A budget for lunacy – taking a sideways view of consumer choice
Companies are struggling to connect with customers who are abandoning or upturning traditional life milestones and the pressure is on to come up with more creative types of engagement if brands are to remain or become relevant. Once there was a well-trodden path – moving out of the family home, getting married, buying your own property, having children – but our global research reveals that many life-changing events have been deferred or abandoned because of societal shifts.
All these changes have huge ramifications for brands and companies trying to attract the attention of prospective customers.
If traditional life milestones are falling by the wayside, traditional marketing propositions around demographics and consumer spending may no longer apply.
One size never really fitted all when it came to customers, and now the variables are greater and more complex than ever.
You don’t have to look too deep into modern Ireland to see evidence of what Accenture’s annual Life Trends forecast calls the “decade of deconstruction”.
Long-standing assumptions about life milestones are being eroded and replaced by a new short-termism or a steely self-reliance that reflects people’s changing expectations.
People being economically barred from traditional life choices is well documented in Ireland, where the scarcity of affordable houses and rental properties is part of the national conversation.
Socioeconomic barriers have fuelled shifting demographics and changed mindsets, contributing to the evolution in Ireland of new phenomena, such as ‘ruburbs’, where people enjoy the lifestyle of a suburban commuter in a more rural setting.
Prompted by the pandemic and rising house prices in the cities, a better quality of life became their priority as they chose to work from home in more affordable parts of the country.
NEW LIFE NARRATIVES
Companies need to become more watchful and responsive to shifts in consumer needs.
Flexibility and adaptability around their products and services is essential to align with different lifestyles.
Banks, for example, have to offer financial products that respond to changing realities, such as the redefinition of what the family home now means, be it a single parent or multi-generations living together.
Utility companies need to recognise that advising people who don’t own their homes on how to make them more energy efficient is not an effective form of engagement; car dealerships might want to consider car-sharing models, because ownership is not on everyone’s to-do list.
The good news is that the people reassessing what personal success looks like are very open to guidance. Google gets a billion health-related queries a day, so there is an opportunity to get closer to customers if companies can fulfil the role of trusted adviser.
We know from our research that individuals will invite brands into their lives if they are relevant and empathetic to their lifestyle choices – in recent research, we found that three-quarters of consumers said they were attracted to brands that source services and materials in highly ethical ways.
REKINDLING CREATIVITY
Tools and techniques are readily available to help companies succeed in the deconstruction decade, but some of them are missing the mark. We have access to more content than ever before and more of us can be creators, yet consumers are increasingly underwhelmed and feel as though they’re living in an increasingly gray scaled world.
Our Life Trends report highlights how they find brand content uninspiring, mobile app design indistinguishable, and complain that tech interfaces feel like they’re happening to them, not for them.
One in five consumers are putting a limit on screen time and a quarter are removing apps and devices altogether from their lives.
Brands must reverse the trend of pursuing quantity over creativity, where everything is about algorithmic averages and an invisible middle. Marketeers need to push to use creativity to drive distinctiveness again, to have what the Life Trends report calls “a budget for lunacy”.
They need to allocate time and money to experimenting, to testing out new ways of engaging. At the same time, there is pressure to improve the customer experience, a cornerstone of brand desirability.
There is justified excitement in the industry about the possibilities of AI helping reverse some of the negative trends, enabling businesses to turn data collected from customer engagements into more valuable and personalised interactions.
It starts with collecting accurate and timely data that can be used in machine learning. Then you can tear up old assumptions about customers and use tools like generative AI to explore new ways to empathise and engage.