The Marketer Who Went Off Consumption

Dear Blue,

I’m finding it really difficult to respond to your post comparing a life of chosen frugality to a life of enforced frugality.

Ever since our first quaint online correspondence with each other more than a year back — do you remember your first e-mail to me? — I have thought of you fondly, as a friend. Even though we didn’t meet up when you were in India, you have been a regular presence in my online life.

So, I’m really embarrassed that I didn’t realize that you had money problems. It’s a tragedy of the tenuous nature of our online ties that it’s easy to believe that we know our friends, when we don’t really know them at all.

It isn’t easy, or nice, to have less money than you need. I have been there myself and I have seen, firsthand, what it does to people and to relationships. It take away much that is of value and teaches you too little, too late. I wish that I don’t ever have to deal with it. I wish that none of my friends have to ever deal with it.

I consider knowing how to make a good elevator pitch one of my best kept marketing secrets, so I thought that I’ll make a quick elevator pitch for ‘The Marketer Who Went Off Consumption’.

‘The Marketer Who Went Off Consumption’ is my year-long blog-as-a-book experiment in why we choose to consume, or not.

The book is a record of two parallel quests — my quest as an individual to find the formula to turn consumerism-caused ennui into happiness, and my quest as a marketer to learn how to apply that formula to convert our collective ennui from consumption into a yelp of enthusiasm for consuming even more.

When the book is published in hard cover, you’ll have to pay a few hundred rupees to read it. However, you can read the book online, absolutely free, months before others read it in print. In fact, you should subscribe to the book in a feed reader, or by e-mail so that you don’t miss any chapters.

Here are three reasons why you should subscribe to the book today itself –

The number one question everyone is asking me ever since I have gone off consumption is different from the number one question I have been asking myself.

While everyone else is consumed with the scientific curiosity of how will I decide what’s a necessity, I’m worried about the more immediate issue of what to do on my next date.

Consumption is a social thing and, of all our social interactions, dating is the one most tied up with buying things.

Let’s do a quick visualization exercise to establish this. Please don’t read beyond the next paragraph until you have completed this exercise.

I want you to close your eyes, breathe deeply, and think of a perfect first date for two minutes. Think of the best first date you have ever had. Or, think of how you want your next date to turn out. Or, if you are married, or off dating, think of your favorite first date sequence from a movie or an ad.

Your time starts now.

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I’m reasonably sure that your perfect first date sequence included at least some of these images –

Can you guess what is number one question everyone is asking me ever since I have gone off consumption?

No, it’s not “but why have you gone off consumption?”, or “but how will you live/ work/ date/ network if you go off consumption?”, or “but how will you survive without eating out/ going out?”, or even “but why should we care if you have gone off consumption?”.

The number one question everyone is asking me ever since I have gone off consumption is: “when you say ‘no shopping except for necessities’, how do you decide what’s a necessity?”

Clearly, for readers of this blog, scientific curiosity is much more important than concern for my sanity!

So, how will I decide what’s a necessity and what isn’t? Honestly, I don’t know. I know that it sounds evasive to say that “it depends”, but it really does, on time, place, person and context.

In fact, one of the most interesting aspects of the experiment for me is to “discover” what I think of as a necessity and how it changes with context. That, more than anything else, is the one big insight I’ll look out for.