Power Play on the Global Stage

The way that consumer power is shifting across the globe is going to significantly affect the way that brands maintain ‘relationships’ with their customers. The impact of new economic global powerhouses, coupled with the empowerment of ‘digitally fluent’ consumers means advertising has changed forever and communication with it.

Is a point of view that the Independent Economics Editor Hamish McCrae shared with me recently. Indeed - we have already posted about epochal change in The End of the Belle Epoch

The greatest shift of economic power for 150 years underpinned by 5 seismic shifts. This is not just about outsourcing or cheap imports, it is about an awareness of a different world

    1). Demography – how do we reach the "new old" 

    2). The environment – we all want to be greener  

    3). Globalisation – power shifts to Asia  

    4). Technology –  towards a global level playing field that has significant implications

    5). Government – spend less regulate more*

*Indeed we need to dig a little deeper into Governments role – There will be huge financial pressures as demands rise and revenues are cut away. Voters are consumers of government services and Government becomes an enabler nudging society towards greater personal responsibility. Well fingers crossed anyway.  

And here is the power play. Over the next few decades we will witness the inevitable re-ordering of world economies. Aditya Chakrabortty asked Is this the Indian century? whilst we see America struggling in so many ways , economically, spiritually and politically.

There are troubling signs across America that the deepening economic crisis engulfing the country is taking a terrible and historic toll on its people, as growing numbers of once-affluent middle-American families resort to desperate measures to make ends meet 

Lurking behind the headline-grabbing stories about the credit crunch, the US housing crash and the near-death experiences of Northern Rock and Bear Stearns , is the bigger one about the slump in the value of the American dollar.

So steeply has the greenback fallen in value against its main rivals - the euro and the Japanese yen - that economists are talking about the dollar losing its status as the world's reserve currency, a position it has held since 1945.

Below two charts that show the evolution of changing economic and with it the political climate 

The growth of China as a superpower constitutes the biggest challenge the world has had for more than a century. Never before in modern times has the financial, trade, economic and diplomatic world pecking order been so profoundly reconstituted with the challenger country itself in the grips of incredible ideological and political change. Listen to Will Hutton talking on China And of course India will not be far behind.

 The implications for us all are about:

1). The fight for economic survival

2). The fight for resources

3). The fight for talent – and for the best educated young

4). The fight for the space of mind of consumers   

The imperative to adapt our organisations to the networked world, harness the wealth of networks: to educate our young to properly compete, and to be able to play to our core strengths on the global stage has never been greater.

So what to do about it? Well we do have an advantage - if - IF - we embrace that opportunity fully. Yochai Benkler in the Wealth of Networks wrote

We need not declare the end of economics as we know it. We merely need to see that the material conditions of production in the networked information economy have changed in ways that increase the relative salience of social sharing and exchange as a modality of economic production. That is, behaviours and motivation patterns familiar to us from social relations generally continue to cohere their own patterns. what has changed is that now these patterns of behaviour have become effective beyond the domains of building social relations of mutual interest and fulfilling our emotional and psychological needs of companionship amd mutual recognition. They have come to play a substantial role as modes of motivating, informing, and organising productive behaviour at the very core of the information economy.

Whereby the technological revolution we are currently living through is changing the structure of markets, economics and the role that organisations have in those markets. The possibility of producing information, knowledge, and culture through social, rather than market and proprietary relations – through cooperative peer production and coordinating individual action – creates the opportunities for greater autonomous action, a more critical culture, a more discursively engaged and better informed republic, and perhaps a more equitable global community.

This could well be how we compete in the future - who wants to live in a society that dictates, who you are, what you do, where you can and can not go? Etc., 

As Marcel Proust wrotes

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