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It would be remiss to begin January without a reflection on consumption. In those cultures that celebrate Christmas, the season of gift giving is over. And the traditional festival of box recycling has begun. Those readers with small children are probably still recovering from the staggering, almost never-ending process of untwisting retainer wires, separating plastic from cardboard and filling the bin with the packaging from Christmas presents. Not to mention those thoughtful gifts that duplicate something you already have or simply aren’t right for you. It’s hard to love that third DVD copy of The Hangover, no matter how funny the film or well intentioned its giver.

Well, you will be delighted to hear that help is at hand in the form of collaborative consumption. In her excellent TED talk, Rachel Bosman makes a compelling case for this emerging phenomenon and explains why crowds might change the way we think about products, services and ownership.

Collaborative consumption comes in three forms – redistribution markets, collaborative lifestyles and product service systems. Driven by significant societal and technology shifts, it is based on the consumer trend away from ‘ownership’ to ‘access’. Increasingly, she argues, we don’t want to accumulate stuff we want meaningful experiences that address a current need. This is particularly the case with products that are traditionally bought outright, but actually used very infrequently. In everything from cars to power drills, we’re now able to part-own, rent or share things on an unprecedented scale. Take that superfluous third copy of a DVD. Using redistribution markets like www.swap.com, you can search for a DVD you really want owned by someone else and simply make a cashless exchange. They get The Hangover and you get something of value they own that they no longer want. The same applies to product service systems like Zipcar.com. Why buy a car and watch it devalue when you can rent one when you need it for a fraction of the cost and environmental impact? Similarly, initiatives like www.landshare.net help to match aspiring growers with small landowners to build fruitful (and vegetable-ful) partnerships.

Interestingly, she describes four key drivers of change underpinning this quiet revolution:

1.     A renewed belief in the importance of community

2.     A torrent of peer-to-peer social networks and real-time technologies

3.     Pressing unresolved environmental concerns

4.     A global recession that has fundamentally shocked consumer behaviours

This combination of factors conspires to make sharing of all kinds an attractive reality for those that have never considered it before.

Naturally, this has positive and negative implications for business and brand building. A general recycling of consumer goods might well drive down demand and lead to economic decline. On the other hand, you could argue that brands will become even more important as hallmarks of quality and performance when a product has been used by someone else. The principle of re-use could even push quality up and might even begin to challenge a 60 year manufacturing reliance on built-in obsolescence. Similarly, those categories best known for encouraging ownership of a product might be able to start moving towards products as services – leasing everything from cars to consumer electronics and actually encouraging more frequent upgrades, replacement and innovation. Effectively driving up consumption and the value of brands. There is even a compelling ‘Cradle to Cradle’ case for this kind of approach where manufacturers can completely re-use component parts in leased products and limit the dependence on down-cycling and exploiting finite natural resources to create new products from scratch whilst their ‘broken’ counterparts go to landfill.

There are also some that would argue that an economy built on conspicuous consumption and defined by excess and waste is no longer sustainable in a world with increasingly limited resources. Particularly as living standards and discretionary income improve worldwide and millions of new middle class consumers emerge over the next decade in the BRIC economies and elsewhere.

Time will tell how far this becomes a dominant economic driver in established and emerging markets, but it’s clear that consumption behaviours are evolving thanks to the power of social technology.

Looking more broadly, if collaborative consumption works for physical products, it can work for ideas too. In everything from open innovation to collaborative learning and co-creation, companies and brands are using social technologies to help crowds identify and solve problems in unprecedented numbers. At FutureBrand, we are doing the same: using crowd-sourcing to engage everyone from employees to consumers in the development of brands, values products and services. What better way to help someone exchange an idea they’re not using with someone that needs it more.

In the meantime, if anyone needs a copy of The Hangover, we’re happy to swap it for something we haven’t seen yet…