Iconowatch

by Josh Kimball

At Iconoculture, we track consumer culture, digging deep to understand people’s desires and motivations. We research the small shifts in people’s behavior in order to understand the big ones. And every once in a while, like right about now, we see a major tilt in the consumer landscape.

When our research observes clusters of consumer values beginning to shift the culture, and that shift has the potential to change the consumer and business environment for 10 to 15 years to come, we christen the movement a macrotrend. New macrotrends don’t come around often (we released one last year), but this one’s been brewing for a while, and it’s particularly important.

We call the new movement People Power, and though its roots go way back, a swell of unprecedented empowerment has popped up just in the past year. From politics to the online realm, examples of People Power have proliferated.

Empowered individuals, enabled by free-flowing data and Information Age tools, are coordinating efforts with one another and demanding to be heard — by corporations, governments and any other institutions in need of a citizen-fueled reality check. It’s a shift in the power balance between people and the institutions they bump up against day to day.

What this means to marketers
In the era of a more holistically empowered consumer, brands need to thoroughly refine their understanding of their own value proposition (especially as they try to negotiate volatile social-media waters) and serve their core customer (even when that means being tough with the taste-and-test customer on the fringes). “Transparency” is an overused buzzword, but the real thing wins consumers and potential customers to your side, both as buyers and as advocates and allies in an always-changing media world.