The Shared Experience of Individualism
A new level of consumer choice is changing the experience of consumption. For decades the consumer experience has most frequently been communal, based on shared user experiences with a given product or service. However, as new ways of interacting with products, services and producers proliferate, that shared experience is changing radically. In its place is a new communalism built on individual experiences, a communal individualism.
In the past, consumers would join a community of users who were purchasing a product or using a service at the same time, in the same manner. The common experience of purchasing Air Jordans, or watching “Seinfeld” created a community of users with their shared, common experience acting as a powerful bond, both amongst individual consumers and between consumers and brands. With the purchase of a good, or use of a service, came membership in a tribe.
That tribal membership is changing as consumers gain choice in a wide range of purchasing transaction and service consumption models. You can now stop by a Coke Freestyle machine to make your own soft drink flavor, use Uber and Divvy Bike to create a custom transportation itinerary or watch a full season of “House of Cards” in one day. Consumers are wresting control of the push/pull model, flipping the equation and pushing their choices to providers in more and more ways.
Emerging are consumption choices based on the purchasing experience related to a product as much as to the product itself. Consumers can purchase Tide detergent at the grocery store, or push an Amazon Dash button to have Tide delivered to their home. It is the same jug of Tide, yet it is the purchasing experience that drives the transaction. Extending beyond purchasing, consumers are also gaining power in creating products at a granular level. Want a Nike running shoe unlike any other? Then use NikeiD to create your exclusive design. Perhaps you’d like custom jeans or individualized jewelry printed on demand. The growing ability of the consumer to decide how, where and when they will obtain a commodity is becoming a strong driver in many transactions.
With this change in consumer choice comes a change in the experience of consumption. The shared, communal excitement that in the past was centered on the product or service itself, is transforming into a communal experience of individualism based on transactional choice. By using an Amazon Dash button to tailor their transaction, a consumer joins a tribe built more on transactional commonality than on fealty to a discrete product.
Emerging from this communal individualism are consumers who are becoming brands unto themselves. Savvy users are creating themselves as a brand that producers aspire to be connected with. Now the key influencer is no longer a single glorified user of a given brand, but rather legions of individual users who utilize transactional choice and social media to subjugate the power of brands to the power of users.
Yet at what point does this new collective, communal individualism become a commodity itself? If the differentiator is the transactional or consumption experience of the product, will that experience itself become a commodity? Chris Dennis, the head of global product strategy for Coca-Cola Freestyle has said that the Freestyle drink dispenser is a major component in Coca-Cola’s transition from a product company to an experience company. The sale of a commodity product is now less about the product itself and more about the experience surrounding the product.
As we fall deeper down the rabbit hole of communal individualism a new truth emerges. While consumers gain greater individual choice they are, through transactional, consumption and design decisions, giving producers a wealth of data to create finite pictures of discrete users. Ironically, as consumers gain more power through transactional choice, they may in fact be handing that power back to producers.
There used to be a thrill associated with being in-the-know, and sharing in the communal glow of a product. While it was more than three decades ago, I remember the emotional bond I shared with Coke drinkers around the country when New Coke came out. Our collective horror as a community had the power to bring back the “real thing”. With the new communal individualism that is emerging we are both gaining and losing power, but most of all we are becoming smaller and smaller tribes.
