Buying Less and Buying Better
By Emma Sant - Founder
When I was a 10 year old kid, gobstoppers/jawbreakers were THE business. If I was going to spend my money wisely, it was going to be on an everlasting sweet (with no regard for my dental health). A sweet that I could keep coming back to time and time again 🤢 . You'd get a lot of sweet, the taste and quality didn't matter.
Children don't change! One of my Christmas highlights was working in the tuck shop at our local youth orchestra serving 7-12 year olds sweets at wholesale prices, where I'm pretty sure the parents giving the daily £1 coin for pocket money didn't know just how cheap everything was. Even Willy Wonka would've been disgusted at the kids' ability to out-eat Augustus Gloop.
With age and responsibility comes choices in how you can spend your money. The mantra of buy less, but buy better now pervades consumer culture. This was pioneered by the likes of Vivienne Westwood in a backlash against fast-fashion. She famously stated "buy less, choose well, make it last".
As the new year beds in, the tension of budgets vs. business growth expectations hits. Many businesses have had huge restructures, cutting out resource and simultaneously spending power to offset operational costs and consumers' tolerance for rising prices. This is a tough environment in which every penny or cent counts.
With the continued shift in-house on research, innovation and brand strategy projects, marketeers and researchers are having to do more with less. 10 years on we are back to or continue to pursue Eric Ries's 2015 hashtag#LeanStartup mindset.
Buying less and buying better, means enabling and empowering teams to act. Rather than buying multi-stage projects with waste/repetition of yet another rewind or more stakeholder interviews, buying better often means buying in experienced thinking partners who can understand the situation and get going without considerable scale up time or cost.
Much of the work we do at Futureful Consulting is as highly valued thinking partners, who can lift the load, move things forward quickly, and run iterative check ins to keep the project on the road.
Perhaps, for 2025 let's look at innovation in consultancy that goes beyond AI, and looks at client needs for senior-level deployment within budget and timelines to allow for both less and better. If the idea of a team of thinking partners to accelerate your brand, innovation or insight journey appeals, then join the other multi-nationals we already work with and get in touch!