The new age consumer, tired of years of hyper-consumption, are championing the pretail phenomenon and jumping on board to be involved in funding innovative and exciting products and services through a booming ‘crowdfunding’ movement.
What is crowdfunding we hear you ask? The collective effort of individuals who network and pool their money, usually via the internet, to support efforts initiated by the collective creativity, entrepreneurialism and intelligence of thousands of individuals and start-ups around the world
This rising phenomenon, investigated in this month’s trendwatching.com report, grew by an astonishing 85% to USD 1.4 billion in 2012 (Massolution, April 2013).
Pretail describes the process where consumers will only PREchase the innovations they want, thus ensuring only those products that are most innovative, exciting and unique are realized, and products that consumers don’t want are ignored, it’s as close to a perfect market as an economists can imagine.
The pretail phenomenon has created crucial new equality of supply and demand: one that did not exist when consumption happened in traditional brick and mortar stores.
Consumers indulging in pretail are driven by the thrill of being early, mixed with the thrill of finding a truly exciting, useful or relevant product, especially if it’s something quirky or so niche that it would have never made it down a traditional brand’s production line.
The ‘pretail’ lowdown…
- Opportunity for products that delight (jaded, saturated, blasé) consumers needs to be on your radar
- Allows brands to give up on secrecy and open up your R&D, and let consumers PREchase ideas that are in the pipeline
- Encourages consumers to present you with the ideas they want to be able to PREchase. PRETAIL initiatives will also support your traditional sales channels. Building a community of enthusiastic supporters will help whip up excitement among other, more mainstream consumers too.
- Allows the opportunity to parnter with an existing creator/inventor/start-up to co-present a concept for PREchase. Or set up your own branded platform, where creators can post their own ideas in a particular niche (read: you and your customers’ niche).
- Instant feedback from eager PRESUMERS helps innovators see very rapidly whether or not their product idea is serving the desires of consumers.
- The next (and final) step for successful PRETAIL products: becoming absorbed by traditional, mainstream retail.
To read the full trendwatching.com report click here