Engaging with the New Consumer

Over the past several months, we've been introducing you to the `New Consumer' - the new breed of consumer forged by the recession and today's society as identified through our global Trend Observer research. Spurred on by a heightened social consciousness and empowered by social media, the New Consumer has a fresh set of attitudes about self, community, the environment and business. With that in mind, the New Consumer is changing the dynamics of the marketplace and the interrelationship between buyers and sellers.

As a marketer, understanding the New Consumer is one thing. But engaging with them is a completely different matter. And perhaps the most important matter, especially if you want your brand to succeed with this savvy, dynamic, and increasingly prominent set of consumers. But it can be difficult.

Knowing that to be the case, we offer five steps you should consider to make sure your organization is engaging with the New Consumer.

Engaging Your Organization

The following is a suggested process for engaging your organization and identifying priorities and actions, responding to the trends uncovered by Trend Observer.

Step 1

It is critically important to clearly understand and articulate your organizational values, brand values, and your core value propositions. Examine them through the lens of the New Consumer, and if necessary, re-word them in New Consumer terminology to see what alternate strategies might be suggested. For example, the New Consumer wants to believe that the organizations they support share their values. This is a good place to start.

Step 2

For each of the trends in Trend Observer, identify if your organizational value proposition (i) is clearly aligned with the trend, (ii) requires some adaptation to align with the trend or (iii) is so out of sync with the trend that efforts to create alignment might result in a credibility gap too wide to be useful.

There are no right or wrong answers to this exercise. The objective is to foster discussion and engagement by forcing the organization to make explicit choices about which of the trends to capitalize on and which to ignore, taking into consideration both the organizational value proposition and what the organization can authentically and realistically deliver.

Step 3

For the subset of trends that are clearly aligned with your organizational value proposition (i.e. the high priority bucket), ask yourself if that alignment is reflected in company communications, expressions of your brand, and in your marketing programs. If they are not, what are the simple tweaks that can be made to bring them into alignment? In many cases, simple wording or tone changes can be the solution.

At this point, consider again the New Consumer persona and your chosen priority subset of trends. Do new approaches to the marketplace reveal themselves? Are there new product opportunities? How about new marketing strategies or tactics? New business models? Entirely new businesses? Having an idea generation session at this point to brainstorm and innovate will be fun, energizing, and productive for your organization.

Step 4

Repeat Step 3 for the subset of trends that you have identified as requiring some adaptation of your organizational value proposition. Does thinking about how to adapt suggest new business opportunities? New processes? New marketing strategies or tactics? Or maybe they suggest a different spin to your marketing communications?

You will need to evaluate the costs of adaptations vs. benefits, then decide whether each of the trends then move into the `high priority' bucket (Step 3) or falls into the `no priority' bucket (Step 5 below). Keeping trends in a middle ground or a holding pattern should not be an option.

Step 5

For the subset of trends that you have determined to be not easily leveraged by your organization (i.e. the no priority bucket), you need to ask if they can be simply ignored, or if they warrant monitoring or managing. In some cases you can just ignore them and focus on the `high priority' bucket, but in others, you will need to watch the direction these trends take as they evolve. Simultaneously, you should closely monitor New Consumers' reactions to your company's activities to help manage (and preserve) your corporate reputation and brand equity.

Conclusion

Ipsos' global Trend Observer research uncovers today's trends and predicts their evolution in the future. All around the world, paradigms are shifting. For business, that means keeping up is critical. Trends are easy to miss and hard to make the most of. But the rewards for those who do it successfully are high. Engage with the New Consumer today and you'll reap the benefits tomorrow.