P2P, Friemily, UnI. Call me anything but Consumer

Imagine if your visiting card said - Senior Producer. Or National Producer. Or Chief Producing Officer. Or Creative Producer. Or Art Producer. Or Market Research Producer.

The very thought is appalling!! And yet in the marketing/communication game of us vs them,we call the people who buy stuff/ experiences/ grocery/ dreams from us - 'consumers'.

I hate this term. Its so inhuman. So degrading. So wrong. So incomplete!

Then is an entire lexicon which we have created- consumer insight, consumer behaviour, consumer research, consumer loyalty...And the edifice of our thoughts, strategies and communication is built on it!

I feel nomenclatures shape our world/ worldview. Seemingly innocuous labelling affects perceptions, thoughts and behaviours...But stereotyping simplifies. And therefore as marketers and communicators, its easy to maintain the divide. Us and them. Producers( of products and communication) and consumers.

Implicit are the rules...
1. They are a target audience
2. We make the rules.
3. We are smarter than them
4. They are stationary targets
5. They are waiting for our products and communication
6. We learn about them. They do not learn about us.
7. They can be loyal to us, if only we tried harder.
8. They can always be grouped in clusters to suit our mass media weaponry.
9. We can change the packaging of our products. And they will fall for them.
10. They have an insatiable appetite for hype, half-truths and bull-shit.
11. If you pray hard. The remote will disappear! Or at least they won't use them that often
12. They love the sound of our voice...

But everyone knows...The rules have long changed.
1. We are the new target. Of disloyalty. Of cynicism. Of derision.
2. They are making most of the rules.
3. They are much smarter than us. They didn't even give us time to realise this:-)
4. They are moving fast. We are the targets
5. They are having fun with change and technology. And are saying to us - "Get a life".
6. They have learnt all our tricks. They can now even make a super bowl ad for $12!!
7. Hype and half-truths never gets loyalty. They are loyal to their families and communities and passions not to bars of soap and toilet paper! Not even to their companies(most of the time)
8. They are as fragmented as shards of broken glass
9. They are saying to us - "When will you change the packaging of your thoughts?"
10. They say to us - "Boy, when will you ever get it. Why are you guys so dumb?"
11. Who needs the remote to escape your ads...We don't watch TV. We watch TiVO.We get RSS feeds
12. They don't give a f*** to what we have to say(mostly)!!

In this open source bazaar of conversations, of people-generated-content, a world with zero tolerance for hype and falsehood, we must find a new word for 'Consumer'. They are exactly like us. They are Us. We are them. People who work during the day and surf at night:-) People with families and stress, kids and budgets.

They are not on this earth to consume. They want authenticity. They want trust. They want to protect the earth and keep it green. They want to laugh and joke. Their loyalties can never be bought with a card. Yes they want discounts;they want 'beautiful images' but that doesn't define them.

They read many of the articles on 'how to capture eye-balls', how to capture a share of the target audience. And then they trust us even less. They shrug their shoulders. Because we don't get it! Even now.

So if they are us. Should we call this bazaar conversation P2P(people-to-people), Friemily(Friend and Family), UnI(You and I)...They aren't the best nomenclature. But at least they are better than 'Consumers'!

2007 resolution. As far as possible, avoid the use of this word/ mind-set:-)

Picture courtesy: Gettyimages

The End Of A Century

On Tuesday night, Lower Parel's(Bombay) Century Mill had it's last shift. I of the India Shining generation, I of the 10% GDP, sensex tanking at 14K generation have little to do with the mill and the lives supported by them. Except for the fact that my agency is in a former Mill(Kamla) compound...

Yet, this article by Soumitra Ghosh in HT on Thursday made me pause and think. Don't know what else can a feeling of one achieve...

Some heart-felt comments/observations from the article...

1. On the last day, as the mill was about to be closed forever, ironically the only source of light for the workers wanting to read about labour rights and exploitation, came from across the street - from the lifestyle store NOSTALGIA!

2. The worker in the picture above - Jagannath Ganpath Kamble, a resident of Chawl no. 14, with a partial disability had this to say -" I joined the mill as a fitter when I was 20. Now. I am 52. In 1982, I lost part of my middle finger while greasing a machine. but I felt a strange sense of pride when I saw the blood rolling down the machine, That is what the mill meant to me."

3. "How come we are making losses? This(Century Mills) was the only mill that was continuously modernised in the country. Clothes are always in demand. Are we headed towards a naked civilization?" asks a 54 year old worker, who has been working at the oldest and the biggest mill in the city for the past 36 years"

4. "Yeh company zabardasti ko voluntary bolna sikhaya. Jaisa murder karke log khud kushi bolta hai", says a 47-year old mill worker and one of the 6000 to accept VRS.

5. The government decided to allow the mill owners to sell the lands(600 acres of prime property in the heart of the city) so it would draw in sky-high real estate rates.

But the sale(of mill lands) has only pushed the prices upwards, making the mill lands graveyards for the workers and vineyards for the super rich -says a worker.

6. "Just as one stops feeling any emotion the day death visits a loved one, I too don't feel anything," says 32 year old worker Santosh Parab, in a whispering voices.

As I said earlier, I don't know what I/we can do apart from looking at the razed mills as I/ some of us cross the Lower Parel fly-over every day.

This is the grim other side of the retail boom. The stories of lives affected adversely, buried in the inner pages of the dailies while the Walmart-Bharti/ Reliance Retail and the Future Group grab column cm on pg1.