Snack Culture

Last week, I went to the eZSystem's Partner Day which was organized at Apple France headquarters. Vincent Bellissen's first slide was about Snack Culture, a new consumption habit based on bite-sized products. Minimal invest and maximum entertainment. You want to change, you can and it is easy.

A typical example is the success of the iTunes music library : once registered in the iStore, you can buy music files in just few clicks. The Amazon website allows too to buy books or dvds in two clicks maximum (one to login and one to buy).

So the consumption habit has evolved in the way that you can enjoy little part of a product instead of the full product. If we check the ratio part of product / price, we can see that the producer gets always great benefits. It's not new, you may buy a big pot of mayonnaise for 10€ or a tiny one for 3€ but you won't get the third of the big pot. What has changed is the way we can buy it, the product's availability and the way we can use it. You can check your mails while waiting a friend in a bar, watch a movie clip in the tube or even surf the net during a fly.

However, it's a bit threatening. I was thinking that in ten years, children won't read books anymore...

99 Francs

Still digesting this inner revolution, I watched the day after a French movie called “99 Francs”. The story is about a creative publicist who is working in the larger advertisement company in France and who has some issues with girls, drugs, his boss and the whole meaning of his life... I guess it is a good movie and it makes me wonder some things.

Our consumption habits are also enclosed in our today life. We are more receptive to advertisement using some classical symbols and values than original scripts and out of sequence art design. So, if we change the way to consume products by adding mobility and specific parts of products, may be we can break free from this chasm of consumption, classical one.

Moreover, I thought that it might be a catalyst for new shape of art and techniques. With smart phones, we will be able to add high enhanced applications as interactive games, shared software and other funny stuff (video chat or whatever).

Co ?

So, this is what we do. Causing people to buy our products or our services. We are creating desire around functionalities and freedom for a more or less convinced set of people.

The limit is what we can do to be pertinent : what functionality can I imagine that will be sold in the real life ? The business is restricting the scope of our ability and by this way only focusing on what is really important : users need.

That's why changing our consumption habit may change the way we are doing things. We may experiment some new techniques as the impact on bite-sized consumption is very thin.