Housewares suppliers today are trying to woo a unique aspirational society by developing passion points that are meaningful to each consumer generation and their retail experiences, said Susan Yashinsky of Sphere Trending.
Due to the incredible boom in new technology, particularly smart phones and other digital communication, consumers went too far one way, “sleeping with their phones on their pillow. Now people realize there needs to be a balance,” she says. Mats with memory foam used in the kitchen to ease the stress of hours of standing, for example, started as a one-use product but hit a passion point that crosses generations and has led to many uses. Single serve coffee machines that give people one or myriad choices are another example.
Consumers want products that provide that balance in innovative ways, taking take both ends of the spectrum into account. They want to personalize, but they also want to share. They want to work wherever they want, but at the same time they want their homes to be their havens.
“To appeal to that balance, companies will need to put less emphasis on demographics and more emphasis on lifestyle and culture,” Yashinsky says. “We’ve gotten away from the latter a little bit, but now things are calming down. It’s still chaotic, but now we’re all adapting to tech after 10 years of us frantically trying to live in this world of new technology. Now we’re starting to get it, so how do we start to balance it?”
