Price: £45 - £65 (depending on research)
Keywords: consumers, producers, consumption
When consumers take centre stage
Take this from an online marketing pro: the most contagious marketing messages are those that play on the absence of their originators in some way or other. Humans are fascinated by the miraculous. The experience economy is all about satisfying this type of curiosity.
Consumers from around the world are clubbing together, investigating how products are made in order to become involved in these processes. It's incredibly fun and has made producers go back to the drawing board. Literally. Instead of just handing over your cash and carting your shopping home, helping make the products you buy is an adventure. Some people refer to it as crowd sourcing. The trend heralds the end of manufacturers' domination of the consumer market. But the manufacturers cleverly play into the hype. By giving the masses what they want. Consumers are now actively involved in helping design the products they order. It adds unforgettable life experiences to shopping.
It kind of started in the music industry. One example of a very succesful crowdpowered way of creating what the masses want is Eventful.com. It’s a platform where people list their wishes for artist performances. At a certain level of demand, the performance takes place. It’s as simple as that! Eventful is incredibly viral and runs over 125,000 demanded events on normal days.
Trendspotting.com, a Dutch consultancy, has reviewed its business model and believes that Eventful “Should help persuade well known artists to now and then change their regular touring schedule, and should definitely create a long tail-style bonanza for niche audiences, and thus niche artists, niche events and niche performances.”
We've come a long way. Before the onset of the internet era consumers were completely invisible apart from in marketing equasions and government statistics. To understand how and why this is changing is important. Just like the nation state, or city communities, consumers have been hypothetical entities, surrounded by vagueness more than anything else.
The social scientist Ernest Gellner already said it. Groups of people of any sizeable proportion exist mostly in our heads when he pointed out that a nation is an ‘imagined’ political community. It is impossible for members of even the smallest nation to ever know all of their fellow citizens, but nevertheless, in the minds of each lives the image of the community. Gellner even went as far as to say ‘Nationalism is not the awakening of nations to self-consciousness; it invents nations where they do not exist’, a statement which when the late Margaret Thatcher repeated it sounded a bit unfriendly to some.
Take a bunch of people that take an active part in creating something that did not exist before. How do they do that? They vote. Which, in the case of a venture like Sellaband, leads to concrete products. Sellaband links fans to bands and enables the both of them to create the music that’s wanted. If a band is popular but has not yet produced a record, fans, dubbed ‘believers’, buy a share, dubbed a ‘part’, in the band. Once the band has sold 5,000 parts, SellaBand arranges a professional recording, including top studios, A&R managers and producers.
The first band to win was Nemesea, from tiny Netherlands. The concept is not new in the music world, where fans of course have a long tradition of building close relationships with their beloved manufacturers of music. The group Marillion for instance recorded one of its first albums from donated cash.
It's developments like this in the consumer story that are beginning to overturn if not the reality, then at least the essence of the views of people like Gellner. It’s by Imagining the future and taking bets on what is going to be popular that consumers themselves materialize.
