Nowism

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Trendwatching.com came up with an interesting concept of nowism. Nowism is a change in the state of mind of young consumers. It is a move away from certain product categories and rites of passage into adulthood.

Definition

Trendwatching describes it as:

“Consumers’ ingrained* lust for instant gratification is being satisfied by a host of novel, important (offline and online) real-time products, services and experiences. Consumers are also feverishly contributing to the real-time content avalanche that’s building as we speak. As a result, expect your brand and company to have no choice but to finally mirror and join the ‘now’, in all its splendid chaos, realness and excitement.”

Perversely nowism comes out of the age of abundance that we live in (even in the recession). Young people do struggle with certain aspects of adult life like putting down roots and getting on the property ladder. Otherwise this relative economic abundance has a flip side: possessions are no longer status symbols. Instead they can viewed as a gilded cage – restricting consumers from having experiences. We can see this is in the developed world with some interesting changes on consumer patterns:

Just 40 years ago, the pony cars of the Ford Motor Company and others blew open the young US car market with the Ford Mustang sports cars and the Ford Bronco off road vehicles that were the forerunner of today’s sports utility vehicles (SUVs). Comparing the Mustang design to Toyota’s Scion and you can see this move away from status and freedom through motoring to pure utility. Nowism gets into the industrial design form and function are unadorned. More information here. More posts about the latest trends here.


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