Consumer Trends in 2022
Please excuse the little blogging vacation I’ve taken over the last few weeks! Between a sick cat, Omicron, and the usual workload, I’ve been juggling a few different hats in both my professional and personal lives.
Two articles caught my attention this past week:
The first by Ted Gioia from the Atlantic about old music outselling new music and how the trend has affected innovation in the record industry.
The second from the New York Times detailing restaurants and small businesses that have decided to operate without a phone number.
Let’s start with the music analogy first. These are the two key quotes that are stuck in my brain right now:
Never before in history have new tracks attained hit status while generating so little cultural impact.
Basically, you can create a hit song in 2022 that has almost no impact on society as a whole, unlike the 80s and 90s when songs had the power to completely change popular culture.
The entire business model of the music industry is built on promoting new songs. Yet all the evidence indicates that few listeners are paying attention. Record stores are caught up in the same time warp. In an earlier era, they aggressively marketed new music, but now they make more money from vinyl reissues and used LPs.
Remember when wine and spirits retailers would go out looking for the next new discovery? Remember when spirits enthusiasts would rally around a new producer or new distillery because it was exciting to taste new products?
In an earlier era, retailers aggressively marketed new producers, but now they make more money from the same MGP-distilled Bourbons put into different bottles, or the same allocated brands that can be sold for higher margins. The point being: no one seems to have any confidence that new brands can have the same impact as old brands anymore. It’s not just music. It’s a multi-genre phenomenon.
Now let’s tie in the second article about phones and customer service.
In their first month of business in the summer of 2019, Hotel Greene would get a stream of calls to the front desk asking about the wait for a table. Mr. Gottier said that a host offering people wait times in advance can be fruitless since the waits can change quickly in real time.
“It was just this constant barrage,” said Jim Gottier, 67, the co-owner of Hotel Greene, adding, “to pay someone $15 an hour, or whatever, to do that is just outrageous.”
Sure, you might make a few people angry by not offering a customer service rep via telephone, but is the amount of money required to satiate those customers worth the money made by satiating those requests?
Not when subsequent generations prefer to text or DM via social media. So then ask yourself: who’s your audience and who are you catering to? As one restaurant owner said:
“We just want to be a hole-in-the-wall restaurant. I personally think websites are not for 2021, anyway. We don’t need a website, and this is my opinion. I would take the IG as a website where we can interact with our own clients right away, wherever you are, with much more information. We can do it really quickly.”
This quote that grabbed my attention not so much because of the reliance on Instagram as a full customer service interface, but rather the acknowledgement of the business owner’s ambition: to simply be a small business owner; nothing more.
I used to tell brands that I consulted for the same thing over and over: in the future, we’re all going to have to work twice as hard to make the same amount of money.
Why? Because the real competition in the marketplace isn’t the big companies who are dominating the larger spaces, but rather the smaller businesses who aren’t necessarily looking to scale or grow their fortune into millions of dollars. They eat up so much consumer attention bandwidth that there’s nothing left for the mainstream marketing dollars to profit from. For brands looking to garner the attention of consumers, it’s like death by a thousand cuts, rather than one fatal blow.
This is the same reason music doesn’t have the same cultural impact it once did because there are no dominant cultural hubs monopolizing our collective attention. National radio is long gone. MTV is dead. People live inside their own personal spaces or media bubbles.
As a businessman working in wine and spirits retail, I see the fractured market on a daily basis and I end up spending more and more of my time chasing down individual requests and obscure bottles for less and less revenue. It’s so much easier (and far more profitable) to find something that larger consumer bases will gravitate towards and send one big email. But that only perpetuates the vicious circle of promoting products because they’re profitable rather than because they’re new and exciting.
Once I’ve decided to focus on easy nostalgia over the more difficult discovery, I want to find the easiest method of customer service that removes all the distraction of having to answer time-consuming questions and just get right down to the facilitation of the service—like chatting, emailing, or messaging a quick response.
And that’s what you’re going to see more of in 2022: the same old stuff that people already like because it’s easier to sell, coupled with a less human, more efficient form of customer service that allows businesses to focus on catering towards a younger, more relevant clientele.
Or, in other words, using an older generation’s lifeblood to tap the younger generation’s wallet.
-David Driscoll