March 25th, 2008
The Number One Question Everyone is Asking Me Ever Since I Have Gone Off Consumption
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.
In the meantime, you should look out for my next post to understand what exactly I mean when I say that I have gone off consumption.
But you’re a marketer! You know full well that most products are positioned to appear to be necessities when they actually aren’t.
Are you suggesting that your year will be punctuated by impulse buys based on a hunch (or an advertising-manipulated desire) that you actually need them?
The people who have published books on non-consumption set very strict rules at the beginning of their projects, and then wrote about when they followed them and when they broke them — and why.
A variant that hasn’t yet been done — and which might suit you as a marketer — would be to set a small period of time (say, 30 days) in which you didn’t buy anything — had to make do with the food in your cupboards, etc. — and watched as many commercials/advertising as you had time to view, and documented how the attempt to create a psychological need which you COULD NOT fulfill affected you over the course of the project.
[…] have deliberately avoided defining what is a necessity because one of the most interesting aspects of the experiment for me is to “discover” what I […]
@Blue: I was anyways going to do a detailed post on what is allowed and what is not, but the idea is that, even after these rules, what is a necessity and what isn’t will be best answered by a process of discovery.
I would have implemented your “watch ads that trigger needs you cannot fulfill” idea, except that I hardly watch any ads at all.
Ok… but now that you mention it… you´ll also have the market cornered on “Dating on $0 a day” guides and “socializing on a shoestring”.
@Medea: Actually, “dating on $0 a day” and “socializing on a shoestring” are my biggest worries.
I’ll have to quickly think of creative first date ideas that do not involve spending money.
[…] to The Marketer Who Went Off Consumption! Subscribe to my RSS feed and you’ll never miss any posts from my year-long blog-as-a-book experiment on why we choose to […]
[…] and what isn’t during my year of being off consumption, I have deliberately avoided defining what is a necessity. This is because one of the most interesting aspects of the experiment for me is to discover what I […]
I suppose before you find out what are ur necessities u should find out who you really are….
No you arent gaurav..its just a name… marketer?? tht ur job, hindu is your religion… 28 is your age…male is ur gender…. human is ur species….go on try to search… may be thats where u shd start