I’m a big believer in the power the language we speak has over our perception of the world. Every language has its own idioms; every idiom is a glimpse into the heart of a culture.

In a recent talk on Collaborative Consumption, social innovator, Rachel Botsman, summed up 20th Century consumption as ‘keeping up with the Joneses’; post-war, baby boomer, hyper-consumption driven by heavy-handed marketing and the imprint of ownership and one-upmanship on the social psyche.

In her book, ‘What’s Mine Is Yours: The Rise of Collaborative Consumption’, co-authored by Roo Rogers, Botsman argues that we are currently undergoing a generational shift in the way we consume, moving away from ‘keeping up with the Joneses’ to, for want of a better expression, ‘keeping in with the Joneses’.

Put bluntly, we all got fed up of feeling like a society of isolated individuals and used the internet, and more specifically Web 2:0, to start connecting with one another again; to get away from corporations and back to our peers for “swapping, sharing, bartering, trading and renting”.

You only have to look at the growth of online auctions (eBay), house swaps (Airbnb), car pools (Liftshare), garden dating (Landshare) and so on to see that the new generation is no longer consumed by ownership. Possession has almost become a bind for people; we simply want products for their uses as and when we need them.

So how does this affect brands? Well, for a start, as the Harvard Business Review puts it, the value proposition needs to change. BMW has already jumped on board, offering its own car sharing programme.

It sounds harmonious in theory, but surely there are side-effects. Illegal file sharing; isn’t that collaborative consumption taken to anarchistic levels?

And will people become collaboratively consumed? Does this spell the end of employment contracts?

I find collaborative consumption inherently appealing, but I still feel uncertainty about it. And that’s why I’ve written this post, to encourage debate and conflict and hopefully help a wonderful concept grow.

WHAT’S MINE IS YOURS from rachel botsman on Vimeo.

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• Rentalship Is The New Ownership in the Networked Age (wired.com)

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The traditional tupperware party

In this week’s New Media Age we find eBay talking down social commerce. This seems a bit strange to me given it is the leading light in social retail.

Let’s think about that for a minute, the online auction site has made its name and a multi-billion dollar business, by bringing people together on a single site and giving them a platform from which they can communicate with each other in order to sell to one another.

As brands and merchants see the 500 million (almost) Facebook users as a huge potential customer base, they are building on their existing brand presence and already engaged fans to promote products and offers. Sound slightly familiar?

It is no wonder eBay’s nose is a little out of joint. By flipping over to page three of the same publication, we see that P&G has chosen to sell its Max Factor beauty products through its Facebook page. What the online auction site wouldn’t give to be the online channel-of-choice for such a brand.

The retail channel now needs to work out how it can maintain its position, and how it can do better than the brand itself, in selling to the end customer. I have to say that if this is eBay PR, it is unlikely to change the steady increase in social retail. The infamous Tupperware party is coming to a social networking site near you.

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