However, it was the data on brands in the blogosphere that I found most interesting.

The big revelation for me was that more than nine in ten bloggers blog about the brands that they love (or hate). I don’t remember seeing a similar statistic before (and I’ll be grateful if you share a link to a similar study with me) but this means that blogging about brands is more ubiquitous than most brand managers realize. Bloggers also write about a wide range of topics related to brands — from brand or product reviews to news or gossip about brands and their experience with store or customer support employees. It would have been interesting to get a sense of how many of these posts are positive, negative or neutral and how blogging about brands varies across geographies.

Brands are beginning to become aware of the increasing influence of bloggers and trying to engage with them. One in three bloggers has been approached to be a brand advocate and, of these, more than six in ten were offered payments of some kind. These numbers also seem very high to me.

For more details, read the report or read a nice summary of the top five statistics from the report from the perspective of marketers compiled by Sarah Marchetti from Ovilgy PR.

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The idea itself is elegant. Users post pictures of the items they desire, along with their prices. Advertisers pay for the items in lieu of having their names and links posted on the front page of the website for a minimum of 15 days. The idea is that the advertisers who pay for the costlier items will attract more attention (but it isn’t clear why).

The execution isn’t as elegant. It’s basically a Blogger hosted blog (and not a very well-designed one at that). Clearly, 30 year old Belgian municipal worker Renaud’s creativity doesn’t extend to website design.

Still, Renaud has managed to get some serious coverage on popular tech blogs and even has a publicist e-mailing bloggers on his behalf. What Renaud needs now is a designer. In fact, I have e-mailed Renaud to check if I can submit a ‘wish’ to hire a professional designer to redo his website.

By the way, the idea of wish fulfillment as a business model has another, more interesting, application. Imagine a social networking site where people make wishes and other people fulfill them, where the social currency isn’t about what you receive (links/ comments/ pageviews), but what you give, so that the most popular users are those who have fulfilled the most wishes (hat tip to Leo Babauta of Zen Habits). That will be some social experiment, don’t you think?

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First, Rob Walker, the author of Buying In, mentioned me in his shout-out for Interesting NY –

The one (speaker at Interesting NY) that caught my attention is The Marketer Who Went Off Consumption. That would be Gaurav Mishra, who writes: “On March 23, I decided to go off consumption for a year to understand an increasingly important subculture whose members refuse to define their identity by buying things.” Here is Mishra’s blog — which turns out to be a book in progress. I was a little surprised to see the top post is about “How to market to consumers who define themselves by their anti-consumerism.”

So I suppose he’s the marketer who went off consumption … in order to become a better marketer? I’m not sure how I feel about that.

But … there’s some other interesting stuff in the blog, which I’ll have to examine more closely a little later, and if you live in New York and want to pay $35 to hear from him and the other presenters at this event, I’d be curious to hear what you think.

Then, Dirk Singer, the co-founder of Cow, also wrote about my experiment –

In recent months, we’ve posted a few entries about people who’ve decided to opt out either from the consumerism or information bombardment of the outside world.

Now from Mumbai comes a year long experiment where a marketer has gone ‘off consumption.’ As he explains in Time Out Mumbai, on 23 March Gaurav Mishra decided to stop buying anything that wasn’t a life necessity. So food and basics only.

Realising that this wasn’t enough, he then decided to shed his “self constructed identity” in July and gave away everything he owned to five strangers. “When I say everything, I do mean everything - furniture, electronics items, books, DVDs - all the accumulated acquisitions of an intellectual yuppie.”

Gaurav Mishra’s blog, which will form the basis of a book at the end of the experiment, can be followed here.

Ryan Jones, who writes about the intersection of marketing and purpose, asked if consumption is overrated (yes!) –

Just how overrated is consumption?

Gaurav Mishra is trying to answer some pretty heavy questions about the nature of consumption in his blog to book experiment, The Marketer Who Went Off Consumption.

As global warming breathes down our collective necks and we enter “the age of responsibility” we should all probably question our consumption habits. Do we really need all this things? Why does XMAS now just have to be about the gifts? What if we all really made a commitment to just live a bit simpler & unclutter our lives?

Gaurav believes that “owning, buying, hoarding” is shifting into a experience, share/exchange/giving mindset.

At times in my life I have lived pretty lean. During my days at West Point, I basically survived with a radio, computer & a bed. Once you live like this for a few years, you realize that you really don’t need much. My wife sometimes jokes that I could probably live like a monk and not have a problem…though we live relatively lean in Europe right now, we could certainly still clear out about half of our stuff and be just fine.

I am interested in hearing more from this “Amish marketer:” Keep going Gaurav…

Finally, Allison Mooney got in touch with me for a profile on PSFK –

Gaurav Mishra has given himself a paradoxical moniker “the marketer who went off consumption.” He’s earned it: the young, upwardly-mobile marketing executive became a hardcore ascetic over the past year (no eating out, no going out for movies or music or plays, no television or newspapers, no shopping except for necessities). The now-Georgetown Fellow is keeping a “year-long book-as-a-blog experiment in why we choose to consume, or not,” which he spoke about at Interesting NYC.

His presentation left us with questions: No music? No SHOPPING?? What was it that caused such a drastic life change (besides a potential book deal)? Torn between confusion and admiration, we asked him, as part of our continuing series, “What’s Your Inspiration?”

Follow Gaurav Mishra’s journey at The Marketer Who Went Off Consumption.

Thank you, everybody, for your support.

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Here’s the final version of the slides I used for my talk –

– and here’s a transcript of my talk –

[SLIDE 1] Good afternoon! My name is Gaurav Mishra and I’m the marketer who went off consumption. I know… I know… it’s weird enough to say “off” and “consumption” in the same sentence and if you add “marketer” to the mix, it become so strange that it’s almost sublime.

Well, I found myself in the unenviable position of having to explain it all to a twelve year old girl the other day and I all I could do was to talk about dolls.

[SLIDE 2] So, let’s start with a story about dolls. But, first, let me ask all the lovely women in the audience: how many of you have owned a doll? [most women raise their hands] Great! How many of you have owned a hundred dolls? [one or two giggles] Come on, don’t be shy, raise your hand. [one woman raises her hand] Great! Wow! A hundred dolls!

Well, all girls want to buy dolls. First, they want one, then they want ten, then they want a hundred. For a while, in spite of how many dolls they have, they want to buy more. Then, when they are twelve (or twenty two), they stop buying dolls. The interesting thing is that even when they stop buying dolls, even when they stop playing with their dolls, they can’t imagine giving them away. Then, even that changes and, one day, they wake up and decide that it’s OK to give their dolls away.

That’s exactly what happened to me.

[SLIDE 3] I was the typical corporate fast-tracker in Mumbai until I realized last year that I was split into two halves. As an individual, I was tired of being targeted by commercial messages from the brands-media-retail triumvirate. As a marketer, I loved the art and science of marketing, adored brands, and was hardwired into the idea of capitalist free markets driven by consumerism.

My endeavor to reconcile these two parts of me has led me down some interesting paths.

[SLIDE 4] First, I stopped buying new dolls.

On March 23rd, I went off consumption for a year and decided to buy only the bare necessities. The basic principle is that apart from groceries, not much else is a necessity, which means no car, no maidservant (it sounds strange in New York, but everyone in India has household help), no eating out/ drinking out/ going out unless it’s free, no buying books/ CDs/ DVDs/ clothes/ accessories and no mass media.

[SLIDE 5] Then, I gave away my old dolls.

One catch in my off consumption experiment was that I was still allowed to consume what I already had (and I had a lot of stuff).

Two months into the experiment, I got an opportunity to take a year off my corporate career (and my seventy hour workweek) to teach and do research in Washington DC. It involved a significant salary cut (especially if you factor in how much more a dollar can buy in India compared to America), but my needs were already minimal, and it was an easy decision for me.

I have always been fascinated with the idea of a life that fits into a backpack. So, instead of storing my stuff (in temporary storage or with family and friends), I decided to give it away to strangers, for free. I ran a contest on my blog and announced that I would give away everything I own to the reader who told me the most interesting story about why they should be the one to get it. More than twenty people shared their stories with me (thanks to some coverage in mainstream media) and I gave away my things to five of them. What I was left with fits into four bags, instead of one backpack, but it’s liberating to know that everything I own is in those four bags (or in my bank account).

[In retrospect, I should have had another slide here]

When I moved to Washington DC, I didn’t want to set up a full household, so I started searching for a furnished apartment. The only apartments I liked were $3000 a month corporate apartments but I couldn’t convince myself that they fit into my off consumption experiment. So, I decided to go to the other extreme and stay at a hostel, with a hundred other people, some of whom I may be teaching in Spring. I share a room with a (sweet but untidy) twenty one year old Japanese guy and it’s an interesting experience after living alone in a three room flat throughout my adult life.

So, that’s my story so far. It has been more interesting and less difficult than I expected it to be and I still have six months to go.

Whenever I tell people (friends and strangers) about my experiment, they have a million questions to ask. I’m sure you have some questions too, so I’ll answer the three I’m asked most often.

[SLIDE 6] The first question I am asked is: why go off consumption? Here’s a chart I have often drawn (mostly on napkins) to explain why.

Every society has a materialism curve. In the pre-materialistic stage, people are driven by survival. In the materialistic stage (where most of us are), people are driven by a combination of things, experiences and relationships. It’s tempting to think of these three as a continuum (things, then experiences, then relationships), but they are often intricately interlinked. In the post-materialistic stage, people are driven by their search for meaning. This chart is often asymmetrical in one direction or the other and I have used a symmetrical chart only for convenience.

At some level, my off consumption experiment is an endeavor to move beyond things and experiences and search for meaning. I’m hoping that by freeing up the space (more metaphysical than physical) occupied by things and experiences, I’ll create a cognitive and spiritual surplus that will allow me to search for the meaning of my life.

[SLIDE 7] The other question I am often asked is: how can you even talk of post-materialistic values in a pre-materialistic country like India? Here’s another chart I have often drawn to explain why.

Within this big materialism curve (let’s say, for the world), there are small materialism curves for each country, each community. Therefore, in India, where so many people own so little, it’s possible to feel that you own more than enough, even if you don’t own as much as, let’s say, most Americans do. So, what I gave up wasn’t much in the context of how much all of you own, but it felt like a lot in the context of how little everybody else in India managed to get by on.

[SLIDE 8] Finally, after I have explained all this, I’m often asked: OK, I understand the off-consumption part, but where does the marketer fit in?

Well, as I have said before, I saw these seven consumption trends, in developed countries like America, but also in developing countries like India — from multi-tasking to down-shifting, from fitting in or standing out to being, from owning to experiencing, from buying to sharing or exchanging, from hoarding to giving, from conspicuous to conscious and from individuals to groups or communities.

When I observed people wanting to spend less, swap instead of spend, go local, go organic, stop buying things, or generally say no to brands, one part of me (me-as-a-consumer) knew exactly what they are talking about, but the other part of me (me-as-a-marketer) wondered what will happen to our brands when more people go “off consumption” because they are tired of consuming, tired of things.

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. I have made some of these consumption decisions myself (from multi-tasking to down-shifting, from owning to experiencing, from buying to sharing or exchanging, from hoarding to giving, from conspicuous to conscious) and I’m sure there are many other consumers like me who are asking themselves and the brands they buy similar difficult questions.

[SLIDE 9] I’m writing a book about these trends and I’m looking for stories of people who have asked themselves some of these questions. So, if you know someone who has stopped buying dolls (or given away their dolls), do drop me a line. I’ll be grateful to you. Thank you.

Some of the other talks I liked most were given by David Art Wales (secret societies), Scott Ballum (another conscious-consumption experiment), Faris Yakob (recombinant culture), Dallas Penn (the Bodega food pyramid), Aaron Dignan (the game of life) and Morgan Friedman (how to wander around in a city). I’ll link to the videos once they are up.

The high point of the event for me, however, was meeting Grant McCracken who writes a fascinating blog about the intersection of anthropology and economics.

Thank you David, Rick and Jinal for putting up the wonderful show and having me over.

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I had earlier decided to speak without any visual aids, but finally succumbed to the temptation of using slides. Clearly, the marketer who went off consumption still hasn’t gone off Powerpoint.

Here are the slides I’ll be using for my talk at Interesting New York –

If you are in New York on 13th, do come (tickets are $35 only). Some of the other speakers at Interesting New York are really interesting.

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I’ll be speaking about my off consumption experiment at the Interesting New York conference on September 13.

I’m looking forward to meet a bunch of really interesting fellow speakers at the conference.

Here’s the final schedule of the three sessions. For some reason, I am bunched with some serious heavyweights like Faris Yakob, Noah Brier, Nick Parish and Grant McCraken and I’m suddenly afraid that I’ll totally underwhelm the audience.

Confirmed Speakers
10:00 - 12:30
Mark Baltazar: How to get run over by a Metro North Train and Live
Aaron Dignan: The game of life. How a generation approaches nearly every aspect of life as a game.
Alex Rosu: Credo Quia Absurdum Est. Romanian Political Street Art (webcast from Romania)
Allan Benamer & Jeff Tuller: Valuing Social Change: Towards a Better World With Numbers
Irving Slesar: Understanding Dreams
Amber Finlay & Bud Melman: Embracing Bastardization: what your reaction to Fan Fiction culture says about you
Joel Johnson: I am my own Grandpa! The good, the bad and the ugly in reclaiming family history online.
Dipti Bramhandkar: Is Reader’s Digest right? Is laughter really the best medicine?
Hillel Cooperman: Cheese, wine, and software? How software is crossing the artisanal divide
Kevin Slavin: Dollhouse Earth - A survey of building on Earth as if someone?s watching from space.

LUNCH 12:30 - 1:30

1:30 - 3:45

Colin Nagy: A brief history of Techno
Charles Rosen: Living with Hillary. Stories from eighteen months on the campaign trail.
Bernard Leibov: If you can’t stand the heat, get the hell out of Hell’s Kitchen
Bryan Fuhr: Fending oneself from a blogger
Dallas Penn: The Bodega Food Pyramid: Food choices and the nutritional habits of the underserved
Scott Ballum: The Consume?econnection Project a one-year experiment to meet the people who make everything I consume
David Wales: Secret societies and the twilight of hidden knowledge.
Doug Jaeger: My obsession with time-lapse photography.
Morgan Friedman: How to wander around a city

BREAK 3:45 - 4:00

4:00 - 6:00

James Cooper: Why ping pong is good for the soul
Faris Yakob: Ideas are New Combinations: A history of recombinant culture, from Locke to Linux
Gaurav Mishra: The marketer who went off consumption
Azita Houshiar: Jane Eyre and the Internet
Jennifer wright: Doesn’t it Seem Likely that the Fashion World’s Kaiser, Karl Lagerfeld is, in fact, a Robot?
Michael Karnjanaprakorn: New Orleans: Social Innovation Hub of the World
Noah Brier: How I Learned To Make Stuff on the Internet (and you can too
Grant McCracken: I am sorry to have to say this, but you have Asperger’s syndrome
Nick Parish: Kombucha: How to manufacture the ancient elixir

Here’s a Wordle representation of Interesting New York topics –

– and here’s a Wordle representation of Interesting New York speakers –

– both thanks to Rick Leibling.

Do check out the Interesting New York website and follow interesting news on Twitter.

If you are in New York on September 13, do join us by registering on Facebook and Eventbrite. If you have (interesting) friends in New York who might be interested, do pass on the word.

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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.

I’m thankful to Drew for letting me share my thoughts with his readers.

Do head over to The Marketing Minute and participate in the conversation.

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If every time you read a blog post or bit of online content you enjoyed you clicked on an ad to say thanks, the economics of the web would change immediately. You don’t have to buy anything (though it’s fine if you do). You just have to honor the writer by giving them a click. You still get what you pay for, even if you pay with attention.

– hell broke loose in internet marketing circles –

That’s all fine and good, except that it screws the advertisers who end up paying for empty clicks and get a poor ROI. Ultimately, those advertisers get priced out of PPC advertising and there is less demand to run ads on the sites with great content that are getting all the thank you clicks. Yes, “the economics of the web would change immediately,” as Godin states. We’d go from a system that works to one where everybody would lose. (Shawn Collins)

For a big picture guy like Seth this a really stupid idea. For an experienced online marketing expert like Seth- this borders on criminal conspiracy. On successful sites people start clicking all sorts of ads. Good advertisers leave these sites in droves because the ROI drops out the bottom. Click Fraud becomes the accepted Standard Operational Procedure for people to do business on the web, if this becomes “an accepted online protocol.” (Chris Kieff)

As an advertiser I don’t like the idea of people who have no intention of buying a product clicking on my ads (or my clients ads). We set our prices according to ROI and we reduce prices when we stop making as much money - simple economics. We also ban ads from showing on websites that get lots of clicks but not a lot of sales. (Patrick Altoft)

I want to make sure that anyone advertising on my site gets value from it. High click through rates with no sales means I lose revenue in the long run. People at these real companies do the smart thing and track results of their paid advertisements. If a source isn’t paying for itself, it goes away. (The HR Guy)

The post also led to a “firestorm” in Seth Godin’s inbox, prompting him to write a rare follow up post –

My point was that if everyone started clicking, clickthrough rates would go up. For a while, there’d be an imbalance, and sites would make too much and advertisers would pay too much.

But then, advertisers would use the landing pages to start converting. They’d adjust to the new status quo, to seeing a stream of happy clickers who came through because they liked the page they were on. And they’d get better at converting those folks (something that doesn’t happen now, because only the hardcore click through). Do you see the benefit? If more people convert, the budget goes up. The spend can increase because converting mild interest (which they don’t see know in a rare-click world) into sales is profitable.

I think the most robust ad environment for the web is one in which more surfers give permission to more marketers to make their case. And one way to get that permission is to have a culture in which surfers agree to “pay” attention in exchange for great content.

Even though I love the delicious subversiveness of the idea, I agree with the SEM folks. I have done CPC advertising both as a blogger and a brand manager and I have always had zero tolerance for websites (or keywords) with high clicks and low conversions. If clickthrough rates go up and conversion rates drop, marketers would shift ad dollars to search, away from content/ placement, and ad budgets available to bloggers would drop, instead of going up.

Seth Godin’s “more clicks -> lower conversions -> better landing pages -> higher conversions -> higher budgets” hypothesis assumes that marketers can learn to design significantly better landing pages to convert disinterested (or mildly interested) leads. I’m not sure if I share his confidence.

Update: Ex-Googler Sumant Srivathsan pointed out in the comments section that –

The other major catch in this hypothesis is the belief that ‘only the hardcore’ currently click through. If this were true, we’d be seeing much higher conversion rates than we currently are.

Marketers who do CPC ads are often happy to get conversions rates that are in high single digits or low double digits, so, clearly, not everybody who clicks an ad is motivated to buy the product or service. Thanks, Sumant.

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Saurabh has some interesting thoughts on the why and how of blogger review programs, including why Nokia might want to ship out Euro 500 phones to little read bloggers halfway across the world.

I wrote a how-to guide to blogger review programs sometime back and included Nokia as one of the case studies (see Nokia N Series blogger review program). Although Nokia seems to have changed their PR agency since then (why?), the new Nokia blogger review program is essentially the same as the N Series blogger review program.

While Nokia’s blogger review program is great, it would become even better if the website becomes the hub for all social media conversation about Nokia. For instance, I own a Nokia E71, have written a (positive) review on it, and even started a daily vidcast using it. A little link love from Nokia might encourage me to continue to blog about my Nokia E71.

What do you think? Should blogger review programs be ‘push only’ programs or use a mix of both ‘pull and push’ tactics?

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- Millenials do use social media to express themselves creatively, but their overarching objective is to form new connections and communities –

Millennials are changing information technology. Instant messaging, chat rooms, texting and, above all, social networking. It’s a return to community, but in virtual space. It’s surprising how they are recreating community within the context of a new technology.

It’s easy for millennials to express themselves today, but it’s done within the context of a generation that enjoys being with each other and enjoys customization as a novel way of forming friendships and forming groups. The social-networking phenomenon is taking place within the context of this incredibly vast and intense and unremitting social immersion experience. This is the most connected generation in world history.

The overwhelming, dominant purpose of social network sites is to further intensify the close social networks millennials have with their own lives in school, work or wherever they are. It’s important to keep that in mind, because when Xers think about the amount of time millennials spend online, they think of it in Xer ways—how they’re doing strange new things and going outside the box. That clearly is not what millennials are doing. Even what they’re doing with music is in a social context; they’re customizing music to share with others.

- The millenials’s active use of social networking is rooted in their broader commitment to the idea of community —

Millenials (have) a desire to not disappoint their parents or their friends. We find a huge increase in team teaching, team grading, community service, service learning—a whole range of activities in which they are acting in team-like ways.

The idea of teamwork is not just [to be] with your friends; it’s the whole community. That’s why you engage in community service; that is why you vote and that’s why you want the company you work for to serve the larger community.

– The millenials’ need for shared experiences may lead to the revival of big brands –

I think that millennials are capable of regenerating the whole notion of the big brand. The idea of the big brand went into decline with the Gen Xers and certainly during the late boomer period. Gen X was a generation that didn’t even want to be thought of as a generation, and it had a lot of little niches. There was never a Top 40 group of songs everyone listened to, and the generation is spread out in terms of wealth. They were cynical toward anything that was big, and this gave rise to niche and viral marketing. The whole concept of the Long Tail is perfectly designed for Gen X.

With millennials you’re returning to the fatter portion of the bell curve. This is a generation that wants to feel that they do have a center of gravity. So you’ll see the emergence of huge brands with this generation. Look at [what happened with] Harry Potter. Think of the idea of the big brand as being a dimension of the return to community.

Neil Howe is right that the need for shared experiences is at the core of both social networking and big brands. However, big brands can only act as intermediaries for passive shared experiences, whereas the shared experiences enabled by social networking are active, and the community itself creates the experiences. It’s possible for brands to enable communities to create powerful shared experiences, but only when the brands concede the center stage to the community.

So, I don’t really get the connection, or the causality, between the social media type of community and the big brand type of community. But, maybe, I’m not supposed to get it. I’m a Generation Xer, after all.

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