As America emerges from the worst economic calamity since the Great Depression, all the artificial demand based on the value of inflated assets and a mirage of wealth has disappeared. But in the space opened by the crisis, our society is rediscovering its strength by reappraising its consumerism.
We are moving from mindless to mindful consumption, where values now define consumer loyalty. In this new climate, “consumers” become “customers” and, more important, “people” whose needs mandate that companies deliver value and values. And like-minded businesses are mashing up old-fashioned American virtues with progressive technologies to form a solid foundation that is remaking capitalism, and America for the better.
Nowhere is this more evident than in Detroit, Michigan. At sunrise on the first Friday in December 2009, a film crew from a European television network blocks the oak-paneled entry hall at the Inn on Ferry Street in Detroit with a pile of black equipment bags that hold tripods, lights, and boom microphones.
After a week in pursuit of “America in decline,” as one of the crew describes their mission, they had captured the “shocking” story of Detroit circa 2010 and were heading home like big-game hunters with their trophies. “No one would believe this was the story of the Motor City,” he says, “but it’s a disaster and we have the pictures.”
The story that the film crew bagged was the easiest “economy in crisis” piece any journalist could pursue. Long in economic retreat, the median home price in Detroit dropped to below $8,000. The 80,000-seat Silverdome stadium sold for $583,000—roughly the equivalent of a studio apartment in Manhattan. Local unemployment hovered at 28.9 percent.
Far more compelling than the statistics was the city’s landscape: abandoned factories, vacant commercial buildings, and neighborhoods where three-quarters of the homes have been boarded, burned, or bulldozed. In the most desolate residential areas, you could drive for blocks and see few signs of life except for stray dogs and, occasionally, a coyote. Some of the houses had been abandoned for so long that small trees and vines have grown to cover entire walls.
Detroit’s poignant decay has become a favorite subject of photographers who always seem to make special note of decrepit landmarks: the Michigan Theater building, where cars now park beneath the ornate lobby arches, and the hollowed-out Michigan Central Railroad Depot.
Once one of the great railroad stations in the country, the eighteen-story building is now gutted and barricaded behind a security fence that couldn’t keep thieves from tearing the copper wire, pipes, and anything else of value out of the building. It looms over the west side like some science-fiction monster.
Given the apocalyptic panorama, any first-time visitor who landed in Detroit in late 2009 and drove around the city for the first time would half-expect to see marauding Mad Max figures come roaring down the street on handmade battlewagons powered by Allison diesel engines. The decay and loss were writ large across the city, and you didn’t need a TV cameraman’s eye to see it.
But if you looked more closely, you could find something that most outsiders miss: a Detroit that is vibrant, creative, and optimistic. This is the part of the Detroit story most visiting journalists never see —or acknowledge.
It is a thriving business in a place that others consider a wasteland, and it represents an indestructible human spirit that arose in the very depths of the Great Recession in the place that was hit hardest of all. It was also the first stop in a remarkable adventure that revealed that a hard-luck city could also be a modern frontier of opportunity.
In inner city Detroit, a resurgent civic pride is uniting a small but undeterred community of citizen-entrepreneurs set on rebuilding their city with new industries and local cooperation. While others see a post-apocalyptic landscape, artists, small business owners and urban farmers have flocked to Detroit to take advantage of inexpensive land and limited municipal oversight to create a grassroots marketplace that is rising like saplings from a clear-cut forest.
With low-cost loans from the non-profit University Cultural Center Association, Torya Blanchard opened Good Girls Go to Paris, a tiny crepe restaurant to share her love of all things French with her hometown, Detroit. Serving low-cost but high-quality meals, the eatery quickly became profitable. The shop also provides jobs and a light of hope in a city where shuttered shops outnumber those that are occupied.
Charles Sorel opened his little French bistro, Le Petit Zinc, after moving with his family from Brooklyn to Detroit. He had been successful with his cafe in Brooklyn and wanted to try his hand in this new environment. This welcoming little eatery — something like a family kitchen where the coffeepot is always on — makes for the perfect start-up business in any community, especially one that is short of comforts. Le Petit Zinc offers, besides delicious French cuisine, cheer and optimism to its patrons.
Patrick Crouch of Earthworks Farms has helped turn vacant blocks into productive farms producing everything from salad greens to jarred preserves. Earthworks not only feeds people in an area where grocery stores are scarce, it is helping to change the character of devastated neighborhoods, and raise inner-city employment.
Crouch, who is sponsored by local Capuchin monks, teaches other city farmers which crops yield the greatest profit. He says a handful of properties now under cultivation will soon be profitable without any further assistance.
A Quiet Revolution
Detroit is just one of the cities we visited and just one of numerous markets where Young & Rubicam has completed a two-year polling of values, attitudes and shopping behaviors of 16,000 Americans quarterly that drive a nationally representative sample. We see a quiet but profound consumer revolution that is remaking our economy and offering substantial opportunities for businesses.
There are considerable value shifts, which can be recognized in today’s consumer behavior. We have identified 55 percent of Americans, who in light of the Great Recession are aligning their spending with their values to promote quality, responsibility, and human kindness through the power of their consumption.
These people are “voting with their dollars” every day, by using their purse strings as a form of self-expression in support of bedrock American virtues, such as thrift, faith, ingenuity, hard work, community and self-reliance— in order to build new lives of purpose and connection.
Seventy-one percent of Americans now make it a point to buy brands from companies whose values are similar to their own, while 69 percent who are now armed with the power of technology and social media feel “they and their friends can change corporate and institutional behavior by supporting those that ‘do the right thing’.”
Through their lessons, they have convinced us that loyalty is changing in commerce, and that shared values are the new terrain for opportunity. In our data, trust has declined in institutions by more than 50 percent, while a “trust virus” has spread through categories. This is a time of reappraisal not only for brands, but the categories in which they operate.
This massive movement of thoughtful spenders is blind to education, age, income and geography. They are both highly educated and not, with 21 percent college educated and 23 percent with a high school degree or less.
They are rich and poor and equally represent Republicans, Democrats, and Independents (28, 31, and 41 percent each). This values-led movement embraces people from all across the nation as well — 17 percent are from the Northeast, 23 percent are from the Midwest, 36 percent are from the South, and 24 percent are from the West.
Prescient companies are adapting to new consumer tastes, where values like ethics, community and self-reliance are unifying ideals. These include large multinationals like Ford, Microsoft and Walmart, as well as new companies being birthed in the post-crisis age, such as Etsy, Sun Run, RecycleBank, GroupOn, Blu Homes and others who are by example, demonstrating the changing rules for brand strategy in the post-recession economy.
