This is a favourite trend of mine, and I’m looking forward to the future collaborative consumption promises. In the world that’s just around the corner, there will be no room for possessions that don’t bring us real and ongoing value. You know, like the car that’s parked on the street most of the time. The dress you bought for that party and won’t wear ever again. The book you’ve read a year ago and now just gathers dust on the bookshelf. That beautiful room in your house you use for storage. All of these examples represent a lot of value that is wasted. What if you could easily share these things with others, and recover otherwise wasted value in the process? That would change everything, and the change is here.

The new trend is collaborative consumption (or the “Mesh”, as Lisa Gansky calls it in her book), and its essence is technology-enabled sharing of physical objects on a peer-to-peer basis. To learn more, watch this TED talk by Rachel Botsman below, or click here for a newer&longer version

Issue of Trust

The big issue surrounding the rise of collaborative consumption is trust. How can you give keys to your car to a total stranger, and still sleep peacefully at night? For a car owner, the marginal benefit of renting a car to somebody for a day is small (£35 maybe?), but the marginal risk is extremely high (will I see my Mini again?). eBay was very successful in resolving the issue of trust for a similar type of transaction – namely buying and selling, where the object changes owners. With sharing, ownership doesn’t change, and risk is disproportionately higher on the owner’s side. It will be interesting to see how this will be resolved over time. I believe that eventually a single “on-line reputation” score will emerge for individuals (and mesh businesses) based initially on their currently fragmented on-line reputation scores (such as eBay, Whipcar, and others, as they emerge and become popular) and input from social networks and marketplaces (I’m sure the smart guys at Facebook, Amazon and Google are busy working on this .

Branding revolution

For mARTketers, there is one implication that stands out – we will all become brand owners in a sense, based on our on-line reputation. Our brand won’t necessarily have to be our real name (have a look at eBay as an example, how many people use their real names?), but all our sharing transactions will go against the brand we choose to use. The quality of this brand (reputation score) will determine to what extend we’ll be able to participate in the collaborative consumption systems. On the flip side, the rise of personal brands will naturally lead to a decline of traditional big brands. Think about it – often, the only value they represent is reliability, especially in service industries. We pay a premium to get a product from a well-known (yet often non-transparent) corporation, in the hope that their brand warrants a certain level of quality. What if we could get the same sense of trust when dealing with our (otherwise anonymous) neighbour, or even a complete stranger on the other side of the world? What if there are suddenly thousands much more transparent micro-brands around competing with the big guys? In this new branding game, some big brands are going to lose.

Market offering revolution

Products that lend themselves to sharing will benefit from this trend. When buying something with sharing in mind, consumers will prefer products that are of higher quality and widely desirable, not necessarily cheap. After all, if they can maintain the value flow from their possessions (sharing when not using themselves), why not buy something decent? If sharing will enable you to own a Volkswagen Golf at the same cost as non-shared Dacia Logan, which one would you buy? For mARTketers, the message is clear – keep sharing in mind when bringing new products to market.

Collaborative consumption is an exciting trend, opening many opportunities for doing marketing art. Now it’s not only about bringing remarkable products to the market, but also about making it easy for people to share and in turn maximize value for everybody.