1. Recognized, Respected, Rewarded: Recognize and respect consumer's social role for sharing, creating, giving, getting involved, or offering one's competencies. These are key new expressions of the "new" social status. Reward the consumer for these actions.
2. The Need for Others: The need for others means physically acting and getting together. The new consumer realizes that their power of expression has more clout when they hook up and group with others to exchange and act together. There is an opportunity for new products to celebrate and strengthen this bond on a local level. Build strategies that are centered around actions that revive social bonds and consequently build up the consumers' personal identity and pride.
3. Caring: Restore consumer trust by delivering the unique visible benefit. Reassure the consumer with messaging that is transparent and speaks to their immediate personal benefits. Treasure the consumer by giving more for the same price; the product alone is no longer enough.
4. Home Produced: Homemade and home produced provide new marketing opportunities to brands and retailers when consumers feel insecurity with crises. Cocooning and nesting have become central to the new strategy for leisure and time out for oneself, social re-centering, and achieving comfort with a return to traditions.
5. Access to Modernity and Progress for All: The new consumer feels excluded from modernity and progress because of premium product costs. Since consumers have to check spending, whether willingly or by force, they are now confronted with an undifferentiated environment in which products resemble one another. The consumer is deprived of the pride of consuming. Entry-level goods can emerge as the right choice.
6. Have It Now: The new consumer is cautious, protective of one's comfort and "easy life" as long as they can. Facing an uncertain future, the new consumer chooses between things they are going to give up and what they absolutely want to have now. Easy, immediate, and affordable access rather than luxury is the new consumer choice.
7. The Naked Product: Today's consumer, especially one who is aware of the eco-trend, has learned how to decode, deconstruct, and strip a product's service, brand, retailing, and communication. The economic meltdown has forced the new consumer to refocus their needs, and make trade-offs with a new focus on finding direct and indirect alternatives.
8. Alternatives: The new consumption is an alternative consumption. The new consumer spends differently. The new consumer will expand their options by reconsidering the need, meaning, and usage. They buy from a community in which they can participate, co-create, and become involved, or else they do it themselves. There is a personal benefit at the level of choice alternatives.
9. Multi-Level: The new product trends show the constant progression of an integrative model. The new consumer is looking for products that are multi-functional, multi-platform, multi-performance, multi-serviced, and containing multiple benefits while being simplistic in its usage.
10. Sunshine Again: The new consumer is looking for products and services that put a smile in their life; products that provide a real benefit to everyday life at an accessible price. Products that inject joy or surprise will be capable of reactivating impulse purchases with the new consumer. Resilient products. New-found freedom products. Dream-building products. Small indulgences, and luxuries that were once deprived.
The future of consumerism in 2011 has changed. Habits have changed: All-out luxury, price futility, image, and status products will remain marginal in consumption. Marketing strategies will need to project an aspirational signal testifying that sunshine is back. The signal will release consumer behavior and desires for 2011.
