"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."
  - George Santayana

photo credit: Hampton Roads Partnership via photopin cc

In my last post about the Collaborative Economy, we examined the companies that made mistakes at the beginning of the Internet era in order to learn what organizations can do differently today, at the beginning of the collaborative era. Many large companies were too confident in their existing brand strength and business models, so they did not see the need to innovate until new consumer behaviors were already diminishing revenue and income streams. The result was the collapse of companies that were household names with long histories of growth and profitability.
My friend Brett King, founder of Moven, challenged me to repeat the exercise, this time studying firms that succeeded with Internet transformation rather than those that failed. It is in an excellent idea, since not all established organizations were impacted equally. Even in industries where many strong companies crumbled, a few bucked the trend. What did they do that kept them solvent while others failed, and how can we apply these lessons as the Collaborative Economy emerges and grows? Here are the three examples we will explore:

• Source: Piotr Cieślak

  Film and Photography: Kodak, the most powerful name in photography for many decades, died and emerged from Chapter 11 a different company dedicated to corporate digital imaging. Agfa-Gevaert spun off its consumer division in 2004, but less than a year later that company filed bankruptcy and today Agfa-Gevaert is entirely B2B. Of the three largest companies that were once known for film, only Fujifilm avoided collapse; its stock is down 10% in the past decade, a huge success versus the traditional competitors the company had at the start of the Internet era.
    
• Bookstores: B. Dalton, Waldenbooks and Borders once operated more than 2,000 stores--all are gone. Today, Barnes & Noble is the only significant bookstore chain left in the US; it now owns two-thirds of the country's retail bookshelves. As with Fuji, B&N's success is relative--its stock is down 32% in the past decade and there is no assurance it will be around in five years--but it is worth considering how B&N managed to fail much more slowly than the competitors it had entering the Internet era.
   

Source: Daniel Oines

• Electronics: Circuit City, CompUSA and hundreds of small computer and consumer electronics (CE) retailers are defunct, but Best Buy soldiers on in a subcategory that has been fundamentally altered by the Internet. NPD Group found that more than 27% of U.S. CE spending took place online last holiday quarter, and about 40% of U.S. shoppers say they have tested products in stores before buying them online; in fact, Best Buy is one of the top two stores for "showrooming." Despite the unique and profound challenges of tech retailing, Best Buy's stock is at almost the same price it was a decade ago.  

Why Not Focus on the Successful Startups?

Before examining Fuji, B&N and Best Buy, it is worth explaining why we must look at these three companies--none of which have positive stock performance in the past ten years--instead of companies like Amazon, Ebay and Google, which have thrived. Too often, authors and bloggers hold up startups as examples for well-established companies to follow, but that naive approach is neither fair nor helpful.

VC investors have different expectations about risk and return than do Fortune 500 shareholders. Source: Amplifier Ventures

Startups operate with vastly different expectations than established firms, and the risk tolerance for Venture Capital (VC) investors is wildly divergent from that of Fortune 500 shareholders. Three out of four venture-backed firms fail, a survival percentage that no Fortune 500 company can emulate. Unlike VC investors, shareholders of public corporations do not reward expensive, high-risk investments that may (or may not) deliver fabulous profits years in the future.

For example, back in the early days of the Internet era, no leadership team at a Fortune 500 retailer would have been permitted to follow the lead of Amazon, which lost almost $3 billion between 1998 and 2002. With Amazon's stock down 90% and Pets.com and eToys dead, the shareholders of traditional retailers were not demanding or interested in a costly Amazon-like approach.

Just last year, despite a six-year 80% drop in its stock, JCPenney's board canned CEO Ron Johnson after only 17 months when his aggressive plan to resuscitate the retailer resulted in a net loss of $552 million. Even in 2013, with everyone wondering about JCPenney's ability to survive, its shareholders were still unwilling to accept any sort of high-risk business strategy!

Today, with the Collaborative Economy growing, established companies may look to startups like Airbnb, Uber, Lyft and Lending Club for ideas and partnerships, but this does not mean they can adopt the same strategies or risk appetite. As today's publicly held companies consider how to react to the Collaborative Economy, they should look to the lessons of Fuji, B&N and Best Buy--firms that entered the Internet era as reputable and successful corporations with millions of shareholders, not no-names backed by a handful of high-risk investors.

What did Barnes & Noble do differently than Borders? How did Fujifilm outlive Kodak? And why is Best Buy alive while Circuit City is buried and Radio Shack is the walking dead? These are lessons worth considering at the dawn of the Collaborative Economy era.

Barnes & Noble vs Borders

Barnes & Noble may not be a success story--its stock is down and the company closed more than half the 1500 stores it operated in 1999--but B&N is the lone survivor in book retailing. What caused B&N to fail slower than all of its competition? If you are expecting a mention of the Nook at this point, you are right but perhaps for the wrong reason. The Nook was B&N's attempt to compete with Amazon on Amazon's turf, and it has not been successful.

Launched in 2009 against the already established Amazon Kindle, the Nook received some early praise, with The Atlantic calling it a "Kindle killer" and Wired predicting Kindle owners would have "buyer's remorse." But the Nook could not compete against the Kindle e-reader, much less the slew of even more powerful tablets that soon came to market.

In the last four years, the Nook division has bled more than $1 billion. In fact, twenty years into the Internet era, B&N is being sustained by bricks and mortar and dragged down by its digital offerings--Nook's $475M loss in 2013FY almost equaled the $485M profit on bookstores. Nook's days are numbered, as B&N has announced it will spin off the plunging Nook business.

B&N deserves credit for trying this innovative route, but its Nook strategy was more focused on the company's past than consumers' future. B&N saw the Nook as a way to extend the bookstore model into mobile whereas others aggressively pursued the full potential of tablets as more than just a replacement for paper books. Amazon's Kindle started as an e-reader, but in 2011 Amazon followed Apple's lead with a fully functional tablet computing device, the Kindle Fire. B&N was not prepared for the constant demand for hardware innovation, and its device was left behind, a common problem that has tripped even companies with deep tech roots such as Dell, Compaq, Palm and Blackberry.

While digital hardware and distribution is not B&N's future, the company still perseveres where its competitors failed. Part of B&N's continued survival is simply due to the reduction in competition, since many people still like to sit in a quiet bookstore, enjoy a latte and leaf through a paper book. Why is B&N the last bookstore standing?

Credit: slgckgc via photopin cc

I love internet memes, but I hate the way each one gets turned into fodder for advertising publications and agency bloggers to (try to) turn the event into a "teachable moment" for marketers. While a trend is hot, news sites and agencies strive to build more attention and traffic with a form of newsjacking, leveraging interest in a trending topic to create attention for themselves. Right now, this is happening with the Ice Bucket Challenge, with dozens of news, blog and LinkedIn posts telling marketers what they can learn from this meme. I do not agree with much of what has been written, so at risk of engaging in newsjacking myself, I am going to write about this program and hope that it encourages more dialog and consideration about this craze and what it may or may not mean for marketers.

Sometimes, a meme can furnish a few lessons that marketers might consider when developing their marketing strategies. At other times, the connection between the event and brands is tenuous, at best. And on occasion, the effort to turn current events into something relevant for brands and marketers blows back.

Many recently criticized PR agency Edelman for publishing a blog post immediately after Robin Williams' suicide suggesting brands "Seize the day" and use the tragedy "as an opportunity to engage in a national conversation." While the Edelman blog post was worthy of criticism, it was really just a symptom of a larger issue: Marketers' and agencies' continued promotion and use of dubious tactics such as "real-time marketing" and "brand newsrooms." These schemes attempt to hijack consumer emotion and interest in a current event to make otherwise irrelevant brands more relevant.

Business leaders must recognize that companies build relevance not by hopping from one trending topic to another but with concerted and ongoing effort in specific and discrete issues that resonate with consumers. Edelman should know--better than most--that the time for a company to demonstrate care for depression and suicide is before a celebrity death brings these topics to the forefront and not after Twitter is abuzz. One way tells consumers that your organization stands for something more than profits; the other tells consumers your brand is a vulture willing to exploit any tragedy or event to try to boost the bottom line.

It is happening again--while the world is busy dumping buckets of ice water over their heads, ad industry news sites and agency blogs are lighting up with posts about what marketers can learn from the #IceBucketChallenge. Alas, I believe many of these posts and articles are simply wrong, drawing arguable connections between what worked for this charitable effort and what will work for brands. Here is what I believe marketers can (and cannot) take from the success of the Ice Bucket Challenge:

• The #IceBucketChallenge demonstrates the power of social media, not the power of social media marketing. (Tweet This): Almost every article and blog post I have read calls this a "campaign." It is not. A campaign is a planned series of marketing events launched by an organization to achieve a goal, but the ALS Association did not plan, launch or manage this (although they have eagerly jumped on the bandwagon). The Ice Bucket Challenge was a spontaneous and viral happening created and spread by individuals; in fact, had the ALS Association attempted to launch this themselves, they likely would have been criticized for manipulating and asking too much of people. The Ice Bucket Challenge succeeded not because it was a carefully crafted campaign but because it wasn't.
   
• The Ice Bucket Challenge didn't succeed because it is easy but because it is difficult. I have read several times that brands can learn from this program that making participation easy for consumers is vital. Excuse me--the Ice Bucket Challenge was easy?! Most brands would do backflips simply to get 15 seconds of consumers' time to post a rating or positive comment. Meanwhile, the Ice Bucket Challenge required people to find a bucket, fill it, lug the heavy bucket somewhere convenient, fill it with ice, set up a smartphone to capture everything, lift the heavy bucket, douse themselves in ice-cold water, dry off, change clothes and post the video online. And, oh yeah, donate money! If that is your idea of easy, I wonder what a difficult activity might be!
  
  Ironically, had the challenge been something easy--"I dare you to post a video doing a duck face!," for example--it would not have worked. Because the Ice Bucket Challenge was difficult, it gave people an opportunity to demonstrate their willingness to make the effort--and no, your brand probably cannot get people to do heroic activities in support of your product or service. 
    

• Credit: gwen via photopin cc

  The Ice Bucket Challenge was not a program about caring but about pride and shame. Before you react negatively to me calling out ego and humiliation as drivers, let me point out that this is not a criticism. The program succeeded, and there is nothing wrong with a charity with using the human emotions of pride and shame to achieve a positive end; after all, those are exactly the same mechanics that work in many charitable programs. Take, for example, the VFW fundraising program where volunteers stand with cash buckets in front of store entryways and give away little flowers to those who donate. If you cough up cash, you get a Buddy Poppy to wear around that day, showing pride in your small sacrifice; but if you make eye contact and walk past without donating, you feel shame. (You know you do!)
  
  The fact that people could show off how creative they were (with Bill Gates building a dousing contraption and Stephanie Izard doing an ice bucket Flashdance) was a big part of the success of the Ice Bucket Challenge. So was the part of the program that demanded people call others out by name; this was the charitable equivalent of a chain email, but because of the social media elements, people could not break the chain privately and quietly but only by humiliating themselves with silence and inaction. While some have claimed this program was about pulling at the heartstrings, I can recall seeing just one video that was legitimately emotional. The lesson of the Ice Bucket Challenge is that pride and shame are powerful human emotions, but brands should be very wary of trying to activate these emotions as part of a for-profit marketing campaign. 
   

• Lou Gehrig's farewell speech, when he declares himself the "luckiest man on the face of the earth," moves me to tears.

  The Ice Bucket Challenge was not successful as a cohesive marketing effort, but it was a great first step. As I write this, the ALS Association has received $41 million of donations thanks to the Ice Bucket Challenge, more than double what the organization raised in its last fiscal year. But while this clearly had a terrific fundraising impact in 2014, will it build future success for the ALS Association?  For example, I would suggest the Ice Bucket Challenge did little to raise awareness. Most people had heard of Lou Gehrig's Disease before the Ice Bucket Challenge, and afterwards, how many of the participants would be able to identify its symptoms, when it strikes, its prevalence or anything else about ALS? Very few of the Ice Bucket videos made even passing reference to ALS, and without awareness and knowledge, this one-time event cannot be turned into a lasting driver of success in the fight against ALS.
  
  Of course, the ALS Association now has the names and contact data for more than 700,000 new donors. If the charity fails to educate those individuals, few will donate again and the association will not build upon this success for future fundraising benefit. With additional concerted effort, the ALS Association may convert this successful acquisition program into an effective awareness, loyalty and repeat donation effort. The point that marketers should take from this is that no single campaign or program can be a soup-to-nuts success delivering on every marketing goal; instead, building deep, strong, and long-lasting consumer relationships takes a cohesive brand journey. 

Photo Credit: Me!

Two weeks ago, John Oliver's bit on Native Advertising went viral--at least in marketing circles--but it was hardly the most disturbing thing to be published that week on the alarming and growing practice of sponsored content in mainstream media. While I enjoyed the humorous (and accurate) critique on Oliver's "Last Week Tonight," AdAge.com featured an even more troublesome item, entitled "New York Times Tones Down Labeling on Its Sponsored Posts."

The New York Times, long considered a U.S. national "newspaper of record" due to its professional ethics and reporting standards, has decided to appease advertisers desperate to bypass consumers' natural aversion and avoidance of advertising. The newspaper "shrunk the labels that distinguish articles bought by advertisers from articles generated in its newsroom and made the language in the labels less explicit."

What is so disappointing about The New York Times' action is that studies demonstrate a substantial level of confusion on the part of consumers about sponsored content. Consumers do not recognize Native Advertising as paid media, nor do they understand what "promoted content" means:

• The IAB published a study last month that found business and entertainment news audiences could generally identify sponsored content, but "the general news audience had more trouble, with less than half (41%) recognizing that the material was advertising."
    
• A 2013 study by David Franklyn, law professor at the University of San Francisco, found that people “didn’t remember seeing ‘sponsored by’ posts when asked to read a web page and the majority (over 50 percent) also didn't know what the word ‘sponsored’ actually meant.”
   
• A recent study by Contently found that "while a plurality (48 percent) of respondents believe that 'Sponsored Content' means that an advertiser paid for the article to be created and had influence on the article’s content, more than half (52 percent) thought it meant something different." The study further found that:
• Two-thirds of readers have felt deceived upon realizing that an article or video was sponsored by a brand.
• 54 percent of readers don’t trust sponsored content.
• 59 percent of readers believe a news site loses credibility if it runs articles sponsored by a brand.
• Every single age group would prefer news sites stick to banner ads versus sponsored content. (This may be the first study in history to find a preference for banner ads, which makes evident consumers' perspective on Native Advertising.)
    

"Several marketers have bristled at all the labeling, suggesting it turned away readers before they had a chance to judge the content based on its quality."

“Because the purpose of business is to create a customer, the business enterprise has two–and only two–basic functions: marketing and innovation. Marketing and innovation produce results; all the rest are costs.”
                                      ― Peter F. Drucker

One of the mistakes that successful companies make when faced with profound change in the business environment is to believe that their loyal customers will stay loyal, both to the brand and traditional business processes. Of course, building customer devotion is a necessity for brands nowadays, but leaders must recognize that today's strong brand loyalty offers no protection against significant changes in consumer expectations and behaviors.

This is an especially vital message now as we witness the birth and growth of the collaborative economy. No brand, regardless of existing consumer preference and loyalty, can avoid innovating to meet consumers' evolving expectations around sharing, renting, collective consumption and P2P (peer-to-peer) commerce.

I love the Drucker quote that leads off this blog post, although I would change one word, replacing "marketing" with "Customer Experience" (CX). At the time he said it, Drucker was referring to the old "Four Ps" model of marketing--product, price, place and promotion; nowadays, too many marketers are concerned with Promotion, leaving the other Ps to different parts of the organization. Nonetheless, what he says is that today's success is not enough; marketing and CX can create strong customer relationships today, but innovation is what creates strong customer relationships tomorrow.

Of course, studies demonstrate Drucker was correct. For example, in "The Living Company," Arie De Geus shares a study completed by Royal Dutch/Shell Group. Researchers examined similarities in companies that have existed since the nineteenth century. The study found that companies that enjoy long-term success share four attributes. Two do not pertain to innovation, but are important nonetheless--successful companies are fiscally conservative and have strong cultures with a firm sense of identity. The remaining two factors speak to the way innovation is baked into the core of their business:

• Successful companies are sensitive to their environment: "As wars, depressions, technologies, and political changes surged and ebbed around them, they always seemed to excel at keeping their feelers out, tuned to what-ever was going on around them." These companies "managed to react in timely fashion to the conditions of society around them."
   
• Successful companies are decentralized: De Geus later rethought the word and redefined it as "tolerant." He notes, "These companies were particularly tolerant of activities on the margin: outliers, experiments, and eccentricities within the boundaries of the cohesive firm, which kept stretching their understanding of possibilities."

Source: Econsultancy

History teaches us that today's brand strength furnishes no protection against the need to innovate. This has never been more true than today; while innovation has always been important, as the pace of change increases, the demand for business innovation grows. That companies today struggle with the quickening pace of innovation is apparent, as the average age of organizations in the S&P 500 has dropped from 60 years to less than twenty in the course of the past five decades.

We can examine what has occurred over the Internet era to see many obvious examples of companies that quickly failed despite very strong brand preference and customer loyalty. This loyalty meant little once the companies could not provide a product that met the changing needs and expectations of customers:

• Source: Journalism.org

  Newspapers: By the late 1990s, newspapers had seen an uninterrupted 40-year increase in both ad and circulation revenue. At the time, many in the news business saw the Internet as little risk given the high levels of subscriptions and trust people had in print media and low usage and trust consumers had for information on the Web. Newspaper were riding high with strong consumer perception and profitable business models. Then Craigslist and eBay launched P2P marketplaces, Monster created a digital job board and dozens of news sites like CNN.com and SFGate gained traction.
  
  The result was the rapid destruction of newspapers’ business models. Classified advertising dropped almost 80% in thirteen years and continues to fall today--down another 10.5% between 2012 and 2013. Circulation declines have not been as severe, but the trend has been consistently downward. In 2012, total daily newspaper circulation and total Sunday newspaper circulation were each equivalent to about one-third of U.S. households, down from around 55% in 2000.
  
  Newspapers could have innovated with consumer behaviors, but instead they are playing catch-up. The recent release of the New York Times' digital strategy demonstrates just how much change newspapers still must undertake because they relied on existing customer loyalty and business models rather than on innovation. The question is if newspapers can adjust in time--in recent weeks Gannett, Tribune Company and E. W. Scripps, all empires built on the newspaper business, spun off their newspapers into separate businesses in order to reduce the earnings drag on their bottom line. The New York Times said the newspapers were "kicked to the curb" and questioned if they can survive (or if anyone will notice or care if they disappear).
    

• Source: Zap2It.com

  Television Networks: Around 1980, the three big television networks had seen three decades of substantial growth in ratings, with viewers per season rising from 6 million in the early 1950s to more than 15 million around 1980. The launch of satellite and cable networks seemed a minor inconvenience, but it began a significant decline that only accelerated as the adoption of the Internet provided entertainment and video alternatives.
  
  The national networks have suffered a 50% decline in viewers by season over the last three decades. Today, there are even greater signs of change ahead; while traditional TV watching among older demographics has been steady in recent years, younger people are increasingly tuning out. In the past three years, Q1 TV viewing by 18-24-year-olds dropped by 4-and-a-half hours per week, or around 40 minutes per day.
  
  Television networks did not adjust to the Internet age. People were recording and sharing their favorite TV shows via filesharing sites years before the networks would acknowledge the online demand for their content. The networks were slow to innovate, leaving openings for a slew of startups (many with dubious legal models) including Napster, The Pirate Bay and even YouTube (which in the early going was subject to great wrath from the networks for not preventing sharing of their IP.)
  
  Today, less than ten years after YouTube's launch, its growing ad revenue is beginning to approach that of some cable and national TV networks. Meanwhile, a recent New York Times article notes that “no one really talks about the broadcast side anymore;" investors care more about the cable channels that the parent companies also own more than the big national networks. The enormous power and viewership of the national TV networks in 1980 could not prevent the 30-year decline of their business model as others innovated more rapidly.
   

• Source: WSJ.com

  Retail:  By the late 90s, national retailers were riding high after decades of strong growth. Their enormous purchasing power had allowed them to shoulder smaller competitors out of the way. In 1948, single-location retailers accounted for 70.4% of US retail, but by 1997 this percentage had fallen to 39%; meanwhile, sales from chains with more than 100 locations grew from just 12.3% in 1948 to 36.9% in 1997. Worry about those tiny, money-losing online eretailers? Ha! Why would loyal customers begin to trust their credit card numbers and retail purchases online?!
  
  Less then twenty years later, Borders, Circuit City and Linens 'n Things are gone. Other retailers--ones that not long ago possessed high levels of consumer trust and loyalty--are on life support, and few believe they can pull out of their death spirals. Radio Shack may not survive through the coming holiday season. And Sears Holdings, including both Sears and Kmart, have experienced constant declines in same-store sales over the past three years. (Since the beginning of 2011, the stock of Sears Holding has dropped almost 50%.)
  
  I recently wrote about the lessons companies should learn from Borders' failure, but here is perhaps the most surprising fact about the chain's demise: Just six months before the company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, Forrester declared Borders the top company in the nation in its Customer Experience Index (CxP). The research firm surveyed consumers for opinions on their experiences with over 150 brands, and customers put Borders at the top. At the very same time that Borders had the strongest customer perception in the country, it failed.
   

A free ebook in progress, being created one blog post at a time:
	Four Mistakes Made By Borders And How To Apply The Lessons To The Collaborative Economy The Innovation Imperative: Customer Loyalty Won't Save Your Company From the Collaborative Economy New (and Very Old) Consumer Attitudes Support Rapid Growth in the Collaborative Economy Old, New, Newer and New Newer: The Past, Present and Future of the Collaborative Economy
Join the "Share and Share Alike" discussion on Facebook

Many people assume that the sharing or collaborative economy is something new and innovative, and as a result, it is subject to caution and skepticism, but is this really the case? I often wonder if people considered today's burgeoning collaborative economy models in a historical context, might their caution and skepticism be lessened? Airbnb, LendingClub and Zipcar are new, but the collaborative economy is not; in fact, when considered in a historic context, it is not collective consumption that is new but the idea of private ownership and individual consumption that are quite recent developments.

Ownership was a relatively alien concept for most of human history. For millennia, we lived in tribal societies that pooled resources, skills and output. During the time of the Roman Empire and feudal society, the common man had little right to anything more than tools, with land ownership reserved for nobility who doled out property rights and protection in return for fees and loyalty.

Ideas of personal liberty and private ownership really only flourished following the Reformation, and even then, modern attitudes of ownership and individual consumption were not truly possible until the Industrial Revolution. It was then that the mass production of consumer goods and rise of a middle class to purchase, own, collect and consume those goods led to today's attitudes about private ownership and consumption.

Advertisement from September 1957 "The American Home" magazine

Our current perspective on individual ownership and consumption is really only a few generations old. Still, even as private ownership flourished, collective consumption never truly evaporated. Government services represent a form of collaborative economy, where mass transit and libraries offer people alternatives to the individual ownership of cars and books. Private enterprise also found rare ways to furnish alternatives to ownership, such as laundromats that allow people to rent washers and dryers one load at a time versus owning (and finding room for) expensive appliances.

For much of the last century in the US, collective consumption has been caught up in attitudes about class and standards of living. While poorer urbanites lived in apartments and waited at bus stops, richer suburban dwellers from single-family homes zipped past the straphangers in private cars (or, more likely, over them on the new freeways that connected the suburbs to city centers). While those with more means could avoid sharing walls or rides with others, they could avail themselves of P2P (peer-to-peer) services to avoid doing tasks that were messy or unpleasant, from cutting hair to painting nails to maintaining lawns to cleaning their homes. The ability to privately own more stuff while paying others to do your chores was as much a symbol of status as it was an economic necessity.

"Keeping up with Joneses" became a thing, as families demonstrated their economic power by consuming as much and as obviously as possible. "The Joneses got a new Chevy," said the Smiths with envy, before rushing out to buy the newest model, egged on by mass media advertising that associated ownership and consumption with status and achievement.

Source: Wikimedia

This sort of conspicuous consumption brought benefits such as employment, rising income, economic growth and improved products and services, but it also came at a cost, both personal and to society. We moved further from work, accumulated more debt and spent more time commuting and more hours working. Meanwhile, garbage dumps and automobile scrapyards grew due to the continuous cycle of private purchase, ownership, consumption, disposal and repurchase.

Sharing economy circa 1893; families sharing their homes for visits. H/T +Jeremiah Owyang Source: Airbnb

In the last several decades, a new word has entered our vocabulary: Sustainability. In 1987, the Brundtland Commission of the United Nations issued a report in which variations of the word "sustainable" appeared 400 times. It defined sustainable development as "development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”

What started as a buzzword for environmentalists and advocates has now become business as usual in corporate America. Almost two-thirds of businesses say, "My organization makes public our environmental and social goals, and publicly reports progress against those goals." (Alas, only one in five report that the leadership team’s compensation is driven in part by sustainability performance.)

Reviewing the history of ownership, consumption and sustainability is important for two reasons. First, it puts in perspective that our attitudes about individual ownership and consumption are relatively new and that we humans have a rich history of collectively sharing and consuming goods and services. Second, history demonstrates that significant and broad change in consumption habits results from two parallel trends: Technical revolutions (efficient industrial production, available mass media, etc.) and attitudinal changes (adoption of different modes of living and commerce).

The new wave of collaborative economy sites are succeeding not simply because they use technology in innovative ways. No web site or app can encourage people to embrace new behaviors unless they are ready to change--the foundation for change must be present at the same time the capability for change is presented. (That's what SixDegrees.com found in 1997 when it tried and failed to bring open sharing of one's social networks to a population that would not embrace this sort of behavior for another decade.)

Today, the foundation for a change in attitudes and behavior toward ownership and consumption is in place. Many point to the 2008 economic downturn as a turning point in terms of people's attitudes, but there are many trends that were occurring prior to the Great Recession and are still continuing well into our slow recovery:

• In 2000, researchers found that the time parents spend with their kids was at a 35-year high.
   
• In 2013, the use of public transit was greater than in any year since 1956; from 1995 to 2013, transit ridership rose 37 percent, well ahead of a 20 percent growth in population and a 23 percent increase in vehicle miles traveled. In addition, in 2012, 9.2% of U.S. households were without a vehicle, compared to 8.7% in 2007.
    
• In 2005, the US saw the reversal of a decades-long trend in longer commute times; experts attribute this to several factors, including millennials' reduced interest in cars, more compact and mixed-use development, higher gas prices and more employees telecommuting.
    
• In 2011, for the first time in nearly a hundred years, the rate of urban population growth outpaced suburban growth.
    
•  IHS Automotive found that the average age of vehicles on US roads was 11.4 years in 2014--three years older than the average in 1995. Moreover, an improving economy is not expected to reduce the age of cars on the road; IHS expects the average to rise to 11.5 years by 2017 and 11.7 years by 2019. Our changing attitudes about cars combined with better quality automobiles is having an impact on the industry; a recent study predicted that today's Americans will buy almost four fewer cars in their lifetime compared to the past. 

Keeping up with the Joneses is simply not as appealing as it once was to Americans, while sustainability is a growing imperative in every corner of our personal and professional lives. These changes in attitudes are beginning to fuel changes in purchase behavior, setting the stage for continued growth in new (and very old) collaborative economy models.

I will continue to explore the data and trends supporting the Collaborative Economy in future blog posts.