Your Heritage is Showing

photocredit: New York Times

We are so accustomed to being sold to, marketed to and targeted with flashy ads and glossy images telling us we need the next, bigger, better thing. It's not surprising that society is beginning to evolve ever more sophisticated tastes and complicated purchasing habits. We're not impervious, but marketers have to get smarter about how they sell us things, how they reach us, how to segment and target us, and how to make a message and a story that we respond to. But I must say, the next "thing" in personal design and fashion is something that should really appeal to people, because it's about you, not them.

Heritage

One of the wonderful things about being who we are is we all have a backstory, and we all come from somewhere. You're going to start seeing people incorporating pieces of their personal heritage and history into how they decorate their homes, the styles they wear, and what they purchase. Expect to see sites like voicesintime.com, and ancestry.com pretty much just explode in popularity, as well as DIY bloggers and sites seeing a spike in interest as people take on projects such as incorporating their family tartan into throw pillows, preserving and framing old photos, and restoring antique furniture and fixtures.

But I'm going to take this one further....

People really want to buy things that mean something, and they want to tell a story about the items they own, and allow the items they own to make a statement about who they are. Product lines with a compelling story around them, such as Tom's Shoes, and lifestyle brands that make a statement about our values are going to increase in popularity. If you manage a product line, or are thinking of launching a new one, you'd best consider how to incorporate social responsibility and a values-based story into your product and how you market it. The future is all about our past. Where we came from, who we are, and what we believe.