Spend Shift E-Book

John Gerzema

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 441

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2010

Beschreibung

Gold Medal Winner, General Business, 2012 Axiom Business Book Awards Understanding the post-crisis consumer In Spend Shift, John Gerzema, world-renowned expert on consumer values, and Pulitzer prizewinning author Michael D'Antonio document the rise of a vibrant, values-driven post-recession economy. To tell the story of this movement, the authors travel to large cities and small towns across eight bellwether states, to examine the value shifts sweeping the nation. Through in-depth observation, proprietary data from Young & Rubicam, and interviews with experts, the authors analyze the changing consumer psyche, document the five shifting values and consumer behaviors that are remaking America and the world, and explain what it means to businesses and leaders. * Explores a movement in society where the majority of American consumers are embracing both value and values * Shows how post-crisis consumer expectations and behaviors will drive business decisions * Draws on interviews with CEOs and entrepreneurs to reveal how companies like Ford and Etsy are reconnecting with the post-crisis consumer Compelling and insightful, Spend Shift is essential reading for anyone interested in how values are changing and how businesses can connect with consumers after the recession.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

Foreword

Introduction

Chapter One - THE NEW AMERICAN FRONTIER: DETROIT, MICHIGAN

Chapter Two - DON’T FENCE ME IN: DALLAS, TEXAS

America Retools

Chapter Three - THE BADGE OF AWESOMENESS: BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS

Chapter Four - AN ARMY OF DAVIDS: TAMPA, FLORIDA

Chapter Five - BLOCK PARTY CAPITALISM: BROOKLYN, NEW YORK

Chapter Six - THE QUALITY OF THE LION: LAS VEGAS, NEVADA

Chapter Seven - THE CITIZEN CORPORATION: DEARBORN, MICHIGAN

Chapter Eight - INNOVATION NATION: SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA

Coda

Suggested Reading

Acknowledgments

Notes

About the Authors

Index

Copyright © 2011 by Young & Rubicam Brands. All rights reserved.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Gerzema, John, 1961-

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-470-87443-1 (hardback)

1. Consumption (Economics)—Social aspects—United States. 2. Consumers—United States—Psychology. 3. Cost and standard of living—United States. 4. Recessions—Social aspects—United States. 5. United States—Economic conditions—2009- I. D’Antonio, Michael. II. Title.

HC110.C6G475 2010

306.30973—dc22

2010026648

Foreword

In my book Chaotics, I explain a new world where businesses must adapt to a new Economic Age. We have entered an era when increased turbulence is a fact of business life. Today’s managers must operate within an environment of endless volatility. The new reality is a world of continuous and at times crushing change.

The lessons for marketers are sobering. Brand equity changes in compressed periods of time. Competitive disruption happens without warning. And consumers are increasingly powerful and unpredictable. For those prone to celebrating a leadership position or a competitive market advantage, commoditization lies just around the hairpin corner.

In a post-crisis world, with the specter of a jobless recovery and more limited purchasing power, consumers themselves have experienced chaotics. Yet there is new, hopeful data to suggest that people are redefining their lives and reviving core values, things like hard work, thrift, fairness, and honesty. They are separating want from need and discriminating more carefully both in product and brand choice. Consumers are buying into brands with meaning—brands with integrity, social responsibility, and sustainability at their core.

This values-led consumerism is not a small, isolated target market. Over half the U.S. population is now embracing these values shifts. They are seeking better instead of more, virtue instead of hype, and experiences over promises. The post-crisis consumer, already highly marketing-savvy and armed with the leveling powers of social connection and critique, is now an even more potent and unpredictable force in the marketplace. People are looking for value and values.

I came upon these ideas when John Gerzema, Guy Kawasaki, and I were speaking at a marketing conference in Las Vegas in the fall of 2009. Over breakfast we talked about the implications for consumer behavior in the economic recovery. John’s research, based upon the world’s largest database, BrandAsset® Valuator, gave credible evidence that consumers were shifting their values and their spending accordingly, and many prescient businesses had already adjusted to the new consumer mentality.

But Gerzema wasn’t predicting a wholesale era of endless frugality and “a consumer in retreat.” Rather, his data demonstrated that brands—in a world devoid of trust—were increasingly more important. And companies could find new forms of competitive advantage by understanding and sharing in the values that were becoming more important to consumers, such as ethics, community, empathy, and accountability.

The lessons in this book are useful to anyone examining their business strategy after the crisis. They explain the new psyche and values shifts that are influencing the spending habits of the American consumer. Along with his partner, Michael D’Antonio —a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer and reporter—Gerzema details exemplary strategies of multinationals and small businesses alike. He shares the methods of adaptation among large Fortune 500 companies, while exposing us to new start-ups who are capitalizing on the values shifts in this new market landscape.

While the data is extensive and thorough, perhaps even more compelling are the stories the authors have gleaned from their travels across America. Through these accounts Gerzema and D’Antonio help us understand the lasting impact of the crisis on middle-class families, small business owners, entrepreneurs, and CEOs. They also help us understand the strategies people are already using to move forward. As voting patterns define the societal mood, consumption patterns do the same. How we spend our money and our time as well as our energy and efforts reveals how a values shift is, indeed, reshaping capitalism.

Spend Shift offers insights into how our lives are changing after the Great Recession. It explains a new consumer movement that you should understand regardless of whom you define as your target market. And it carries forward my lessons from Chaotics, offering managers, marketers, and entrepreneurs insights into how to understand and cater to the consumer of the post-crisis world.

Philip KotlerS. C. Johnson Distinguished Professorof International MarketingKellogg School of ManagementNorthwestern University

Introduction

NUMBERS AND THEIR MEANING: KANSAS CITY, MISSOURI

The typical evening seminar crowd at the Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas City, Missouri, could hardly be described as ragingly radical. The city lies smack in the middle of the conservative heartland and the museum is a traditional limestone landmark that draws heavy support from old-money families. Few institutions would seem more connected to the forces of stability and propriety. Until a few years ago it was still the site of the annual Jewel Ball, where debutantes paraded for high society.

About a month before our appearance, the Atkins had hosted Edgar Bronfman, one of the richest businessmen in the world. A few weeks later would come a former president of the World Bank, James Wolfensohn. Sandwiched between these pillars of the corporate establishment, we worried about how our message—that America was undergoing a radical but ultimately positive shift in consumer values—would play in a state where the official motto, “Show me,” promises a cold welcome to know-it-all outsiders.

As it turned out, a few factors had prepared the crowd to hear us. First and foremost was the condition of the economy in the summer of 2009. With unemployment racing toward double digits and business activity declining, America was approaching the low point of the worst business crisis since the 1930s. Dubbed the Great Recession, this downturn had shattered public confidence in the usual sources of wisdom, including financiers, economists, and politicians. To be sure, the crisis had made lots of people angry and resentful, but the shared suffering had broken down some of the barriers that can separate us and made many people more eager to hear fresh ideas, especially if they were based on solid information.

The analysis we brought to K.C. was built on the world’s largest reservoir of data about consumer attitudes, preferences, and values. Based on seventeen years of quarterly data involving more than 1.2 million people, this wealth of information has been gathered by the international marketing and communications company Young & Rubicam, where it is overseen by John Gerzema. One of the two authors of this book, John manages this ongoing study, which is called BrandAsset® Valuator, as Young & Rubicam’s chief insights officer. Young & Rubicam has invested over $130 million in the data, which goes back to 1993. In all he has spent twenty-five years studying and analyzing how people behave in the marketplace. His coauthor, Michael D’Antonio, is a writer with long experience in addressing social and economic trends.

BrandAsset Valuator holds data on more than forty thousand brands in more than fifty countries, and every quarter it is supplemented with new results—on purchasing and social attitudes—from seventeen thousand respondents in America alone. This information helps us understand what people prize in a material sense and how that changes over time. More important, as people reveal their preferences about products and companies, BrandAsset Valuator opens a window on their inner drives, motivations, and values in ways that other models cannot.