Aventine Partners

Revisiting Scenarios and Tracking Tools

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 proposed two dimensions to describe out country's future.  The first was the degree of government involvement, the second the degree of consumerism.  The four scenarios that result -- Lever Lever Land, Euro-America, Do-Over, and Back to Basics -- describe very different futures that can help shape strategy and risk management.

Are you a Pragmatist? Traditionalist? Curious?

As part of our continuing Culture Graphics project we've released a public version of our Culture Graphics survey.  One of the insights developed in this effort is the ability to categorize individuals' worldviews into five basic groups:

• Traditionalists
• Modernists 
• Progressives 
• Communitarians 
• Pragmatists   

While we continue to collect data, the academic work in this field and our initial results support the validity of this approach.  We invite you to take the survey yourself (click on the image below) to learn more and share your reactions.

 

Using Scenarios to Spot Opportunity, Risk in Crisis

I recently had the opportunity to speak at a seminar for privately held businesses.  The seminar was about ways to use the economic downturn as an opportunity to prepare for the potential future sale of a business.  My topic was how to spot new opportunities created by the crisis.  I suggested scenario analysis as a good tool for generating and evaluating ideas and offered four specific scenarios to consider

Aventine Scenarios Pres May09

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The Shifting Consumer

Identifying how consumer attitudes are shifting in this downturn and which shifts will stick is an important, but tricky, task.  John A. Quelch and Katherine E. Jocz tackled this issue in the Financial Times with their Managing in a Downturn.  

I can recommend this article as thought provoking, and it contains some good insights.  But there's some bad mixed in with the good.  First the good.

Key takeaways:

"What is certain is that the market segmentation scheme you were using to plan your marketing budget and programmes this time last year is obsolete. You need to listen to your customers and possibly develop a new segmentation approach."  

Very true.  The authors recommend an overlay segmentation that adds insights to how consumers are reacting to the current environment.  This is likely a good first step.  

Youth, Americans, and Science

As we continue to work on Culture Graphics, we occasionally run across interesting findings in the data.

One of the topics evaluated in the most recent World Values Survey is the attitude of people towards science and technology.  According to theories about value in post-materialist societies (the book to read is Modernization and Postmodernization by Prof. Ronald Inglehart of the University of Michigan), people value science less the more they are separated from conditions of economic scarcity.  More specifically, generations that do not experience material want during their formative years tend to be more skeptical of the benefits of science and technology.

This phenomenon is illustrated tellingly in the chart above.  The survey asked the question, "In the long run, do you think the scientific advances we are making will help or harm mankind?"  The chart shows the percentage of respondents who believe science will harm mankind, broken down by age group.

Measuring and Modeling Culture and Cultural Change

How much of our marketing has been calibrated to a culture and set of values that may be on the verge of radical change?

There is no shortage of opinion seeing our society as hyper-consumerist, bearing the seeds of its own self-destruction.  Some industry commentators see the cultural turmoil afoot ushering in big changes in marketing.  A handy example is the cover article of the most recent issue of Media magazine, “Age of Dissent: Has America’s 50-Year Shopping Spree Hit the Wall?”, by Steve Smith (free registration is needed to access the article).  Smith does a good job of moving beyond mere tactical adjustments to address the near-term economic malaise and sees permanent changes to how marketing is done because of a pervasive change in culture.

Quite apart from questions of whether these changes are good or bad and who and what are to blame for our economic predicament, the fact is significant cultural changes are far more likely now than a year ago.  Furthermore, the probability of dramatic and longer-lasting change is higher, and the direction and profile of the changes may be easier to discern. 

So what does this mean for marketers and marketing analysts?