Postmodern shopper

In the Dec. 19th edition “The Economist” writes about how today’s shopper follows the postmodern paradigm of leading postmodern philosopher’s like Derrida, Lyotard, or Foucault. The “postmodern” shopper deconstructs any pattern of old shopping behavior and erases any strict boundaries of price, image, brand, and location. One shopper might “perform” the following activities during one day: Buy cheap socks at Wal-Mart, and an expensive iPod at the Apple store; Eat lunch at McDonalds, and dinner at a five start restaurant; browse online for the best flat panel TV at Circuit City’s peer review site, and buy it at Best Buy at the nearest store, eat cheap white “Wonderbread” and drink a $100 bottle of red wine to go with it.

We marketers need to much better understand the foundation of a postmodern society and its inhabitants to do our job. There are three key elements for a postmodern shopper society:

• It’s not just a fragmentation of our society into numerous groups and segments; it’s about the fragmentation of one consumer into a multitude of personalities. These personalities are more and more difficult to cluster and segment into marketable groups. They segment themselves into one person units. It’s the potential nightmare of 1:1 marketing that can not be executed due to the inconsistencies of the “1” element.
• It’s not just about more diverse value and belief systems, it’s about the ever shifting values and criteria for a purchase and consumption decision of one consumer. Any traditional research to understand the long obsolete “purchase funnel” will have less and less value. Consumers don’t move down logically the purchase funnel but are jumping back and forth without regards for our nicely designed funnel programs.
• Its not just about the loss of control of brands for us marketers, it’s about the lack of understanding how a brand interacts and can influence any consumer. It is not a marketing strategy to just accept the loss of control and hand over the brand to consumers. It’s more about enabling the consumer to experience the brand in his or her way, and to enhance this experience by any form of participation.

I have seen glimpses of postmodern marketing but our marketing community is far away of setting a standard in postmodern marketing. But it might be that the pure lack of this standard is one of the enduring sides of today’s marketing discipline in a postmodern world. And still, we have to understand how to build the underlying marketing science and derived marketing strategies in a post modern world.