CONSUMER SPECIAL.... Rise Of The Professional Consumer

Rise Of The Professional Consumer

Future Group’s Santosh Desai eschews the trend route to talk about significant shifts in consumer and social behaviour

I’m personally not a big believer in annual trends. I see more continuous shifts that blur into each other over years. Of late, what we see more than a central shift is fragmentation. Influences that have become much more non-linear. Here are some of the big shifts in consumer behaviour and society:

The shifts in consumer behaviour

Personal taste as a driver:

So far, the main purchase drivers were affordability, status and belonging to a cohort. The idea of who I am and what I like corresponds to a more crystalised view of personality; the desire to be distinct rather than part of a group. We’ve begun to see a desire to define a personal style and aesthetic, a set of things I do and things I don’t. This is likely to result in more experimentation in grooming at a mainstream level.

In food, the desire for experimentation coexists with a desire for health: 

Consumers want these trends to be located in the same place, which requires some reconciliation since they can move in opposite directions. In metros this is driving the idea of authenticity. Food that is also storytelling, particularly when you eat out, is a very big trend. In smaller towns you see an opening out of the palate with multi-cuisine options still being the favourites.

The rise of the professional consumer:

Consumer choices are increasingly based on the quality of experience. As a result, individual brands and options are finding a market. This is because consumers are turning into producers. The idea of creating something based on what you like and your own consumption patterns is catching on, instead of what there’s supposed to be a market for. We are seeing new kinds of brands emerge that speak to people of a particular mindset. More sophisticated consumers lead consumption rather than following. In makeup and beauty, we find people educating others. This marks the rise of the professional consumer: people whose job it is to be a consumer and help other consumers.

The shifts in society

There’s an occupation backwards approach to education:

 People first figure what they want to do in life and then work their way back to getting qualified. You can see the first stirrings of employment anxiety. There are questions being asked about higher education and how useful it is. There previously used to be a happy go lucky sense of ‘kuch toh ho jayega’ (I’ll find something or the other to do) that’s diminishing.

We are going through the second round of adjustment post liberalisation: 

There are a whole set of new questions that we are trying to find answers to. As a reaction to identity moving from the past to present, there’s now an anxiety about one’s roots. And a desire to reconstruct the past to seek that: whether it is in the reaction against jallikattu or the rise of identity politics.

Women have more freedom but less independence: 

Women enjoy a greater practical, everyday level of freedom. We are simultaneously finding a rise in attacks and the issue of safety. The men are feeling threatened and the reaction is an attempt to reclaim masculinity; an imagined masculinity seen in cinema. Salman Khan, for instance, is a fantastic form of masculinity, not set up against any real conflicts. It creates a spectacle but is not trying to claim anything higher than that. We are also seeing a similar twofold narrative when it comes to marginalised sections of society. We’ve seen a sense of confidence and movement in Dalit enterprise but that equally creates anxiety. We are at a stage where these are becoming big and significant enough to create countermovements and backlashes.

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