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Posts Tagged ‘mindfulness’

Designing Happiness

September 25th, 2010 | by Euro RSCG Worldwide Knowledge Exchange,

Of the 5,700 adults Euro RSCG surveyed in seven countries for our New Consumer study, exactly half said they are actively trying to figure out what makes them happy. One of the ways in which people are seeking happiness is by uniting in common cause, investing time in something more substantive and significant than can fit neatly within a shopping bag. They are looking to replace materialism with meaning, spending with substance.

This post originally appeared on The Dragonfly Effect and is reprinted with the permission of Jennifer Aaker and Andy Smith, authors of the new book by the same name.

How do you design for happiness?

A first step in tackling this question is to understand what happiness means. But herein lies the problem. Our understanding of what happiness is (and how to get it) is often misaligned with what really drives happiness. Indeed, research by Dan Gilbert and his colleagues show that we tend to go looking for happiness in a lot of the wrong places. If you disagree, you can check out the lead story on Entertainment Tonight on any given day. What people think will make them happy is not in fact what actually makes them happy.
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Will Rogers Would Approve

September 24th, 2010 | by Euro RSCG Worldwide Knowledge Exchange,

Half of respondents to Euro RSCG’s New Consumer global study said they worry that digital communication is weakening human bonds, and more than four in ten sometimes worry they don’t have enough friends.

Perhaps inspired by American cowboy and social commentator Will Rogers (1875–1935), who famously stated, “A stranger is just a friend I haven’t met yet,” a group called Living Exercises posted this on a wall in Brooklyn, N.Y.:

Another promising sign of the move toward mindfulness. Thanks to Scouting New York for the spot–and shot. You’ll find other great city scenes here.

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| Tags: digital communications, Euro RSCG, friendship, Living Exercises, mindfulness, New Consumer, Scouting New York
Post a Comment | 3 Comments | in Community, New Consumer, Purposeful Pleasure, Uncategorized, Values

Company Spotlight: The Andean Collection

September 7th, 2010 | by Euro RSCG Worldwide Knowledge Exchange,

One of the four paradigms of the New Consumer is the search for what we term purposeful pleasure. For many people, this added layer of pleasure comes from making purchases from companies that are aligned with their own ethical and social values. Looking at the leading-edge Prosumers in Euro RSCG’s global study, six in ten prefer to buy from companies with a purpose beyond profits, and seven in ten prefer to buy from companies that share their personal values. On the flipside, 75 percent believe they have a responsibility to censure unethical companies by avoiding their products.

Here, guest blogger Katrina Pennington shares with us her perspective on the increasing social and environmental consciousness of the modern consumer and how her company, The Andean Collection, is challenging the notion that a business cannot simultaneously be at the leading edge of sustainability and fashion.

There is no doubt we are living in an age of globalization and global warming, made more visible every day through a media that increasingly offer us secondhand experiences of realities occurring across our planet. Yet confronted with overwhelming levels of third world poverty and the planetary ripple effects of climate change, we are not as helpless as some would believe. Here in the United States, as the world’s biggest consumer force, we are only just beginning to realize the extent of our power to effect change through our consumption choices—rewarding those businesses that promote sustainability and punishing those guilty of exploitation, whether of people or the land.
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The Start of Something New?

August 30th, 2010 | by Andrew Benett, CEO, Arnold Worldwide and Global CSO, Havas Worldwide, and Ann O'Reilly, Director of Content, Euro RSCG Worldwide Knowledge Exchange

The following is excerpted from Consumed: Rethinking Business in the Era of Mindful Spending (Palgrave Macmillan, July 2010), written by Andrew Benett and Ann O’Reilly and drawing on findings from the Euro RSCG New Consumer study:

The long, wearisome decades of hyperconsumption shaped not just the way we think and feel but the very language we use. It is now customary to refer to human beings as consumers or even as brands. And an entire lexicon has been summoned into existence just to give verbal shape to our profligate excesses: big-box store, Black Friday (and now Cyber Monday), bling, door-buster, McMansion, self-storage, shopaholic, supersized, warehouse club.
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The Mindful Traveler and Luxury Reimagined

August 24th, 2010 | by Euro RSCG Worldwide Knowledge Exchange,

Adapted from KNOW: The Future of Travel, available to employees and clients across the Euro RSCG Worldwide network.

While overconsumption was the common practice prior to the economic downturn, we are now seeing a countervailing trend of mindful consumption that is changing how people define value and what they seek—and increasingly expect—in their brand experiences. Where once “more was more,” now different perspectives on luxury and service are emerging, with interesting implications for the travel and tourism category.
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Can Small Changes Lead to Big Ones?

August 23rd, 2010 | by Nathan Schock, Director of Public Relations, POET

This post originally appeared on Greenway Communique and is reprinted with permission. What can marketers do to nudge consumers in a more sustainable—and satisfying—direction?

How can people be convinced to significantly green their lives? To make the big changes needed to conserve natural resources and decrease energy use?

Robert B. Cialdini may have something to suggest. Cialdini is the author of Influence and I’ve been reading his follow-up book Yes! 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to Be Persuasive. Each of the 50 ways is given its own chapter in the easy to read book and number 14 is titled: “How can one small step help your influence take a giant leap?”
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How Green Was My Travel

August 10th, 2010 | by Euro RSCG Worldwide Knowledge Exchange,

Excerpted from KNOW: The Future of Travel, available to employees and clients across the Euro RSCG Worldwide network.

Whereas not so long ago the issue of “going green” was one of exhortation and persuasion, now it is more a matter of shade, degree, and implementation. Most all constituencies in the travel and tourism (T&T) sector—consumers, providers of lodging and transport, tourism authorities and operators—would agree in the abstract on the good of green, but are still challenged by how best to integrate green goals in terms of acceptable compromises related to comfort, ease, and the bottom line.

Varying Shades of Green

The most successful green practices are bottom up, well integrated, and transparent, with buy-in from all stakeholders. It’s a far cry from the early days of eco-consciousness, when hotels were able to earn green cred simply by placing small cards in rooms alerting guests that, in the interest of sustainability, sheets would not be laundered each day unless requested. Now that leading companies from Walmart to GE have shown that sustainability bolsters the bottom line, more travel and hospitality brands have made a commitment to go green all over. In one example of where the industry appears to be headed, every room at Seattle’s Best Western Executive Inn and Best Western Loyal Inn is an “EcoRoom,” meaning it features products that are energy and water efficient, waste reducing, nontoxic, and/or biodegradable. Reservation agents have been trained to discuss the hotels’ green program with prospective guests. Other T&T brands are approaching “green” from a more personal perspective: New York’s Premier Hotel uses special purification products and techniques to ensure each of its “Premier Pure” rooms is at least 98 percent free of bacteria and viruses. Marriott and Hilton are among the large chains entering the “hypoallergenic accommodations” space.
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What’s the Opposite of Schadenfreude?

July 21st, 2010 | by Ann O'Reilly, Content Director, Euro RSCG Worldwide Knowledge Exchange, and coauthor of Consumed: Rethinking Business in the Era of Mindful Spending

I moved away from San Francisco about a year before the Loma Prieta earthquake. Granted, we had the occasional jolt at our new home in Los Angeles, but nothing sufficiently destructive or alarming to get people to glance up from the latest issue of Variety much less gather in the streets. And while I was happy to have escaped the hassles of power disruptions and shattered glass, I was also a bit envious of my friends in the Bay Area who called with tales of what they had experienced and what others had endured. These feelings didn’t stem from some latent death wish or craving for excitement; rather, they were a twinge of longing for a shared experience powerful enough to create common cause and lifelong bonds. These friends had been through something, however peripherally, and, for a while at least, they were drawn closer to the strangers who populated the streets around them. Anyone who has been through an extended blackout knows how much friendlier a supermarket can become when everyone is filling their carts with bottled water and batteries and nonperishable food items. The shared hardship (however slight) gives people a sense of connection absent from regular store visits.
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The New Rich: What Success and Wealth Mean to Consumers in 2010

July 19th, 2010 | by Andrew Benett, CEO, Arnold Worldwide, and Global CSO, Havas Worldwide, and Ann O'Reilly, Content Director, Euro RSCG Worldwide Knowledge Exchange

All year long Forbes comes out with lists of the world’s richest people—the youngest billionaires, the most eligible billionaires, the richest women, the wealthiest families on each continent. People find it fascinating to track the waning and waxing of personal wealth, watching as perennial front-runners Bill Gates and Warren Buffett are eclipsed by a Mexican telecom titan and chased by various silver-spoon princes of Asia and the Middle East. To be among the world’s wealthiest is the stuff of many a daydream.
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| Tags: Andrew Benett, Ann O'Reilly, Arnold, Consumed, Euro RSCG, Forbes, Havas, mindfulness, New Consumer, simplification, success, wealth
Post a Comment | in Consumed, New Consumer, Purposeful Pleasure, Uncategorized

Posts Tagged ‘mindfulness’

Will Rogers Would Approve

The Start of Something New?

Can Small Changes Lead to Big Ones?

How Green Was My Travel

What’s the Opposite of Schadenfreude?

The New Rich: What Success and Wealth Mean to Consumers in 2010

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