Innovate, but for which consumers?

How do consumers react to global events that throw their way of life or vision of the world into question? Due to the climate crisis, the pandemic, the economic crisis and the digitalisation of the economy and of daily life, the ways people behave have already changed dramatically. One thing is for sure: this trend will continue. But where will it lead, and how can we shape the outcomes?

Continually focusing on location, formats, flows and neighbourhoods, as the stakeholders of commercial real estate do on a daily basis, runs the risk of overlooking the very essence of commerce: the consumer. 

This might explain some mistakes, when trends are followed more on the basis of beliefs than of facts. This is the case for the erroneous prediction, backed by supposedly decisive big data, that brick-and-mortar shops will be replaced by e-commerce. Or the idea that millennials and digital natives necessarily prefer smartphones to shopping malls, when the opposite is true. 

Other trends have emerged more recently, some of which were bolstered by the lockdown in France last spring. These trends include the appeal of short supply chains, the noteworthy comeback of in-store sales of games and a renewed interest in garden centres and DIY and decoration stores. This all seems to point to attitudes that are less consumerist and more responsible. 

The end of the world or the end of the month?

This list would not be complete without mentioning the boom in the market for second-hand goods. The French website “Le Bon Coin” has been around since 2006, not to mention its precursor eBay, established in the last century. More recently, Vinted, an app on which you can buy or sell clothes at affordable prices, has already conquered 12.5 million French consumers since 2018 and carved out a large share of the market for online clothing sales, especially in children’s clothes. What’s intriguing is the interest of traditional brands in what seems to be a new segment of the clothing market. But what do they have to gain from selling used clothes? Probably mainly just a bit of symbolic capital, because the growth reservoir of this diversification doesn’t seem to be very deep. However, after having sacrificed quality and fallen into the trap of endless promotions, the time has probably come for them to make their brands more meaningful. But is the goal to appeal to consumers’ environmental concerns, or to save them money?

Utopias and action 

We need to take a closer look to understand what is at stake. And that is precisely the goal of ObSoCo,  a research and strategic consultancy firm, with its Observatory for Utopian Perspectives. Based on the work it has conducted, its founder, Philippe Moati, together with Olivier Badot, has coordinated the publication of a collective work titled Utopies et Consommation (Utopias and Consumption). 

We can no longer ignore that the promise of consumerism is losing steam in a world where it is becoming evident that consumption only contributes to happiness up to a point. Other utopias will have to take the lead, and, according to ObSoCo, which has tested three of them, the ecological utopia outperforms both the security utopia and the techno-liberal utopia.

According to Philippe Moati, the ecological utopia “depicts a society aiming to save the planet, organised around simplicity. […] One of the most striking results of the survey is that adherence to this utopian system is also, and perhaps most importantly, based on an attraction to the lifestyles and consumption patterns that are associated with it”.  

But the book also encourages prudence, because much remains to be done. In a chapter on the green gap, Adeline Ochs examines the still very wide gaps between words and deeds in environmentalism, and suggests avenues for action to shrink them. 

Consumers in transition 

In conclusion, and this should come as no surprise, consumers are also “in transition”, but it is an ill-defined transition, because they pick and choose from various utopias, which overlap in some places – shopping locally being, for instance, an aspiration in both the ecological utopia and the security utopia.

Stores are one of the places where this change can be shaped, when brands get more creative and think more strategically. In particular, there needs to be consistency between the design, the product ranges offered and the service, as well as between the premises themselves and their commercial, sociological and urban environments.  

This is why, more than ever, we are still very keen on close cooperation with the teams that, at our clients’ brands, are working to understand and meet consumer expectations.