parts of the cultural movement that is creating the attitudes that Ray describes. We think that this movement is driven by a deep cultural longing to find a more "soulful" way of living. We want to emphasize here, though, that we don't talk about "soul types," because we think almost everyone wants a lifestyle that is more soulful - including the Traditionalists and Moderns that Ray dismisses, because as few of them are as consistent in their attitudes and behaviors as we think the Cultural Creatives are. We think that if you understand the real character of the desire, that is the deep-seated, culture-wide longing that is driving this cultural trend, it transcends the professed attitudes of any particular segment of the population.

Everybody wanders in and out of the new lifestyle worlds being developed in response to the longing for soul; some are just more conscious of their reasons for doing so, and those are the people Ray calls Cultural Creatives. For this reason, we think that this "soul-oriented" market is much bigger than Ray's work would indicate. We designed the Hartman Model, therefore, as a tool to more effectively understand how the marketplace works and to more effectively support companies in their development of market strategies that target a wide variety of consumers who will be attracted into what we describe as lifestyle worlds.

SECTION TWO. New Methods for the New Consumer.
We have come to believe that the old market segmentation method is not as effective as our world model because market segments are lifeless computer abstractions, which lack soul. Cultures are living organisms, and if you want to understand how a living organism operates, you have to develop what we call "soul sense." We think that the best way to understand a culture, however big or small, is to think of it as a kind of group soul.

This is not the way we're accustomed to think. But if we think of "soul" as the animating force that gives an individual life and identity, it's not that hard to see soul as a kind of social energy field that can animate a group in a way similar to the way it animates an individual. It's not unusual to hear of someone talking about the French soul, or the American spirit. We think these common phrases are more than just fanciful uses of language. They really point to something, and we need to understand it better, especially since it is a dynamic element - it's something that moves and changes and shapes our life as a people, as a culture. And the difference now is that the American soul is not one easily identifiable thing. It is rather a tissue of interdependent subcultures in and out of which people migrate. If you understand the soul logic that shapes this variety of subcultures, you can understand the logic of lifestyle consumption patterns.

So in order to understand the changing marketplace, we need to understand the changing culture, and that means mapping the American soul, and the spirit of the times that is shaping it.

* * *

I've often wondered what makes a true visionary, and the more I've thought about it, the more clear it has become to me that it's not being a dreamer, or even having some kind of clairvoyance. It's the ability to see clearly what's in front of you right now. Being a visionary means having vision, and all that having vision means, really, is that you can see clearly, and that's not so easy to do. The biggest problem, of course, lies in not seeing what's really there but instead seeing what you are used to seeing or what you want to see. But if you really see what's there, and understand the potential of what's there, then you can begin to understand how what's there, if properly cultivated, will grow into the future.

I don't necessarily think I have great vision, but I've paid attention to the marketplace. For more than ten years now I've been paying attention, and I've striven to find better instruments to help us see more clearly what is going on in the natural products and wellness marketplace. One of the key insights I've brought away from this constant attempt to see and understand the American consumer more clearly is that the consumer is not primarily driven by rational economic motives. And this is what has led me and everyone at The Hartman Group to a tremendous appreciation of and fascination with the logic of the irrational forces driving the lifestyle marketplace.

Stay tuned for next week's issue: "Get with the Program: The Changing Face of Retailing"...

Comment »