Difference is the most common thing in America nowadays. Everywhere you look, what you see is a kaleidoscope of difference and diversity.
Look at household structure. For the first time in U.S. history, the so-called traditional family — a married couple with kids at home — comprises less than 25% of U.S. households. Non-family households are almost one-third of the total, a 50 % increase since 1970. Multigenerational homes with three or more generations of parents and children living together now make up 4% of U.S. households.
Or look at race and ethnicity. Minorities like Hispanics, African Americans, Native Americans, Asians and others grew 43% from 1990 to 2000. Not to mention the 6.8 million people who checked more than one box for race in the last census. The Hispanic sector alone grew 58% and now constitutes 13% of the U.S. population. This burgeoning community is doubly important because Hispanics are a diverse group who bring with them a mix of cross-national experiences because of the immigration that is such an important factor behind Hispanic population growth.
Or look at popular culture. The number of pop music genres is huge and growing, many of which, like swing music and jam bands, reprise old styles rather than presenting something brand-new. Musicians sample and fuse funk and punk, country and rap, hip-hop and electro pop. Fusion foods show up on every menu. Miss America contestants sport piercings and tattoos. Long hairs, short hairs, shaved heads, Mohawks, spikes and beehives can all be found in the same high school cafeteria on any given day. Or in the same office building or shopping center. Anything written, filmed, invented or produced at any time, anywhere, is accessible in real time online or on TV.
The result is a staggering diversity of styles, forms, fashions and innovations. And not just diversity but a jumble of diversity. Not a checkerboard but a collage. A new diversity perhaps best characterized as “cablinasian,” the term Tiger Woods used to answer the question Oprah Winfrey asked him about his ethnicity. Cablinasian is a syllable or two from Caucasian, black, American Indian and Asian, all of which are in Tiger's heritage. The background of life today is exactly this mix-and-match sort of diversity in which everything is blended with everything else to produce a profusion of things that are totally new and often unexpected.
Brands must find their way through this maze of difference and diversity. Direct marketers have blazed that trail with personalization, mass customization and one-to-one, approaches that entail an inherent respect for the unique wants and needs of individuals. They're passionate about celebrating, rewarding and satisfying diversity and individual difference. DMers respond to consumers by producing ever more varieties to satisfy ever more individual tastes.
Direct marketers believe fundamentally that there is value in diversity. This is more than just good business; this is the right thing to do. It is a model for society at large. As our communities struggle with difference and diversity and fight against prejudice, parochialism and intolerance, the marketing lesson is clear — there is more profit in rewarding difference than in demanding conformity, more return from embracing difference than from ignoring the ways in which people are different, more success in welcoming different kinds of people into the franchise than from disenfranchising people who are different.
The demands on direct marketers to satisfy difference and diversity are growing. In particular, tomorrow's diversity will be rooted in a different cultural expectation — self-invention. More and more, consumers want to have a say. They want to create things for themselves, not just consume what's offered. Consumers expect brands and direct marketers to facilitate this by sharing — if not giving up — control over pricing, design and messaging. Just look at the consumers of music, travel and fashion, among others: Self-invention has arrived. Satisfying the diversity of tomorrow is not about direct marketers customizing something that fits, it's about consumers customizing it for themselves.
This is a big challenge for direct marketing, because today, DMers respond to difference and diversity not by sharing control with consumers but by exerting even more control in the marketplace. Direct marketers design what they believe is best for different consumers rather than empowering consumers to design it for themselves. While good direct marketing includes a consumer feedback loop, all of the control still rests with DMers. Consumers can only complain, they cannot create.
The accelerating pace of difference and diversity will make it much more imperative that direct marketers facilitate self-invention. Difference begets more difference. New styles age faster and fashions at the fringes grow further apart. Indeed, young adults have come of age awash in surfing and sampling.
What will be different about tomorrow is difference itself. As difference and diversity accelerate to an explosive velocity it will be impossible for direct marketers to anticipate every consumer need in advance, no matter how great the investment in studying and modeling consumer attitudes and behavior. The only way to stay responsive is to begin learning how to profit from relinquishing control.
J. WALKER SMITH is president of Yankelovich Inc., Atlanta.
CRAIG WOOD is president of Yankelovich's Monitor MindBase division in Chapel Hill, NC.
