Just Be And You Are

Most brand names, celebrities, hot-shot companies work from an old model of selling content - here is who or what I am and I’m going to market myself to the point you either love or hate me. Paris Hilton comes to mind, maybe Geico, and how about Dove. The new model is one of experience - I’m going to simulate a version of my reality for you to live and offer tons of testimonials so you either join the club or feel left out. Apple is first and foremost with iPod mania underway. I’d put Google in this category and one of my favorite actors, Daniel Day-Lewis. Experience will certainly win out in the short-term and our sense of individual reality will be skewed proportionally to how much TV we imbibe. What’s next? How will the consumers’ hearts and wallets be won over? My guess is through connection. Generating a tie-in with the consumer’s life and the company’s agenda. The green community is definitely keying in on this. The point? The core of day-to-day living remains relatively the same. We get more tools and neat stuff to tackle it. The process of convincing people to buy stuff continues to evolve. Decade to decade since the 50’s, we’ve been on a sine curve with “stability” on one end and “change” on the other. 50’s: stability, 60’s: change, 70’s: stability, 80’s: change, 90’s: stability, 00’s: change. Money is still made trading and bartering. People still gossip. We try to understand ourselves and our place in the world. We look to the sky and dream. We build amazing things. We fight over those things, natural or otherwise. We try to get along. We seek laughter over pain, comfort over loss, safety over disconnect. And the cycle goes on and on and on.