Desire: Connecting With What Customers Want

We have to deal with an amazing internal commotion: competing, disembodied voices, all battling for top-of-mind attention; a constant blitz of stimulation; the grinding gears of brain exertion; relentless, after-hours brain spinning. In the United States, the media spends $1,861 per person to transport messages to each individual. More than half of American adults (90% of older adults) say that their brains continue to churn at night when they should be sleeping. With so much internal pressure cooking, stress and anxiety are reaching cosmic proportions. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention state unequivocally that 80% of our medical expenditures are now stress related.

In a world where there are fewer hard truths and clear-cut answers -- where reality itself has become so difficult to figure out -- people seek meaning through narrative and archetype. Tell us a story, weave us a tale -- we long to find instruction in the mysteries of our lives. BMW woos buyers through the experience of short movies. Bulgari commissions a novel by Fay Weldon titled The Bulgari Connection. Movies such as A.I. create business-building groundswell through participatory games on the Internet that invite viewers to live the story. The long tale is the new sound bite; narrative has more teeth than slogan. The truth of the story really doesn't matter. Today, we see life as a choice of spins: It's the journey that gives us pleasure. Purposeful deception will always spell disaster, but pleasurable spinning is a road to success.

3. Peace of mind has become the ultimate consumer good. Which means that marketers must become healers.

Consumers who once put houses, cars, and gizmos at the top of their aspirational lists now cite "a safe, happy home" and "peace of mind" as their number-one priorities. People are looking for an experience that goes by many names: the zone of the athlete, the inner bliss of a religious person. For some, it's a Calgon moment, when you slip into a warm bath and go "Ahhhh." I call it the State of O, for optimal state of mind.

All of the most important consumer trends can be understood by looking at this state-of-mind calculus, where people make choices based on how it makes their heads feel. Your product must still be fabulous. It must still be priced right. But those are the prerequisites for getting into the game. Where the possibility for real differentiation comes in is not in the product itself but in how you collaborate with the consumer's need to heal.

Some advertisers are already offering up a kind of superficial, tranquility-theme-park response to our newest, biggest consumer need. Origins makes a killing selling a very specific kind of hope in a bottle: a lotion called Peace of Mind and a shampoo called Clear Head. Pepsico concocts drinks with names such as Zen Blend and Karma. Walk into a Duane-Reade pharmacy, and it's very hard to find a plain-old generic bubble bath. Instead, you find Tranquilities, Euphorics, Healing Gardens, and Bath Therapy. This is pretty superficial, but it shows that we are taking tentative steps into a new era: the era of state-of-mind marketing. This is the new imperative: The marketer must now be a healer.

4. Besides peace of mind, people desire a sense of importance. In a world where everybody knows too much, everybody wants to matter.

Our craving for a happy balance inside our heads is fueling several big trends. Chief among them is luxe populi, the quest to stay visible in an increasingly invisible world by becoming one of the "important people." Luxe populi is a deeply held, even militant belief that we are all entitled to the finest, the best designed, the coolest.

Good-taste gurus such as Emeril Lagasse and Martha Stewart have helped midwife this new elitism by peddling a kind of prestige lifestyle to the masses. That, in turn, has led to a surge in mass-at-class offerings among mainstream and high-end retailers alike, whether it's Wal-Mart adding Godiva ice cream to its superstore menu or Donna Karan and Giorgio Armani introducing bridge lines that make high fashion available at lower prices. Luxury marketing is no longer about selling to the few but about selling to as many as possible.

Target is way out in front of this trend. It has seized onto the notion that art is a badge of status. Target has introduced a new department called Framed Art. At target.com, you can buy a framed Van Gogh, Picasso, or Monet print for between $100 and $200. One of the categories for Framed Art is Over the Sofa. You get your furniture at Ikea, and then you go to Target and buy your Picasso to hang over the sofa. And the next day, you tell your friends at the hairdresser's all about it: "I just bought a Van Gogh. I found it online. I'm an insider."