I think that we all agree that the increased empowerment of communities and individuals has led to a shift from push to pull. In turn that means that you can’t simply interrupt a person any more to communicate your message. Consumers have become increasingly skeptic towards brands. Therefor, a strategy of engagement is a much better one. In which the goal is that through that engagement the individual will eventually ask for or want the brand. How is engagement created? Increasingly through the creation of captivating experiences on multiple platforms. That thinking has strong roots in the experience economy. An economic model first coined by Joseph Pine and James Gilmore.
However, that aside, our discussion yesterday focused on the question what comes after that? Joseph Pine has stated that the (last) economic model that comes after the experience economy is the transformation economy:
“Experiences are not the final offering. Companies can escape the commoditization trap by the same route as all other offerings: customization. When you customize an experience to make it just right for the individual - providing exactly what he or she needs right now - you cannot help changing that individual. When you customize an experience, you automatically turn it into a transformation….” (p. 165)
So, the ultimate individualized experience is a transformation. What will that mean for the power of communities? If we will all strive towards personal transformations in which our own private goals are more important than the goals of our community, will the power of communities then decrease in the coming decade? Does it mean that communities become much more fluent? Meaning that I’m looking for temporary bonding with a specific group of people merely for a short period of time?
For instance: will I be looking for like minded people when I want to educate myself in a certain field. And move on, if I’ve received the knowledge I was looking for? If that is the case and I will as an individual flow from one community to the other, that would mean a decrease of the power of a community. Or does is make the community even more powerful as the issues or beliefs around which these temporary communities are formed are much more important to us (as they will lead to the transformation of ourselves?
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I enjoyed today discussing the insights that are driving the profound changes that are currently reshaping our economic and social landscapes.. But felt pretty exhausted after talking for 4.5 hours. Your question of what I want to do next flummoxed me a little bit as I was not expecting the question. I was asked, what comes next? The 2.0 question. And It was a good question.
My view is that, we are just about witnessing the dramatic reordering of the media industry, and in fact many other industries driven by the falling cost of technology, the fact we are a We species, and the fact that today we are all capable of creating and distributing, knowledge, information and culture. So what next? The next is the reordering of Medicine – Education – and Politics. No aspect of what makes our civil society tick will be left untouched. Darwinism is upon us. Forcing us to adapt or die.
The conversations I have had with many organisations over the last 18 months and particuarly the last 12, outline for me how fraught, and painful that transition is. As someone once said: I embrace progress, I just hate change. It wont happen tomorrow, or the day after. But we can see, already the grassroots of that change. Engagement as we call it defines a very different approach.
Transparency, co-creation, participation, harnessing collective intelligence, authenticity and trust are all part of the langugae and equation. Its not a tweak of the old industrial model. Its a fundamental reshaping of how we will live in the very near future.
And as we say, Once you have stormed the Bastille, you don’t go back to your boring day job. In this instance your boring day job is the consumer (economic value x$) who is unconnected, passive, & ignorent who will happily consume whatever is put in front of them. But equally the day job reflects how we secure a healthy future, how we better educate our children and how we can all once again re-engage with the debate of the type of society we would like to live in via political debate.
Has art replaced the artful politician in challenging our sense of ourselves and the role we all have to play in our post modern world? Realistically, if we all stop voting, who will decide those that should be elected representatives of the people?
Within the some 300,000 words we have written on our blog is the groundwork and the testament of what that looks like and what that means for us all.
I like being asked what’s next, even if it makes my head hurt.
Always good, to share thoughts with the like minded, it was a great conversation ;-)
Interesting that you picked those three area’s in which you think a profound change (?) will occur next. As they all have to do with the transformation of the individual: in medicine individuals (clients, users, or however you want to call them) transform from sick to healthy, in education people change from ignorant to knowing. And in politics beliefs are transformed into actions (or perhaps that’s what it should be about). In any case in either of those three markets (?) it’s about changing the individual. Or the ultimate experience: one that is everlasting, memorable; one that truly reaches deep inside us and actually change us.
In that respect, I think that the ultimate engagement might not (just) be about creating an experience, but about creating a transformation? Is transformation of the individual the last stop in ‘creating engagement’? Does the same apply to communities? Is it possible to create a transformation within a community, or transform the community itself? Or is a transformation economy inherently an individual thing and will it lead to the decrease of the power of communities?
Dear Jörgen,
Thanks for your comments.
Transformation - The three areas I mentioned need transformation, and we have the tools previously not available to us, or even the correct mental models to enable us to deploy transformational solutions. I had not previously conciously thought about transformation in this way, but I think all along it was implicit in my thinking.
When I talk about the American Idol for example where in the 2nd series 30% of mobile texting voters had never sent a text message before. I ask then the question – How does one change peoples behaviour around, in this instance technology? So yes then the question can you affect, create a transformation within a community and the answer is yes.
I am not sure about you’re last point, because we can transform as individuals and we can transform as a community. Both are independent from eachother, but both need eachother. Community, ultimately is a sub-set of civil society, it is a more manageable size, whether thats Sneakerplay, Current TV, World of Warcraft, our local village or the village football club.
Thanks for posing the question.
Alan :-)