If you know the name Zach King or Khaby Lame; if you’ve watched videos of people being playfully hugged by man-eating lions, seen posts of young people all doing the same choreography across dozens of videos, watched dogs snuggling infants or found a “hack” to cut a pepper, hull a strawberry or peel garlic easier, then you are a consumer in the “Attention Economy.”
And all those things likely made someone quite a lot of money.
In the age of ubiquitous, often addictive social media, there is a price to be paid and money to be earned capturing consumers attention. In fact, it has become its own subset of the economy, spawning a new generation of millionaires, creating a new wave of “celebrities” and fundamentally changing how the average consumer spends their discretionary time.
Notice, I did not say discretionary dollars, but discretionary “time.” The combination of blurring lines between work and leisure coupled with access to massive amounts of information right at our fingertips has made the ability to capture consumers’ attention a high-value skill and made discretionary time the rarest of currencies.
By now most everyone has heard the term “influencer” and seen examples of the ways that creative content creators are turning interesting, unusual or downright bizarre activities into hundreds of thousands, at times millions, of views. These, in turn, are translated into dollars for providing marketers with access to this legion of followers.
This is not an entirely new phenomenon, but with the advent of Tik Tok just eight short years ago, the entire phenomenon has exploded, launching content creators into the economic stratosphere. In the one minute it took you to read the last sentence more than 23,000 videos were posted to Tik Tok, and that number will be repeated every minute for the rest of the day, the rest of the week and so on, adding up to more than 34 million Tik Tok posts each day.
So where does furniture fit into this equation?
That’s a good question because despite the sheer breadth and diversity of content making the social media rounds, a negligible portion of it is related to home furnishings products. And an even smaller proportion comes from, or on behalf of, furniture retailers.
Now I know some will say, “that’s not my audience.” That may be true, unless your audience is women aged 45 to 64, in which case there are more than 16 million Tik Tok users in that demographic. That number goes even higher when you layer in Facebook and Instagram.
At a time when consumer traffic is down and those who target the traditional furniture are struggling to keep the doors swinging, it’s worth rethinking traditional marketing methods and mediums. It’s equally important to recognize that what captures the consumers’ attention has also changed.
It’s no longer enough to follow the tried and truism, “If you do what you always did, you’ll get what you’ve always got.”
Because in today’s attention economy that’s just not the reality anymore.