As the first year of the current administration is unfolding, and especially as we embark upon the second Christmas shopping season after last year's economic meltdown, it is interesting to reconsider the four scenarios we constructed in the spring to describe possible future worlds. After the distractions of a raging stock market this summer, our future path now seems just as unclear as six months ago.
We're anxiously looking for signs of which path we'll go down. Government involvement is relatively easy to spot. While it seems we are destined for a larger-government future, the current health care debate could mark a reversal in that trend. In any case, our current direction is fairly easy to discern from New York Times headlines.
The consumerist dimension is more interesting because it is harder to read and will develop over a longer period of time. This shopping season may provide an early measure of the trend, but there remain plenty of noise in economic data to discern longer term trends, however well retailers fare this year.
As noted in our earlier post on scenarios, this work was an outgrowth of our Culture Graphics project, which features the measurement of materialist or 'post-materialist' attitudes as a good proxy for consumerism. Part of the vision for the Culture Graphics project is to devise ways to measure changes in these attitudes in near real time.
The potential utility of a consumerist tracking measure may be indicated by another project we recently discovered, the Gallup-Healthways 'Well-Being Index'. This ambitious effort has created an index of overall well being (oversimplified by many reports as 'happiness'), which is in turn based on six sub-components. Perhaps most impressively, the Gallup and Healthways people are tracking this daily, and have committed to do so for the next twenty-five years.
It's hard to imagine that something as fundamental as well-being will not have powerful application to marketing and general business strategy. We'll be watching closely.
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