There is a great post today on Marketing Web (see here). Its about the experience economy I was talking about earlier (see here).
Rather than owning things, many people are moving towards experiences, rentals, trading, and the virtual. The old world of purchase, prestige and property rights is being replaced by a world where ownership is not necessary or assumed, and may even be violated.
The rise of Napster was testament to that. The question of who owned the music was not as important as the attraction of discovering and sharing great music.
This kind of consumption goes well beyond the idea of ownership and includes some new segments of consumers, one of which is termed the “light lifer”.
The light lifer literally travels light, preferring instead to borrow, filch or share possessions. They will be more willing to lease a car than to buy it (which car companies fear will reduce the value of their cars), are happy to visit an internet café rather than deal with the hazards of technology at home, and design their own impromptu holidays. For them, ownership is merely a burden.
I’m not sure I agree with all his examples, but this certainly is a trend we are seeing, too.
Ownership isn't everything
Interesting that Toyota launched its futuristic hybrid Prius on a lease agreement only…
We rent the pot plants in our office! But doesn’t ownership still land up in someone’s lap? i.e. owning something so that you can leverage an income off of it.
Technology has allowed these light lifers to cut all earthly ties. They don’t need a fulltime job; with a laptop, a cellphone and their brain, they can work virtually from anywhere.
Would these light lifers not resort to the barter system where money doesn’t necessarily change hands but services do?
What would the taxman do then?
Anj,
Nice thoughts. I had never thought of the return to bartering as an implication, and yet that is exactly what we do with many of our network partners. It makes serious tax sense.
With Pravin Gordhan’s emphasis on improving the collection of taxes (and which he’s doing quite well at) – how long before the barter system becomes enough of a threat to the taxman for them to try and legislate this. But how? It’s easy to track your movements through a bank and to follow your financial trail – but how do you track services which have been exchanged and don’t appear as invoices or on balance sheets?
This also has implications on an international scale – if the system of bartering services or products eventually replaces the use and transfer of money, what does that do to checks and balances which governments have put in place? What will that do to exchange rates?
And would the barter system potentially introduce a new kind of business morality into the economy? Where the verbal agreement regarding the services being exchanged is enough to do business.