In two recent columns, here and here, I wrote about two of the three consumer economic trends that are and will dramatically change consumer and buyer behavior well into the 2020s.  In this column I address the third major consumer economic trend, moving from an ownership to a rental society.  This trend as with the prior two will be prevalent primarily in the developed world and then spread globally in a decade or so.

Four years ago I started to suggest that in the United States, the reorganizational recession of 2007-2010 might have broken the aspirational, patriotic …

Since 2010 I have been speaking about what I see as three new consumer economic trends that will alter consumer behavior in the developed countries of the world.  A number of aligning forces are significantly increasing the influence and impact of these three trends.

In a recent column here, I wrote about Conscious Capitalism, one of the three new dominant trends of consumer behavior for the Transformation Decade 2010-2020. Conscious capitalism is when a company takes on an altruistic cause, charity or practice and applies revenue to that endeavor.  In that column I profiled two companies, Tom’s Shoes …

In a recent column I listed the Five Contexts of the Shift Age.  As stated there, while the true cliché of the Information Age was “content is king” the true cliché of the Shift Age is “context is king”.  We live in an increasingly contextual world.  The context in which we receive or consume information shapes the information as much as the information itself.

In my just published book “Entering the Shift Age” I wrote about the five contexts through which we would look at almost everything in the future.  Whether it be education, energy, technology, …