Giving Is The New Taking, And Other Trends
“Success and failure are both difficult to endure. Along with success come drugs, divorce, bullying, travel, medication, depression, neurosis and suicide. With failure comes failure.”
— Joseph Heller, novelist (‘Catch-22’)
The rich have yet another problem to deal with, at least according to the folks at trendwatching.com, who report this concern in their “Eight Trends to Capitalize on in 2008”:
“If millions have access to the same premium goods, to the same premium brands, these premium offerings lose some of their value, as their entire raison d’être was to offer something that others could not get access to. Scarcity is becoming less scarce and wealth is always relative, leading to actual status despair among those who are by all means, financially well-off.”
Status Despair
I don’t know about you, but if I’m going to despair, I want it to be status despair. I’d like my biggest problem to be that I almost got into the wrong Bentley because someone had dared to buy one exactly like mine.
There was, however, another line from trendwatching.com that caught my eye:
“Find us one high-profile billionaire who’s not deeply into ‘giving’ right now. In fact, whether it’s giving away your riches, your time or sharing your (content) creations with a total stranger, giving is the new taking.”
Call me cynical in evaluating a report’s level of cynicism, but since when does the word giving rate quotation marks? And I’m not sure how giving is taking, although I admit it sounds profound.
But let’s get back to the promise in the title of the report, capitalizing on status. You might think that it’s too late, given the end of the economic Great Run, but not only would a recession tend to lighten up your status despair, the trends report also reminds us that “conspicuous consumption” is headed nowhere but up in China, Russia, Brazil and other markets, even, they say, Nigeria and Vietnam.
Buying Premium
So they’re arguing for “premiumization” to march on (in its Jimmy Choo pumps, no doubt). I learned that there’s a brand of bottled water called Bling H2O. It’s from a Hollywood producer who observed: “You can tell a lot about a person by the bottled water that they carry.” His response was to put water in limited-edition corked bottles costing from $17 to nearly $500 a bottle.
Let’s hope this doesn’t catch on; otherwise, we’ll be doomed to having “water snobs” swishing and sniffing their glasses of water. (Which reminds me: The other day I was walking my wife’s two dachshunds, and they encountered a bush possessed of some intoxicating dog aroma. This, of course, occasioned much head cocking, furrowing of the brow and nostril flaring. Watching them, I asked myself where I had recently seen a similar display, and I realized that the pair of intent dachshunds at a bush resembled a pair of wine snobs at a pricey restaurant.)
The other examples of “premiumization” range from airlines offering private suites in first class, to a Porsche baby stroller going for almost $700 (pricey, sure, but that baby sure can corner), to a Portuguese paper company selling fashion toilet paper in black, green, red and orange.
It’s enough to make you appreciate the folks at trendwatching.com for spotting a new product that isn’t about fashion or status as much as good old slothfulness.
Procter & Gamble has begun selling Swash, apparently targeting college students, which includes new spray products to eliminate wrinkles and odors, thus, in the language of the trends report, giving clothing “the look and smell of having been washed without the trouble or expense of actual washing.”
Then again, the users of Swash would be conscientious consumers compared with the popularity of clothing that conforms to the “snack culture” — when it comes to clothing, the snack culture is inexpensive items meant to be worn only a few times before being discarded.
I kept waiting to run across a report of some of the trends I’ve spotted recently (no joke here, I really have seen this) — trends such as people setting aside nights of the week for family meals and a renewed interest in the reading of classics.
Maybe those didn’t appear because they’re harder to “capitalize” on — but then again, let’s hope that one of the trends of the coming years is a declining interest in trends.
Dale Dauten is the founder of The Innovators’ Lab. His latest book is “(Great) Employees Only: How Gifted Bosses Hire and De-Hire Their Way to Success.”
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