The Marketer Who Went Off Consumption gets its first interview in Indian daily Hindustan Times.
Last Tuesday, when Riddhi called me to say that she had read my blog and wanted to do an interview, my first (very audible) reaction was –
Ah! Finally the first interview! It has been fifteen days since I started the experiment and I was beginning to wonder why nobody has called for an interview!
To her credit, she didn’t sound shocked at all.
The interview was published yesterday on the front page of the Delhi edition –
Saturday, April 12th, 2008
The April 2008 Issue of David Report: I Shop Therefore I Am (via TreeHugger and Santosh Maharshi) identifies some of the trends that led me towards my off consumption experiment:-
- From conspicuous consumption to conscious consumption.
- From brand-consciousness to background-consciousness.
- From synthetic to organic.
- From mass-produced to hand-crafted.
- From global to local.
- From short-term to sustainable.
- From fashionable to durable.
- From valuing things to valuing insights.
- From fitting in/ standing out to being.
- From buying more to buying less.
- From doing more to doing less.
- From multi-tasking to down-shifting.
- From buying to sharing/ exchanging.
- From owning to experiencing.
- From having to giving.
Thursday, April 10th, 2008
I have spent the morning listening to ‘Something’s Missing’ from John Mayer’s truly delectable album ‘Heavier Things’.
I always find it amazing when a song resonates so well with whatever state of mind I’m in. Replace ‘guitar’ with ‘laptop’ in the second last paragraph, and this song could have been written for me.
I’m not alone, I wish I was
‘Cause then I’d know I was down because
I couldn’t find a friend around
To love me like they do right now
They do right now
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.
So, if the absence of money or an overdose of ideology are not the reasons I have gone off consumption, what exactly is it?
The reason — friends, readers, fellow marketers — is alchemy, or alchemy 2.0, the art of making money by not spending money.
For centuries, alchemists across the world have toiled in vain to transform lead into gold. I tip my imaginary hat to the audacity of these pseudo-scientists, because what I’m trying to do is something similar, except that it is even more audacious. I’m not trying to convert lead into gold, I’m not even trying to convert nothing into gold, I’m trying to convert less than nothing into gold.
Why would a twenty-something, single, eligible, IIM-educated, upwardly mobile marketer on the corporate fast-track in India’s business capital decide to go ‘off consumption’ for a year?
Will a year off consumption (no eating out, no going out for movies or music or plays, no television or newspapers, no shopping except for necessities) leave him ill-equipped to handle life and work in Mumbai?
Or, will it leave him with invaluable insights into what drives us to consume, or not, into the nature of consumption, into human nature itself?