The Marketer Who Went Off Consumption

Welcome to The Marketer Who Went Off Consumption! Subscribe to my combined feed in a feed reader or by e-mail and you'll never miss a single post. Thanks for visiting!

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.

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

In my earlier post about the National Geographic/ GlobeScan Greendex Survey, I had talked about the dichotomy between developed and developing countries in their attitudes towards the environment –

If the consumers in developed countries are not concerned about the environment, and the consumers in developing countries won’t back up their concern with proactive consumer behavior (recycling is very rare in developing countries), there isn’t much hope for the environment, is there?

On a second reading of the Greendex report, I discovered another (more interesting) dichotomy between developed and developing countries, in their attitudes towards consumption itself.

In the chart below I have plotted the top box “strongly agree” answers for respondents from each country on two questions related to the intent to consume. The first question is an indicator of the intent to consume less and the second question is an indicator of the intent to consume more.

- Question 1: As a society, we will need to consume a lot less to improve the environment for future generations.

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 –

– and the city section in the Mumbai edition –

One interesting thing I learned yesterday is that different editions of a newspaper may publish different versions of a story.

The Mumbai Edition published the full story — see text below — complete with my rules and URL.

The Delhi Edition published a much shorter version of the story — also available online — but it was on the front page and I’m not complaining at all.

Now, I’m waiting for the television crews to land up on my doorstep.

The Simple Life

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.

These trends are already a strong sub-culture in Europe, they are beginning to become visible in the US, and will eventually trickle down to developing countries like Brazil, China and India.

I’m convinced that, ten years from now, it won’t be unusual for someone like me to say that they’ll only buy necessities because they are tired of buying things. It would probably never become mainstream, something most people do, but I’m sure that it would become a strong sub-culture.

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’m dizzy from the shopping mall
I searched for joy but I bought it all
It doesn’t help the hunger pains
And a thirst I’d have to drown first to ever satiate

Something’s missing
And I don’t know how to fix it
Something’s missing
And I don’t know what it is
No I don’t know what it is
At all

When Autumn comes, it doesn’t ask
It just walks in where it left you last
You never know when it starts
Until there’s fog inside the glass around your summer heart

Something’s missing
And I don’t know how to fix it
Something’s missing
And I don’t know what it is, no I don’t know what it is
At all

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 –

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.

Think about it — it’s the most brilliant idea ever — I plan to make money by writing a book about not spending money. Of course, the trick is that, for this to work, you first need to have more money than you can sanely spend.

But alchemy 2.0 is only part of the reason why I have gone off consumption. I’m a marketer by profession, yes, but as my bio proclaims, I’m also a poet at heart.

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?

‘The Marketer Who Went Off Consumption’ is a blog in which I document my year off consumption. It is also a book-in-progress, in search of a publisher with a multi-million dollar advance.