HAVING NO LIFE
IS THE NEW ASPIRATIONAL LIFESTYLE
It used
to be that we equated power and prestige with a leisurely, luxurious lifestyle.
Today, lack of leisure time is the real status symbol. Anat
Keinan discusses what that means for consumer marketing.
Americans are working longer
hours than ever before, with the office increasingly stealing our leisure time.
But according to new research by Anat Keinan, this hectic way of life is, for
many of us, far from an unmitigated negative.
In fact, some boast the lack of
spare time as a status symbol—even an aspirational lifestyle.
The finding suggests a new way
for marketers to sell their products and services to consumers by flattering
them with messages that recognize how valuable their time is. But such an
approach is risky, too. Do you really want to position your brand on the side
of telling people to work too much?
Keinan, an associate professor in
the Marketing unit at Harvard Business School, explores the phenomenon in a
paper forthcoming in the Journal of Consumer Research, “Conspicuous Consumption of Time: When Busyness and
Lack of Leisure Time Become a Status Symbol,” co-written with Columbia marketing professor
Silvia Bellezza and Georgetown marketing professor Neeru Paharia.
What
happened to the good life?
This finding that “busyness”
conveys status flies in the face of decades of social history, where enjoyment
of nonproductive leisure time was seen as a mark of a successful life.
The ability to fritter away your
hours was considered the apex of success as evidenced in books from sociologist
Thorstein Veblen’s 1899 classic The Theory of the Leisure Class (he
coined the term “conspicuous consumption”) to television shows such
as Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. And if you didn’t actually have a
life of leisure, you could pretend you did by buying increasingly affordable
luxury brands like Cadillac or Rolex. “People used to spend their time in
ostentatiously unproductive ways to show their status,” says Keinan.
But something in our culture has
changed about how status is achieved. In the past decade, conspicuous
ostentatious consumption has become less socially acceptable. Those wishing to
flaunt their status have had to find more subtle ways to show their value. At
the same time, our go-go workplaces are emphasizing and rewarding 24x7
productivity.
To study this idea, the
researchers set up six experiments to gauge our attitudes about luxury and
busyness.
As a preliminary test, the
researchers combed through social media posts by celebrities compiled by Harris
Wittels, author of Humblebrag, The Art of False Modesty, and found more
than 1 in 10 were about being too busy or “not having a life.” (A typical
example: “Hi, I’m 16 and I’m publishing 3 books and an album this year. Do you
have any advice on how to handle it best?”)
Has this glorification of
over-commitment trickled down to the masses? Keinan and her co-authors
recreated such “humblebrags” (Humblebrags are
essentially brags veiled in a complaint, so as to sound less blatantly like a
brag) in mock Facebook posts by a fictional office worker, “Sally Fisher.” The
posts demonstrated either busyness (“I have been working non-stop all week!”)
or leisure (“Enjoying a long lunch break!”). The researchers then asked some
300 participants to rank Sally’s wealth and importance. On average, busy Sally
was seen as having higher social status and greater socioeconomic wealth than
leisurely Sally.
In another experiment, a hundred
participants were asked to read a fictional letter from a “friend” named
Daniel. In one version, he complained about being “crazy busy” and never having
time to watch TV. In another, he talked about being relaxed and often watching
ESPN. The results were even starker than the previous experiment. On a scale of
1 to 7, participants ranked busy Daniel more than twice as high on an aggregate
measure of wealth and social status as they ranked leisurely Daniel, 5.44 to
2.55.
They also ranked busy Daniel as
being more scarce and in-demand to employers, 3.8 to 2.83. That measure of
scarcity, says Keinan, may hold the key to why busyness is perceived the new luxury.
“When we talk about traditional
conspicuous consumption, it’s about consuming scarce and expensive things like
jewelry or money or cars,” she says. “But the new conspicuous consumption is
about saying, I am the scarce resource, and therefore I am valuable.”
The
business of busyness
Marketers have already begun
using such insights to target consumers, flattering them by implying how
valuable their time is in order to sell them products.
A recent Rolex ad asked:
“Checking his watch costs Bill Gates $300 a second. What is your time
worth?" And an ad campaign
for The Wall Street Journal features celebrities including Tory Burch and
Will.i.am reading the paper with the tagline, “People who don’t have time make
time to read The Wall Street Journal.”
Even Cadillac, a symbol of
traditional status and luxury, featured a popular ad during the 2014 Winter
Olympics in which a middle-aged actor sitting by the pool monologues:
Why do we work so hard? For this?
For stuff? Other countries, they work, they stroll home, they stop by the café,
they take August off. Off! Why aren’t you like that? Why aren’t we like that?
Because we are crazy-driven hard-working believers, that’s why!
That “crazy” American work ethic
has led to accomplishments from the Wright Brothers to the moon landing, the
voice continues—before the actor gets into his Cadillac and turns to the
camera, saying, “As for all the stuff, that’s the upside of only taking two
weeks off in August, n'est-ce pas?”
(In another study, Keinan and her
colleagues found Italian respondents equated working more hours with lower, not
higher, social status, implying that obsession with busyness is a distinctly
American phenomenon.)
In another experiment that should
be of interest to brand managers, the researchers confirmed the potential power
of a “sell busyness” strategy. Five hundred participants were asked to rate the
status of consumers who used products associated with a busy lifestyle.
First, they showed participants a
description about a consumer named Matthew who shopped at either an upscale
grocery store or instead used grocery-delivery service Peapod. Though Whole
Foods was perceived as more of a luxury brand, the participants rated the
status of the Peapod shopper equal to the Whole Foods shopper, and both were
rated above Trader Joe’s.
“Whole Foods may be the more
luxurious experience, but Peapod signals your time is so valuable you can’t
afford to waste it,” says Keinan.
In another study, a woman wearing
a Bluetooth headset was rated higher than one wearing headphones, while both
were rated the same in how nice, honest, and attractive they were.
“This leisure-less lifestyle is
so aspirational, any products or services that are associated with it become
status symbols,” Keinan says.
Interestingly, this glorification
of busyness and productivity is also affecting how consumers spend their
limited leisure time, Keinan believes. “We are so obsessed with productivity
and efficiency, we tend to keep ourselves busy even when we are on vacation, We
make bucket lists and collect experiences, even when we are supposed to be at
rest.”
A wrong
message?
While marketers can certainly
strike a chord by appealing to our obsession with busyness and productivity,
that doesn’t mean they should.
Keinan cites her own 2008 study that found that while
people often felt guilty about taking time off for fun in the short term, in
the long run they are more likely to regret missing out on indulging in leisure
activities.
“It’s the old adage that nobody
on their death bed ever said they wished they spent more time in the office,”
Keinan says. “If marketers can help consumers devote more time to things that
are really important—like spending time with friends and family—without feeling
guilty, that would be a real success.”
Michael
Blanding is a writer based in Brookline, Massachusetts
http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/having-no-life-is-the-new-aspirational-lifestyle?cid=spmailing-14288166-WK%20Newsletter%2002-22-2017%20(1)-February%2022,%202017
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