I got inspired Ulla-Maaria's statements of handicrafts, and stated a similar manifest (draft) of the economy of everyday life.

THE ECONOMY OF EVERYDAY LIFE

1. People are foremost practitioners of their everyday lives
2. People want to maintain structures, and habits, and see many times technology and services as disruptive
3. People also innovate their everyday life, and find it valuable to create new forms of living
4. Companies can support their customers everyday life, but are not in most cases centralized, and important
5. Companies take the everyday life of people as the starting point for their business, and aim to “normalize” themselves to fit into it.
6. Current market logic is not adapted to serve the economy of everyday life.
7. A market logic that takes practice of everyday life as the unit of analysis, and object for activities is needed.
8. The economy of everyday life can be the basis for voluminous, stable and faster income, but also for more well-being and democracy.

This is only a draft and will now be tested, and hopefully discussed with you ; )

Adult imitation

During my studies of cruises as practice i identified
the practice of adult imitation that appears to
be suprisingly valuable for children onboard of the
vessel. Adult imitation refer to a form of play in which
children "become independent" and "participate in
adult doings". You can see from the image below
a child who used her adult-like handbag
in very symbolic terms when shopping. For me the
use of handbags was one way of constructing an
imitation of adulthood.

I just bumped into this picture, which reminded
about my dissertation.. This study was done already
in the winter 2005/2006.

Work and Play

Ulla-Maaria Mutanen has an interesting article in the Finnish Design Yearbook 2006 on the importance of play. I could not agree more about the point that both production and consumption are discussed with terms of work, whereas play is assumed non-productive, not important and naive. This makes us use concepts describing work-like activities when trying to conceptualise both production and consumption in processual terms. At least In my ethnographic studies, I can very clearly see that people are players, not workers, in their everyday life. Especially men ; ).

Ulla-Maaria has a really interesting blog, especially the stuff about handicrafts fascinated me. This all is a part of Consumer 2.0 movement. Knitting as a creative (not productive- comparison to above) practice is interesting.

http://ullamaaria.typepad.com/hobbyprincess/

Elisa and ethnography

The Finnish tele operator went public on the 25th of October, this wednesday about a large program for studying their customers' practices with the help of ethnography. Over 400 employees have been trained to do fast ethnography, and will do that before christmas. The objective is to create a "architecture of everyday life" that can be used as an starting point for business development. An article saying this was published at least in Hufvudstadsbladet the 26th of October on page 16-17. I commented the program in the role of being the coordinator for this program.

Idea®2006

Some notes about today.

Idea®2006 was held today at Marina Congress center.
I was kindly invited to participate in a panel discussion about future trends in marketing. The following person participated in the discussion:

Marco Mäkinen, strategiajohtaja, SEK & Grey
Anne Lehmuskoski, markkinointijohtaja, Nordea Pankki
Juha Voutilainen, markkinointijohtaja, Markkinointi-Instituutti
+ me

Please see the link for other parts of the program (only in Finnish).
http://www.mark.fi/html/idea2006/

I introduced the idea of "the economy of everyday life", and the importance for understanding mundane consumption as a basis for marketing decisions. I was also trying to point out both paradigmatic and methodological changes this withholds.

The panel was enthusiastic to discuss the theme, and I would say that the 45 minute panel was mainly focusing on this topic. I also got some very positive comments concerning the topic from the audience (500 marketers in Finland attended the event). At least 10 of the participants told me personally about their interest in the topic. Especially ad and design agencies seems to be eager to find new perspectives to more traditional perspectives to marketing.

I got really even more thrilled with the concept of "the Economy of everyday life", "Arkitalous" in Finnish, and discussed the topic with two of the people I highly respect. Professor Kaj Storbacka was really of the opinion that this concept could bring new perspective to marketing. Also Professor Mika Pantzar commented the wording by saying that the content of "economy of everyday life" is in english literature usually referred to as a "moral economy".The concept of moral economy may not be the best one. "Arkitalous" would perhaps describe the domain in better ways. Let us see what we will do about this.

I already changed the title of my book according to this discussion into "the economy of everyday life - designing consumption practice", and feel quite satisfied with this change, although it might have some consequences for the content of the book.

I spoke also at a Vectia Forum (an event arranged by the firm I am a partner of) together with my colleague Heli Arantola, who released her book on customer insight earlier this week. She talked about strategy work, and the needed insight for being agile in competitive environment. I claimed and reasoned that the understanding of consumption practice would perhaps function as a platform for scenario work concerning different forms of consumption. I claimed that practice may be a rather stable platform for having FORESIGHT if one decide to build holistic and historical insight of certain practices in given environments. This is now something I will put more energy on in the future.

This is the model I have been working on. The point with the model below is to center the practice and develop a kind of new 4P model (which is not 4ps, but anyway) that start from the notion of an existing practice, and the ways the company can support/empower/ reconfigure the current practice.I have found this very useful. I will add some cases later.

Market share vs. Practice embeddedness

Market thinking, as it is used in most places, namely as a definition of which products, geographies and customers the company is involved in does not give a very innovative approach to finding new market opportunities.

This has been discussed quite often in different context; one should try to find new ways of depicting markets, and the real opportunities there are in a market. One suggestion is that market share is only relevant when doing comparisons with competitors in the same industry. More important for long term growth would be to build a sort of embeddedness in the consumption practices one can vision as a lucrative market.

Embeddedness is measured by presence and relevance, whereas market share is purely a reactive measure of how succesful one has been in a given industry structure. This may sound as theorizing, but yet (I have seen it) as an crucial question for many businesses today.

Still working on my book on practice oriented marketing.

The working title is now:

EVERYDAY LIFE AND MARKETING
Designing consumption practices

.. and the table of contents (for now)

PROLOGUE 3

WHO SHOULD READ THIS? 4
THE STRUCTURE OF THE BOOK 4
IMPORTANT REMARKS 6

INTRODUCTION: FROM NOUNS TO VERBS 7
PRACTICE FOCUS AS AN ALTERNATIVE 8
BUSINESS OPPORTUNITIES FROM THE APPROACH 13

QUESTIONING THE LOGIC OF MARKETING 16
FROM MARKETS AS CUSTOMERS TO MARKETS AS PRACTICES 18
FROM PLEASING CUSTOMER NEEDS TO INNOVATING NEW FORMS OF PRACTICES 20
FROM PERSONALITIES TO PROCESSUAL MARKET UNDERSTANDING 21
FROM THE “VOICE” OF THE CUSTOMER TO ETHNOGRAPHIC UNDERSTANDING 24

PRACTICES BROUGHT INTO FOCUS 26
PRACTICES – DEFINITION OF THE CONCEPT 27
THE EVOLUTION OF PRACTICES 30
CONSUMPTION PRACTICE IS EMBEDDED WITH VALUE 32
CONCLUSIONS 33

THE ECONOMY OF EVERYDAY LIFE 35
VOLUME, STABILITY AND UNREVEALED OPPORTUNITIES 36
MARKETS IN PRACTICAL TERMS 38
SEGMENTATION OF CUSTOMERS, OR PRACTICE 42
THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS NEW MARKETS 44
ALLOWING THE MUNDANE TO APPEAR 45

SERVING PRACTICES, NOT CUSTOMERS 48
SERVICES AS IMPROVED PRACTICES 48
THE PROBLEMATIC CONCEPT OF BENEFIT 51
CUSTOMER TAKING ON PRACTICES 53

PRACTICE DESIGN™ 55
FITTING ELEMENTS OF CONSUMPTION TOGETHER 57
Tools/ toys 58
Image/ competence 60
Physical space 62
Customer involvement 63
PRACTICE DESIGN – THE WORKING PROCESS 65

SUMMARY: A TOOL OR PARADIGM? 66

ENDNOTES 67

The point I have tried to introduce is that services and products are always used in practical situations. This would mean that there is also a need to understand customers in practial terms as "practitioners" of their lives.

The more I reason around this theme, the more clear it becomes that the consumer is in most companies constructed in very abstract terms. Consumers, and customers seems to be something that is impossible to discuss about in direct and concrete terms.

Is that really the case, or is it rather a matter of the perspective and mindset of marketers? In many of my projects, I have been suprised by the clarity a practice approach can bring. Consumers are maybe not after all fragmented and paradoxical mixture of ideas and value, but
in many cases parts of unified practical arrangements, possible to understand and build upon.