When it comes to "the future of experience" in the marketplace, alternative cultures are leading the way
From the Journee video
Many folks from the creative, media, advertising and marketing agencies are often in touch with us. Aware of their power and skills to shape and mould intent and desire, they’re looking for opportunities - via A/UK - to put these competencies to other uses than the strictly commercial.
Great examples of this would be mission-marketer Phil Teer’s embrace of universal basic income, and Alessia Clusini at Trybes Agency getting Pat Kane (our co-initiator) to contribute to her most recent report.
So we’re sensitized to what thinking about consumer futures can tell us about how we get to a sustainable, balanced world - given how interested in novelty and innovation most human begins are. These reports can be real indicators.
Here’s a great example, which we’re going to sample from in this blog: The Future of Experiences (pdf download), a report issued by the consultancy The House of Beautiful Business.
Like the Trybes report above, HOBB are grappling with what the pandemic era (backed up by climate breakdown) could possibly mean for existing business models. Ones that rested on humans swarming through physical retail and was largely heedless of the material externalities they generated.
We'll run with each of their big trends, and pick out just a few elements that accord with A/UK’s agenda (laid out at the front of our website).
Make Distance Beautiful
Fascinating and utopian - imagine this relationship to a world-class performer becoming a norm. What kind of transformative experiences could result?
Digital Experience Playgrounds
At first sight, Journee is a poetic attempt to create a beautiful virtual space through which interested parties might wander, to glory in its wonders, while the outside world labours under the pandemic…
Until you come to the big pavilion filled with a giant sneaker (see still from this promo video). And then, it’s just another mall. How much genuine play in such playgrounds?
Conscious Hedonism
The new psychedelic culture has been coming into our orbit for a while - but interesting to see that it’s going thoroughly overground with professional development centres like Synthesis, backed by considerable investment capital (see this New Atlantic piece). Yet like the rest of the items in this section, there seems to be a lack of being “conscious” about the carbon and materials expended to enable this hedonism - continuous flight experiences, satirical malls and future-retro hotels built in Las Vegas…
A LOCAL UNIVERSE
Our interest in the concept of a “local universe” is obviously echoed by our investigation into “cosmo-localism” over these last few years - where localities can find themselves networked to each other across distances, sharing practices and digital resources. KoDorf and Willa are both new to us, though it’s unclear from the websites whether they are intentional or gated communities (or perhaps, of course, a fusion of both).
Some talk of the trickle-down theory of innovation - where elites adopt novel lifestyles and practices on the basis of their accumulated resources (financial and cultural capital), these tastes eventually becoming more widespread.
What we find interesting about this report is that the elite tastes seem to be chasing grass-roots and alternative cultural and lifestyle practices - trying to imagine commercial models that tap into appetites for authentic experience, balanced living, durable and non-destructive pleasure. If so, who really has the power to shape “the future of experience”?