The Untapped Market Is In The Abundance Gap

In A Whole New Mind, by Daniel Pink, Pink joins his wife on a foray to Target. He admires a $5.99 toilet brush designed by one of the foremost architects and product designers in the world. He writes:

"Only against a backdrop of abundance could so many people seek beautiful trash cans and toilet brushes – converting mundane, utilitarian products into objects of desire.

"In an age of abundance, appealing only to rational, logical, and functional needs is woefully insufficient. Engineers must figure out how to get things to work. But if those things are not also pleasing to the eye or compelling to the soul, few will buy them. There are too many other options. Mastery of design, empathy, play, and other seemingly “soft” aptitudes is now the main way for individuals, firms, and consumers themselves to stand out in a crowded marketplace.

Abundance elevates R-Directed Thinking [creative, right-brain thinking] another important way as well. When I’m on my deathbed, it’s unlikely that I’ll look back on my life and say, “Well, I’ve made some mistakes. But at least I snagged one of those Michael Graves toilet brushes back in 2004.” Abundance has brought beautiful things to our lives, but that bevy of material  goods has not necessarily made us happier. The paradox of prosperity is that while living standards have risen steadily decade after decade, personal, family, and life satisfaction  haven’t budged. That’s why more people – liberated by prosperity but not fulfilled by it – are resolving the paradox by searching for meaning. As Columbia University’s Andrew Delbanco puts it, “The most striking feature of contemporary culture is the unslaked craving for transcendence.”

In a talk at IDEO, I hear Dan Pink coins this discrepancy between our material wealth and satisfaction (or perhaps, our spiritual poverty) the “abundance gap.” In other words, our life satisfaction does not track with increases in wealth.

Visit any moderately prosperous community in the advanced world and along with the plenteous shopping opportunities,  you can glimpse this quest for transcendence in action. From the mainstream embrace of once-exotic practices such as yoga and meditation to the rise of spirituality in the workplace and evangelical themes in books and movies, the pursuit of purpose and meaning has become an integral part of our lives. People everywhere have moved from focusing on the day-to-day text of their lives to the broader context. Of course, material wealth hasn’t reached everyone in the developed world, not to mention vast numbers in the less developed world. But abundance has freed literally hundreds of millions of people from the struggle for survival and, as Nobel Prize economist Robert William Fogel writes “makes it possible to extend the quest for self-realization from a minute fraction of the population to almost the whole of it.”

On the off chance that you’re still not convinced, let me offer one last – and illuminating – statistic. Electric lighting was rare a century ago, but today it’s commonplace. Light bulbs are cheap. Electricity is ubiquitous. Candles? Who needs them? Apparently, lots of people. In the United States, candles are a $2.4 billion a year business – for reasons that stretch beyond the logical need for luminosity to a prosperous country’s more inchoate desire for beauty and transcendence.”

Credits: Flickr photo by ticklebug

Comments

[Tom]

Of course candles today have nothing to do with light bulbs and electricity...they have to do with ambiance, sensuality, mood...or simple trendiness.

The flexibility of the meaning of objects is one of the key discoveries by retailers in the last few decades. It's very important to explore the actual lived-meaning of objects for people; tempting to assume we know what those objects mean.

I'm not so sure the many of the practices we see today are "spiritual" in nature. Own a Yoga mat? Used to mean, "exotic spiritual practitioner." Now means, "I have a piece of conventional workout apparatus."

Let's never underestimate the power of the predominant material culture to appropriate, and transform, the meaning of just about anything. People buy/watch things for reasons we ought to rigorously explore, not assume we understand.

[Evelyn Rodriguez]

Yes, most of this stuff is still stuff and doesn't hold much transcendental meaning. Personally, I'm well aware that many people buy for ego reasons (I throw myself into that camp), but right now I'm interested in the deeper (unfulfilled) wants. I like Seth Godin's quote: "People often choose to consume not because they need but because they want."

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