In With the New and…in With the Old?
Consumers Embrace Heirloom Experiences
Posted: 6/3/2010

By Kelly Thompson, Director of Brand Planning, Partner
kelly.thompson@clynch.com

As brand sherpas, we strive to live on the bleeding edge of consumer culture, stay a step ahead of the trends, or at the very least, stay in lock step with early adaptors. This realm of modernity is quite an exciting place to be. Every day is filled with the discovery of shiny new experiences like Foursquare, the iPad and 3D TV. Sure, there are days we might be tempted into drinking the Apple-flavored Kool-Aid and declare all technology over six months old as irrelevant, but it is important at those moments that we pause, take a breath of perspective and really look and listen to the cues of the consumer body at large. Just as rural moms in North Dakota are spotted organizing their honey-do list on their iPhone, conversely we find hipsters in New York taking up crocheting. Humans are wonderfully-complicated creatures, full of contradictions in interests and habits. It is these dichotomies that weave together to form our individual personality DNAs.

We have found, as our culture evolves with technology that consumers are continuing to derive meaning from what we are calling “heirloom experiences.” The following current cultural trends illustrate this confluence of the new and the old:

Burgeoning culinary passion
Cuisine has gone mainstream and while we find consumers are embracing new technologies like talking to Twitter’s @Twecipe to receive recipes tailored to their pantry, there is no substitute for the comforting, tactile experience of thumbing through the stained pages of your favorite cookbook. In fact, even in recessionary times, cookbook sales rose 9 percent in the past year.1

Elevation of the role of the farm
While today’s small-town farmers are utilizing technology like smallfarmcentral.com to grow the equity of their businesses, urbanites are turning their backyards into Victory Gardens of the past, even raising small flocks of chickens in city lots. You can learn how to build your coop at backyardchickens.com.2

“I made it myself”
Home seamstresses, a whole new crop of them, are creating their own fabric at places like fabricondemand.com and connecting with other handmade-junkies on social networks like spoonflower.com. These modern resources are breathing new life into the heritage pastime (and chore) of sewing and crafts.3

These cultural trends, among many other similar ones, illustrate the shared human psychological need for familiar experiences that connect us not only to our current social peers, but also to our past, our family’s heritage and our history as a culture. While the bleeding edge is an important horizon to lean toward, as marketers, let us not forget the power and place of heirloom experiences in our consumer’s world.

Did You Know?
• Fifty-three percent of consumers are now cooking from scratch more often.4

• Even on Facebook, consumers gravitate toward a very traditional experience: launched in June 2009, FarmVille now has 62 million players. More than 22 million people pay it a visit per day, making it one of the most popular applications in Facebook history.5

• Ree Drummond’s blog “The Pioneer Woman” gets 13 million pages views a month, has been named an "influential" blog by Technorati and has inspired a cookbook.6

1 Nielsen Bookscan 2010
2 Trendcentral 2.18.10
3 Trendcentral 3.25.10
4 CMI Brief-Trends: Cooking at Home, Health, Organics, August 2009
5 Inconoculture 11.10.09
6 LATimes.com 9.23.09