The “age of I”

What is the “age of I”?  Individualism with a sense of community.

The movement from mass production to mass customization is becoming standard practice.  How does this relate to us as individuals and our psyche?  As quoted by one Fortune 500 executive* in BusinessWeek:

“I think this “age of I” is our biggest opportunity and our biggest challenge. This idea that people want to be individuals and want to belong at the same time is a huge concept. It used to be if you belonged

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BusinessWeek: The Vanishing Mass Market (New poll up!)

BusinessWeek: The Vanishing Mass Market

The new American aspiration is to stand out from the crowd, not keep up with the crowd.

The July 12, 2004 cover story of BusinessWeek features the shift from a mass media, mass production economy to an individual-targeted, mass customization one.  People don’t want to be normal and part of a consumer crowd, they want to be unique yet part of a real community.  This graphic from the magazine

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Motion picture studios know why some of their movies become hits - positive word-of-mouth that becomes viral.  Great critical reviews do not correlate with box office returns.  In this knowledge age, that buzz is being used to make better movies via test screenings before they’re released, and online fan review boards for sequels and related genre films.  This is especially becoming more prevalent in TV show production, where fans have increasingly more say on the content of upcoming shows,

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In other words, how do you transform the vision of hundreds or thousands of future CoolTown tenants into a built place that is greater than the sum of their opinions?

The simple answer?  Talent.  More specifically, people who both truly understand the CoolTown market and know how to design and develop communities.

The challenge is that the people with the greatest design and development capability are either no longer part of the CoolTown market or are willing to zoom with or ethnograph

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What distinguishes a successful company from a bankrupt one is how well they interpret what the market really wants into something the market will pay for.

Ford did a tremendous amount of homework in the early 1980s to understand that people wanted a sedan (insert ‘community’ here) that was uniquely beautiful in a sea of look-alikes, handled as well as the imports, and focused on quality design details from opening windows to playing music.  In 1986 they introduced the then futuristic-looking

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Ethnography: The branch of anthropology that deals with the scientific description of specific human cultures.

The best way to understand something is to participate, as defined by zooming yesterday, but that’s probably a bit too radical for most.  The next best way is to practice ethnography.

This great article will give you a much better idea of how to apply this science as an art in the real world.  It essentially comes down to playing Jane Goodall, not that there’s any hidden references

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Taking a page from Freaky Friday, the only way one can completely understand a teenager if you’re a mom, and vice versa, is to become the other.  Business guru Seth Godin refers to this as *zooming.

For those who wish to understand the CoolTown market:  Unless you’re willing to try living in the city and/or giving up your car for a month, emptying out your bank account and hanging out and conversing with an entirely different creative crowd from time to time, it’ll be tough to get more than a

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The industry average says only 20% of potential home buyers who put a refundable $1000 deposit on a future community (that they have some say in), end up buying.

Using my favorite principle of Occam’s Razor (the simplest answer is usually the right one), that means only 20% of them got what they really wanted.  Of course, using the Industrial Economy Developer’s Razor, that means 80% of them didn’t know what they really wanted.

Take it even simpler - if you went into the process of designing

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There’s probably no more over-used philosophy in product development.

You’d think this would apply to fashion, yet Blue Cult’s new jeans are insanely popular because women feel they’re finally being listened to, while individually customized jeans and even shoes are fast becoming the norm.

It’s bad enough in general, but rather disastrous when applied to building communities.  For instance, another product that “we didn’t know we wanted” - SUVs.  We didn’t ask for them, but now they’re

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As a civic/community-building practitioner, I often observe a disconnect in how communities approach initiatives to create vibrant places. For instance, the popular place-based initiatives… with new urbanist designs often overlook the necessary visioning work on ‘softer’ issues, viewing (instead) the physical changes as the essential ingredients in community transformation. How will CoolTown integrate civic/community-building aspects within its conceptual approach? Joel Mills, Herndon