Over on The Business Filter, Maura Welch had a post yesterday on the notion of "Brand Abstinence" which has been put forth by an outfit called Piers Fawkes, which I suppose I should have heard from but haven't.
Piers Fawkes predicts that 2007 will see a rise in "brand abstinence," a trend caused by a mix of ethical consumerism and brand disappointment in which consumers will develop apathy for new product purchases. Some companies will try to offer us guilt-free purchases (ex: products made from recycled materials, the Prius) but Fawkes believes a rising number of consumers will simply recycle, re-craft or maintain and retain products instead of buying new ones. When eco-conscious products are not available more and more people are saying, "Why should I replace my phone so often? Why upgrade my PC, my car?"
Maura ends on a note that all this junk ends up in a poison-seeping landfill in China, so good thing if we stop overconsuming crap we don't need.
I'm not - never have been, never will be - a 100% practitioner of brand abstinence. I like stuff - and urban life - too much to toss it all over and move to a cabin where I spin my own wool and use my personal, ah, droppings, to fertilize my root garden. Where I squeeze berries to make ink and brush my teeth (or will it be tooth?) with a twig.
But I've never been a major league acquirer. I drive an aging, beat-up, but high MPG car. My furniture is aging and beat-up, too. My boom-box is outsized and you really need to lean on the lid to get it to start playing a CD. My cell phone could conceivably do text messaging, but I don't. My PDA is a separate device entirely and does no more than it did when I got it seven years ago (i.e., keep my calendar).
I will likely break any Brand Abstinence vow I might take by getting an iPod this year. But I can convince myself that it's something of a necessity. I make a long haul commute from Boston to Syracuse every few months and, given that I was too cheap to get a CD player in my car, I have to rely on my tape deck - and my aging and beat-up tapes to get me through the trip. Half of the tapes I like are worn out - they're probably 20 years old - so I kinda-sorta-need an iPod. But I'm happy to live with my 20 year old kitchen that's so dated it might actually be hip again at some point.
And I think that Brand Abstinence could well become an exciting new parlor game as we all sit around trying to out-do each other with brands that EVERYBODY should be abstaining from. Dibs on Hummer.
The only thing that keeps me from getting wildly excited about Brand Abstinence taking off is my fear that our economy is so wobbily based on our insane consumption habits that it'll crumble if we stop spending our Sundays worshiping in the 21st century cathedrals - Best Buy, WalMart, and Target - buying junk that's already obsolete before we get it home and manage to claw-hammer our way through the plastic "clam shells" it's all packaged in.
And then there's that pit-of-the-stomach feeling that this "trend", if it materializes as anything more than an infinitesimally small blip on the consume-dar screen to begine with, will die fast and be replaced by the next new thing.
Which would be too bad. No, more than too bad. It will actually be terrible if at some point soon we don't take real stock of how much stuff we can and should accumulate within the constraints of finite resources, sustainability, an increasingly fragile planet, and common decency.
I won't be around to see it, by I still hate to think that 100 years from now we'll have overplayed our consumption hand so badly that the only consumer options will be some futuristic equivalent of berry squeezing and twig toothbrushes.
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