The Buzz About Hiving

Comfort and connection are what consumers crave the most these days. And “hiving” is what they're doing about it.

Consumers are reaching out to connect with family, friends and community by re-centering their lives around their homes and neighborhoods. The metaphor of a beehive captures what consumers are seeking because a hive is a home base of activity and engagement that is connected with the surrounding environment, not sealed off from it.

New Priorities

Two dynamics are at work, both with staying power.

A turnabout in core consumer values began to bubble up in the late '90s. The Yankelovich Monitor tracking of values and lifestyles shows a surging interest in intangibles like family, friends, community and work/life balance. Consumers have not abandoned material interests, but they have a new set of first priorities focused more on comfort and connection than on stuff per se.

As this shift in values was taking hold, the stock market plummeted and terrorism hit home. The fears, scandals and crises that followed have made anxiety the undercurrent of the public mood, leaving people with a persistent low-grade fever of worry and concern. In the grip of this anxiety, consumers want the comforts of connections with others.

Hiving is the response to this craving for comfort and connection. Hiving is the embrace of others in a safe setting abuzz with activity and engagement.Home is an integral part of hiving, yet hiving is not just about home. A hive is command central for a more fully engaged and more broadly connected lifestyle. This return to home has been described as the new cocooning. But that is not the best metaphor.

Responding to Victimization

Cocooning is the term coined by futurist Faith Popcorn to describe the ways in which people were returning to home during the late '80s and early '90s. This was the victimization era — recovered memories, the jobless recovery, the Menendez brothers hung jury, reports of Satanic rituals at day-care centers, O.J. Simpson, the crack epidemic, the broken promise of “Read my lips,” and more. People felt exposed, at risk, victimized. They wanted a retreat, an escape, a refuge — a cocoon where they could wrap themselves in a protective shell and then pamper their battered psyches with soothing indulgences.

The current return to home is about reaching out, not retreating; about others, not oneself; about finding comfort through connection, not through isolation. Nowadays, people don't feel victimized so much as they feel challenged. Today's challenges can't be met by tuning them out; they must be met head-on. And people understand that no one should try to face up to them alone.

Reconnecting

Results from the Yankelovich Monitor and the Direct/Yankelovich study of direct marketing shoppers (“The Whys Behind the Buys,” August 2003) show a strong, renewed interest in reconnecting.

Family and community are more important than ever. People want to pull together and share in a common set of values and emotions. There is a growing interest in neighborhoods and a rising dissatisfaction with public discourtesy and incivility. And consumers are demanding brands that provide the tools and occasions for connecting with others.

When asked directly, 64 percent of consumers prefer that their homes feel like a hive, a place full of activity that connects them with others. Only 33 percent prefer the isolation of a cocoon.

The recent pockets of strength in an otherwise sluggish economy have been products that facilitate home-centered connections with others. DVD players. Better Homes & Gardens. HGTV. The Food Network. Trading Spaces. Cell phone family plans. Pingpong tables. Microwavable pot roasts. Lifestyle villages. Family driving vacations. Even board games like Monopoly and Scrabble.

Board games have enjoyed a comeback because they offer a way for people to come together face to face in a home-based setting. Board games are a good model for figuring out how to tap into the interest in hiving.

Other products can duplicate the success of board games to the extent that they too provide tools and occasions for bringing people together.

In short, to succeed in the era of hiving, be like a board game!

The Comfort Zone

There is a big opportunity as well for products that enable people to make their hives more comfortable and inviting. Consumers want things that add a new look and feel or that make their homes easier to manage, thus freeing up time and mental energy for friends and family.

Direct marketers are particularly strong when it comes to hiving. The convenience of direct marketing enables consumers to spend less time shopping and more time connecting with others at home.

This built-in advantage of direct marketing likely will work even better if the marketing messages of direct campaigns speak to the themes of hiving and if the product offered in direct efforts support the needs related to hiving.

The opportunity in hiving for direct marketers is to celebrate and support engagement with others. Because that's what consumers want — to live in hives where they can enjoy lifestyles that are rich with the comforts of connection.

J. WALKER SMITH (l) is president of Yankelovich Inc., Atlanta.

CRAIG WOOD is president of Yankelovich's Monitor MindBase division in Chapel Hill, NC.