The Marketer Who Went Off Consumption

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The video of my talk at Interesting New York is finally up (the slides are here) –

You can see the other videos at the Interesting New York website.

Yesterday, I spoke about my off consumption experiment at the Mandala NYC “performance party” organized by my new friend David Friedlander.

Inspired by the TED conference, David organized the first Mandala NYC event in August with the intent to kick off meaningful conversations about ideas that matter in an informal, accessible, and affordable setting. Since then, David has hosted an impressive list of speakers (August, September and October) and created a small but engaged community of regular attendees. David’s next event, under its new branding — Lucid NYC — is on 20th November and, if you are in NYC, you must not miss it.

At yesterday’s well attended event, my fellow speakers were relationship coach Michael Jascz, artist Steven Hirsch (do check out his Courthouse Confessions project) and green energy enthusiast Jonathan Colby.

I once again used my story about little girls who own a hundred dolls to explain my off consumption experiment to the audience and the story is becoming a sure hit with women at conferences –

Here’s the video of the presentation –

– and here’s the slideshow –

Seth Godin offers some old-fashioned advice on how to make your own luck — go off consumption –

1. Delete 120 minutes a day of ’spare time’ from your life. This can include TV, reading the newspaper, commuting, wasting time in social networks and meetings. Up to you.

2. Spend the 120 minutes doing this instead:

- Exercise for thirty minutes.
- Read relevant non-fiction.
- Send three thank you notes.
- Learn new digital techniques.
- Volunteer.
- Blog for five minutes about something you learned.
- Give a speech once a month about something you don’t currently know a lot about.

3. Spend at least one weekend day doing absolutely nothing but being with people you love.

4. Only spend money, for one year, on things you absolutely need to get by. Save the rest, relentlessly.

Almost eighteen months back, I decided to live my life more purposefully, when I made my 30-by-30 list. Since then, I have tried to live my life on the same back-to-the-basics principles that Seth writes about. It hasn’t always been easy, and I haven’t always managed to stay on course, but these simple changes have transformed my life.

In a guest post on Drew McLellan’s blog The Marketing Minute, I talk about marketing to consumers who define themselves by their anti-consumerism –

An increasing number of consumers are rejecting their roles as consumers and refusing to define themselves by the things they buy. Instead, they are choosing to define their identities from the experiences they have, the relationships they build, and the meaning they create by expressing themselves creatively.

If you are a marketer, you can react to these trends in two ways. You can ignore them until they hit you, or you can immerse yourself in them, like I have chosen to.

After studying these trends for almost six months, I see that there is a way for brands to stay relevant, even if the seven social trends I talked about move closer to the mainstream.

Simplicity, authenticity and community are the three themes that run through the seven social trends that are changing consumption. Brands that help us clear the clutter in our lives, or enable us to have authentic experiences, or assist us in forming and connecting with communities will become the most important necessities, the only things we can’t do without.

Given that hipsterdom has been reduced to empty trend-hunting, it’s difficult to remember that the original hipsters were the original advocates of minimalistic consumption –

It’s really ironic that a subculture with a liberal/ anti-establishment/ anti-brand philosophy has transformed into become a an empty, recursive, self-referential focus group for marketers.

In Chapter 2 of ‘Hip: The History’, John Leland lays out the history of this connection between being hip and saying no to consumption —

Within hip’s juggernaut is a quest for the real, a belief that enlightenment involves stripping away sophistication, not adding it… Hip promises truth received, not constructed… This call to primitive experience resists (America’s) cult of progress. In place of status or achievement, the writers offer non-material values by which people could define themselves. This impetus — repeated by bohemians, beboppers, action painters, hippies, punks, hip-hoppers etc. — has been remarkably resilient over American history. Though we often think of these as discrete responses to the mainstream, they are really an ongoing part of what makes America American. They are not footnotes; they belong to the story. By our rebellions are we sometimes best known.

Riddhi Shah, who has earlier done two stories (1 and 2) on my off consumption experiment in Hindustan Times follows them up with a story on some other young people who are trying to find happiness by going off the work-watch-spend treadmill –

There are some really interesting stories in here, stories that tell me that I’m doing too little myself. I know one or two of these people, but I wish I had the time to know the rest of them before I left.

The Buck Stops Here

India may be in the throes of consumerism, but a growing number of young people are making a conscious effort to stay away from the high life.

By Riddi Shah, riddhi.shah@hindustantimes.com
Hindustan Times, Mumbai, Sunday, August 3, 2008

Question: But why do you need packers when you are giving everything away?

Answer: I’m moving to Washington DC for a year and I’m giving away almost everything I own to three five strangers.

Giving away my stuff, I have learned, is more, not less, work than moving it from one city to another or putting it in storage.

Moving, so far, has been a simple two step process –

- At the old house, I pack everything I need for two weeks into a bag or two to carry with myself and indiscriminately stuff everything else I own into boxes and load them into a truck.
- At the new house, I unload the boxes from the truck and transfer all my stuff straight into cupboards so that I don’t have to look at it again.

So far, I have never really had to worry about the stuff that’s in the boxes. I have never had to ask myself if I really needed it at all.

In every city I have stayed in, I have bought more stuff than I have discarded. As a result, every time I have moved, there is even more stuff in the boxes and even less incentive to sort through it.

Twenty five year old ChineseTaiwanese-American author Tao Lin is offering 60% of the US royalties of his forthcoming untitled second novel as shares (via Freakonomics) –

I am selling 6 shares (each of 10% of the U.S. royalties of my second novel) for $2000 per share. This includes all U.S. serial, reprint, textbook, and film (and other performance) royalties.

Shareholders will receive checks (and copies of the royalty statement from my publisher) in the mail every 6 months after the book’s publication (probably Fall, 2009 or Spring 2010). Shares can be resold at any price at any time, I will facilitate trading and promote it on my blog if that is what a shareholder wants.

Based on sales of my first novel I project sales of my second novel to be ~13000 after 24 months (if there isn’t more mainstream attention than with my first novel). If there is more mainstream attention sales will be “considerably higher” I think. Regardless of the amount of mainstream attention that happens I believe that in the long term sales will remain steady and that my second novel will remain in print.

I just figured out that what I’m trying to do with ‘The Marketer Who Went Off Consumption’ is Immersion Journalism or Gonjo Journalism.

Both styles of journalism involve immersing oneself in a situation and writing about the events and people involved in the experience from a deeply personal perspective. Gonzo journalism is more focused on the writer’s life, while immersion journalism is more focused on the writer’s specific experiences.

Edward Humes, Steve Weinberg and Bill Kirtz offer how-to tips on immersion journalism –

The heart and soul of narrative nonfiction is in the reporting, not the writing. But there is a danger inherent in this process: Immersing in a subject tends to generate an almost impossible amount of information, devoid of structure other than what you, the writer, impose upon it.

First, though, you have to get to the point where you have the time and luxury to think about bringing order out of chaos. You have to get there first, you have to get inside your chosen world.

There is a process I use, though I’m sure everyone who does this sort of writing has their own unique method. Mine is a bit like the five stages of grief. (Edward Humes)

I stumbled upon this trippy treatise by Lithuanian thinker Andrius Kulikauskas — An Economy for Giving Everything Away — via Chris Messina’s blog.

The first part of Kulikauskas’s treatise — before he starts talking about open-source software — is truly mind-bending, especially in context of my own experience of giving (almost) everything away.

I accept the idea that I should give everything away. The challenge is to put this into practice. This is a design problem for personal life and social economy.

Accepting that I should give everything away, I realize that it’s not clear what this exactly means. What is mine to give away? At any moment, I have some cash on my person and in my accounts. I may own a car, laptop computer, desktop computer, software, bicycle, books, hiking equipment, chairs, clothes and shoes, eyeglasses, phone cards, kitchen utensils, paper and pen, toothbrush. I have a credit line that I can draw against at a particular rate of interest. I have family, friends, and even strangers on whom I can call for help. I am employable by virtue of my connections, work experience, education, enthusiasm and helpfulness. I have citizenship and civil rights. I have my time, my health, my organs, and my life expectancy. Moreover, I have gifts of creativity, invention, thoughtfulness, playfulness, friendship, concern, love. I have a mind for cultivating and applying these gifts. I have truths of life, and a moral sense. Finally, I have a capacity for good will, a free will by which I may defer to others.