The new face of consumerism

The new face of consumerism is the man standing outside the office of Mercury Energy with a placard “Contract Killers,” and we had all better start getting used to it.

Disenfranchised, angry, cheated and out-for-revenge consumers are wanting and demanding more from big business. Last month it was Ribena and now it’s Mercury Energy in the firing line.

Big businesses are in the gun and they need to adopt a new approach to brand building if they are to survive.

We are now in the new age of ‘consumer centric business’ and Chief Executives need to work out how to apply that to their businesses.

This ‘global warming of consumerism’ is the result of some profound social changes: notably the breakdown of traditional communities. The impact of those changes means that the rules of brand development and management are being rewritten as we speak.

Kevin Milne of Fair Go is at the forefront of consumer advocacy. Where do businesses get it so wrong? In my experience “they just don’t take care of their customers,” he told businesses at a BrandNew seminar recently.

The problem is that companies like Mercury Energy have focused on selling a product not on providing a social service. But it is possible to get it right.

Take the coffee business. From its foundation in 1971 to 1987 Starbucks adopted a ‘product centric’ approach to its business. In sixteen years, it managed to open just six stores in Seattle.

By 1987 it adopted ‘a customer centric’ approach and over the next sixteen years grew to seven and a half thousand stores in thirty-four countries. Customers came and drank coffee and interacted at Starbucks stores. The stores didn’t sell coffee; they provided a meeting place. That was the business. It was a social service.

The new environment is no longer a place for commodities, however good the price, product, service or promotion might be.

How has this sea change come about? Fifty years ago our traditional ‘face to face’ communities started to collapse, and break apart in a spectacular fashion.

Nuclear families became solo parent families, villages were replaced by suburbs, membership in sports clubs collapsed, and church congregations fell. Almost all of our traditional ‘social-capital rich’ communities have been decimated.

The primary culprits in this ‘community destruction’ process have been, television, automotive travel, the pill and telecommunications; all wonderful inventions that have enriched our lives in so many beneficial ways.
But like all good things they come at a cost. Their combined effect has been world changing.

Television has privatised recreation and entertainment; we no longer need to get together in groups to amuse ourselves, to learn or to have fun.

Telecommunications connect us with anyone, anywhere, instantly without the need for face to face contact.

Automotive travel allows us to escape local environments and move away from people and things we don’t like, to become rootless; new age nomads.

Widespread use of the contraceptive pill means women can choose if and when to have children. They were freed to work, earn money and become independent.

Communities that for so long were life supports, communities we were born into, communities that cradled us, nurtured us, and taught us values and how to co-exist, cared for us when we got old and communities that defined who we are, are vanishing.

Five million years of evolution has gone out the window in fifty years. There are no more families, or villages or neighborhoods, at least not the way they were.

The opportunity is here right now for businesses to step into the vacuum.
Already highly successful ‘brand communities’ are blossoming; Harley Davidson, BMW, The Onslow Tarbabies, Tuis, Starbucks, Icebreaker, U-Tube and Swazi are just a few of these new brand communities.

These are brands we trust, brand communities with shared values where people connect, where we belong, brands that add value and meaning to our lives, that express who we are, what we believe in and what we stand for.

Doug Heffernan should be thinking hard about the Mercury brand and what it stands for, what value it brings to the community. How can he add value in a customer-centric manner? This approach will be more effective than any crisis management course he and his executive may undertake.

Dave Bassett is the Chief Executive of BrandNew, a brand agency in Wellington.