Debra Goldman's Consumer Republic

You've heard it a thousand times. You've probably said it several times yourself. On Sept. 11, everything changed. But is it true? Since the World Trade Center towers collapsed, consumers have been asking what they want out of life. And their answers bear few traces of the bull-market acquisitiveness of yore. After Sept. 11, it was no longer enough just to possess a Viking stove. What was important was that you cooked for your family on it. Americans who spent the last decade celebrating hyperindividualism suddenly felt connected with their fellow citizens at home and across the nation—and it felt good. Knowledge-society achievers, enthusiastic consumers of all the tools of connect ivity, were suddenly planning winter holidays without laptops or cell phones. Luxury brands, recently so coveted, now seemed frivolous or irrelevant. Sales of real Christmas trees rose as families sought to share a more authentic holiday. But are these emerging attitudes best understood as the product of a cataclysmic event? No, say those who have been following the consumer obsessively since the attacks. Asked in the weeks before the holidays to predict how consumers will behave and what their attitudes will be in the year to come, most researchers gave essentially the same answers they would have on Sept. 10. "It's not that Sept. 11 created something new," says J. Walker Smith, president of Yankelovich, a consumer research firm. "What it really did was reinforce trends that were already under way. Sept. 11 accomplished in a day what would have taken a year or more." Evident only in retrospect, like the onset of a recession, the seeds of post-Sept. 11 attitudes were planted in the late '90s, when consumers were still delirious with the stock-market wealth effect and terrorist bombs only went off in Hollywood movies. It was about 20 months ago, says Smith, that consumer research began to turn up what he calls the "paradox of well-being"—the dawning realization that money does not buy happiness. Add to this the "claustrophobia of abundance." Says Smith: "Across all income levels there was more job security, more income, more choice. Things that once were considered special or luxuries—gold, sushi, gourmet coffee, overnight delivery—became available to everyone, everywhere. It ended up overwhelming us." Having asked for—and gotten—more control over their lives, consumers were beginning to reel from the responsibility and balk at the burdens of multitasking. "There was a yearning for something beyond more stuff and more material things. People were beginning to ask, 'What can I do to get more balance into my life?' " The terrorist attacks turned these vague, subterranean yearnings in certain consumer segments into more broadly and keenly felt needs. "We got socked in the gut on Sept. 11," says Dr. Robbie Blinkoff, an anthropologist at Context-Based Research, a research firm in Baltimore. "Across the board, people were asking, 'Who am I?' and doing it very consciously and openly. Since then they've been in a testing mode, saying, 'If that's who I am, let me test it out.' " It is the speed and social breadth of this reorientation that presents the real challenge to brands hoping to stay relevant. Says Blinkoff, "Brands are having an identity crisis, too. They need to be reassessed, so that as I re-establish my identity, my brands will reflect that." Moreover, marketers have to do this reassessing in the dicey environment of recession. And not just any recession—one that follows a massive spending spree. "The Overstuffed Consumer," the 2002 edition of retail consultancy WSL Strategic Retail's biannual "How America Shops" survey, suggests Sept. 11 simply gave these already surfeited consumers another reason to pause over a purchase and ask, "Do I really need it?" And chances are they really don't—unless it is an irresistible bargain or helps them toward their goals of simplifying, balancing and emotionally enriching their lives. Says WSL principal Candace Corlett, "The consumer is saying, 'I've extended my kitchen, added new rooms, created more closets, and I still don't have room for all this stuff. I'm cutting back unless it's something really terrific. It really has to grab me.' " Until now, this has been more a lifestyle decision than an economic one: As of Nov. 1, 72 percent of WSL's respondents said they had not been affected by recession. But that could change, says Corlett. "We may see a consumer recession. Even if the economy improves, there's a long lag time when companies keep laying off workers. And we're all beginning to hear about people who've been laid off. [In 2002], the consumer may catch up to the recession." Where Sept. 11 is likely to have the biggest impact in 2002 is not on consumer values themselves but on the imagery by which they are expressed. The new heroes will be the guys who, in the newly minted cliché, "go up the stairs." And though the attacks may have faded as a topic of conversation among teens, the military has once again become chic, particularly among boys. "In the last recession, grunge got to be the thing as thrift became fashionable," says Irma Zandl of the Zandl Group, which studies young consumers. "Again we are seeing kids hunting down and expecting bargains and discounts. For guys that means getting into Army-surplus style. In particular, Special Ops are really cool, especially considering the fact that we've shown our military might and are really kicking butt. "Manly men, iron workers, there's something authentic and real about that that's appealing. It will really make the artiness and edginess we've seen in a lot of communications for young people seem particularly weak. It's the final nail in the coffin for that kind of thing." The jaggedness of edgy behavior is likely to yield to the smoothness of good manners and social courtesy, a legacy of the desire to be helpful, which flowered during the last few months. For the foreseeable future, the fireman who says "Please" and "Thank you" will be the social ideal. Of course, no thinking about the coming year is complete without factoring in the unthinkable. Says Yankelovich's Smith, "If there is another unimaginable event, something on the magnitude of a suitcase nuclear bomb or an attack on the water supply," all bets are off. "Security will jump to the top of the list, and we will have to clamp down. For consumers it would then all be about how to make themselves invisible, and that would change how they shop, what they wear, what they drive and where they go." Short of such a cataclysm, the one cultural reference point that is almost certain to become less compelling in the coming year is, ironically, Sept. 11 itself. "I'm tempted to say that if we can get to Jan. 5 without another incident occurring on American soil, then we're back to Sept. 10," says Marian Salzman, global director for strategy and planning at Euro RSCG Worldwide. Also, the lack of the loss of American life in Afghan istan, Zandl points out, "helps make the event into something that has come and gone." New Year's, too, will play a significant role in putting Sept. 11 behind us. "The timing of the holidays is really fortunate," says Blinkoff. "It's a nice transition, a new year, a fresh start." In fact, Salzman suggests the ringing in of 2002 might be the sym bolic watershed that the millennium frenzy of two years ago failed to be. "For all the hype, the millennial celebration was rather anticlimactic. Instead, the 21st century began 20 months later." What will not go out of fashion in 2002 are the quest for balance, the renewed attention to family and to personal and public connections, the valorization of authenticity and the need for consumables to offer spiritual as well as material returns. Driven by the economic cycle and that ever-present factor, the aging baby-boomer demographic, the shift to such aspirations preceded Sept. 11 and will outlast that day's overt influence. After prolonged introspection, "People are waiting for the end of the holidays to get on with their lives," says Smith. "But we would be mistaken if we assumed that means people want to go back to the way it was before."

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Debra Goldman's Consumer Republic

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Debra Goldman