Desire: Connecting With What Customers Want

Call it what you will: the Information Economy. The Networked Economy. The defining reality of competition and marketing is that companies are in the Overload Economy. Sure, the stock market is down and growth is sputtering. But there's still too much of everything. Almost every industry is struggling with overcapacity: too many goods chasing too few customers. Almost every customer is struggling with overcommunication: too many ads targeting a limited attention span. So how do firms stand out from the crowd, break through the clutter -- and connect with what customers truly desire? Melinda Davis, founder and CEO of the Next Group, is working on the answers.

A quick-witted woman with a contagious laugh, Davis is a blue-sky thinker who stakes out the future for companies such as AT&T, Corning, Diageo, L'Oréal, Merck, and Viacom. In 1996, she launched the Human Desire Project, an ambitious initiative with a unique commercial twist. The goal is to figure out the major motivators of the 21st century, to glean what people want and why they want it, and to come up with insights that will let companies connect with consumers in deeper, more meaningful ways.

Unlike most hired-gun visionaries, Davis does not believe that it's her job alone to predict what's next. To get a line on the future, she works with the people who are creating it: scholars, artists, research engineers, policy wonks, marketing gurus, award-winning screenwriters, trailblazing educators, CEOs, choreographers, high-tech wizards -- dozens of "peripheral visionaries" who are high-level experts in their fields.

Davis's years of work have produced a trove of insights about the new sources of value in business, the new logic of consumer demand, and the future of marketing. Last fall, in a dispatch from the future titled The New Culture of Desire (Simon & Schuster, 2002), she presented a summary of her insights. Since then, she has been supplementing her research, working with clients, and turning her ideas into real-world innovations. In an interview with Fast Company, Davis offered, in her own words, ideas for marketers who want to connect with the hearts and minds of their customers.

1. Let's get metaphysical. When it comes to what people want and how people buy, it really is all in your head.

Our whole socioeconomic structure is no longer just about manufacturing things; it's also about selling ideas. Our work is largely mind driven: intellectual capital, the power of image, brand identity, consumer confidence, investor courage -- all of these intangible things are quite real. Some of our most valued products never actually become objects, or they become objects in a peripheral way. Take software. It's an idea that's created in an imaginational space, and sometimes it's sold by being downloaded through thin air. How many times a day do we use the term "brand image"? Brand image is a company's most valuable commodity, but we can't hold it in our hands. We are living and working through a world that can only be experienced in the human imagination.

All of this started with television. That's when we first began to experience the world not through the physical experience of reality but through the image of reality on a TV screen. But even then, we still spent most of our lives in the physical world. Now we spend almost all of our lives living through a kind of primal screen. The screen has become our main environment, be it the TV screen, the PC screen, the PDA screen, the cell-phone screen, or the GPS screen. Thanks to the screen, we've all become one degree removed from the physical world.

Meanwhile, what's going on inside our heads keeps getting more complicated. There's a new fascination with the Sybil syndrome -- not as a psychiatric disorder, but as an aspirational value. People are dividing themselves into multiple, virtual identities as a way to handle an increasingly complex, chaotic world. Consumers are enthusiastic about products that allow them to switch identities at will. Just in time to capitalize on the multiplexing trend is a makeup line called -- appropriately enough -- Too Faced. Sony's popular role-playing game EverQuest has nearly 400,000 registered users -- who have created more than 7 million characters. At the 2002 World Economic Forum, one of the most popular seminars was called "How to Become Somebody Else." The implication for marketers: Each of your customers is actually many customers fitting into multiple segmentation models.

2. Those voices in your head? They're loud -- and getting louder.