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02.06.2008

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UNDERSTANDING THE CONSUMER REDEFINITION OF QUALITY

Quality is undergoing a makeover. Premium Experiences: Understanding the Consumer Redefinition of Quality focuses on documenting how consumers define premium products.

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For part 1 and 2 of this 3 part series, click here...

01.23.2008 When the "Third Place" Isn't a Special Place

01.30.2008 Pouring Heart back into Starbucks READMORE...

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09.23.2004 Asian Dinner Mixes & the Family Meal: Evolving Food Culture

08.05.2004 Snacking Our Way Through the Day: Food Culture in America

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Understanding Consumer Culture

What Do We Mean By “Culture”?

The best consumer insights arise with one foot anchored in the past, the other treading curiously around the fringes and boundaries of emerging culture. Contemporary consumers have been infatuated with authentic, high-quality experiences with few boundaries. Starbucks once reigned supreme as the iconoclast of consumer culture; Apple, thanks in no small part to iPod, now is the epitome of consumer culture.

Yet, thinking of culture in terms of some nostalgic clinging to the past where America was once a big melting pot of immigrants would not be the best way to target consumers within contemporary society. Companies and government need to think well beyond the individual or the demographic segment as the target of their efforts. Unfortunately, many product development, marketing and policy efforts fail to grasp that coursing through us all are subtle forces of shared motivation and inhibition that none of us completely control.

Bundled together, these forces act through us as “culture.” But, what is “culture”?

For starters, it ain’t fine arts class. The English word “culture,” in the singular, used to refer solely to the high arts patronized by the wealthy elite (opera, theater, etc.). While that might be a useful definition for designing art museums, it doesn’t help understand consumer behavior and how that behavior translates to purchase.

Our dictionaries, at least, have accepted the word “culture” in the spirit of 19th century German romantic philosophers who reveled in the quaint customs and beliefs of pre-modern, largely rural communal life. This is more the spirit in which we look at the world. Culture, for us, is an abstraction that describes the powerful forces patterning social behavior beyond complete individual control. It is about the mechanics of everyday life.

Why Does Culture Matter?

Culture generally explains most failed products, services and public policy efforts. Conventional wisdom in both business and public policy, would suggest that failed efforts to engage the consumer are primarily a matter of poor communications, poor dissemination or some combination of the two. If consumers aren’t resonating with it (whatever “it” happens to be) then the problem is largely about: 1) awareness, or 2) ignorance of the benefits, or 3) BOTH. The solution is basically better marketing; get the message right about a product, service or public health plan and people will respond.

Culture is the key to understanding the unmet needs that actually matter.

Just because someone can make it or envision it, does not mean anyone needs it or would want it. Deep cultural insights about a domain of activity are the best analytical tool we know of to separate out real unmet needs from those invented for the sake of inventing.

Case in point: Self-guided, robotic vacuums do not meet an unmet need in the culture. The majority of consumers do not have a problem with doing the vacuuming themselves; they do have a problem with vacuums that just do not work. Look at how both Dyson and Miele have entered the market to command immense premiums by simply making products that offer excellent function in a category historically plagued by inefficiency, endless repairs and nuisances.

When pressed, most of us accept the notion that we live in collective social worlds where some shared rules apply that limit our freedom of choice to do exactly whatever we want to do and where some patterns in routine behavior clearly exist. But we often feel that only “other” people really have cultural limits on their behavior and thinking. We tend to view “culture” as optional for ourselves. The constraining power of culture is always easier to see in foreign worlds than it is at home. This is why the well-traveled, i.e., those who immerse themselves in the worlds to which they travel, often return to become powerful social critics. They return acutely aware of the collective forces of constraint that limit or support possibilities for self-improvement, happiness, self-expression, etc. Studying culture is about cultivating a self-aware mode of perception that helps make better sense of what we can see all around us in the human environment.

Shift From Traditional Culture to Consumer Culture

Today, the market is our culture — a consumer culture. Old mass-era symbols are no longer relevant. Consumer culture is rooted in everyday lifestyles and has little to do with where or how people grew up. Marketers would be looking in the wrong place if they are examining solely the cultures in which consumers grew up in to predict how they can connect with consumers in the future. Consumer culture extends far beyond heritage and country of origin.

When we speak of “traditional culture,” we are referring to a society regulated by pre-modern, pre-market authority structures. That sounds high-minded, but what we are referring to here are societies regulated strongly by family structures, family roles, class hierarchies, social hierarchies and the like.

While the transition is by no means complete, our current epoch is approaching a fully developed consumer society more rapidly than even most academics could have predicted. In today’s modern culture, consumers are increasingly freed from the vast and powerful constraints of traditional authority structures to pursue a life — and express themselves — in ways previously unimagined.

Imagining Something Better: The Reimagined Culture

We find consumers will increasingly seek to transform simple, routine practices into full-fledged social rituals. This impulse to transform ordinary practices into elaborate social occasions is part of something we call “reimagined culture.”

Reimagined culture allows consumers to recapture cherished elements of traditional culture — from the not-too-distant past — and refashion them into an entirely new, much more engaging experience.

Imagine this: In a reimagined culure, consumers now reenact the traditional Sunday meal of the humble farmer, procuring fresh ingredients only on the day they are to be consumed and only when in season. We now relish in the opportunity to dine as we imagine our humble ancestors did — or at least we think they did.

Make no mistake, the pursuit of reimagined culture is at work, in some cases serious work. But it is important to recognize that for consumers infatuated with authentic, high-quality food experiences, this work is not a problem waiting to be solved by clever marketers. For these consumers, the “work” is the whole point.

Perhaps the most important takeaway here is this: What will happen when, as our data suggest, what was once a Sunday-only thing spreads to Monday?

And what happens when Sunday and Monday become Tuesday…

The writing, they say, is on the wall.

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