Carlota Perez

"Have you noticed how good taste has suddenly become fashionable and is moving right down the income scale?"

--Carlota Perez

This morning I read a wonderful interview with Carlota Perez conducted by Art Kleiner, editor-in-chief of Strategy+Business, Booze Allen Hamilton's magazine. It is prefaced with a nice summary of long-wave theory, which, as the editor notes, is making a comeback in an age focused on short-term results. A shining example of the theory's proponents, Perez is a research fellow at the Cambridge Endowment for Research in Finance at Cambridge University.

As have other thought leaders, Perez says that our current period is a transition between when new technologies are first introduced (the 1990s boom) and when their true economic benefits are realized as more sustainable prosperity. She calls this period we're in now a turning point (although "point," as she admits, might be misleading since in previous cycles it has lasted anywhere from two years to 15.) It's also pretty much what Tom Friedman is talking about with his "flat world" metaphor. But she sees beyond this period to a future potentially brighter than Friedman's. For example, she says: "It all seems impossible now, but things always seem impossible at this point in the surge. Between 1934 and 1946, a lot of economists believed that high unemployment was inevitable . . . ." But that, of course, was right before the "Happy Days" of the post-World War II expansion.

Perez sees early signs we are moving beyond the turning point again to sustainable prosperity: "Have you noticed how good taste has suddenly become fashionable and is moving right down the income scale?" She could have also cited how consumer price brand leaders are moving more into image-driven marketing and public relations. The well-publicized economies of scale inherited from the 1990s tech boom only took retailers so far in their quest to grow profits (even if, in many cases, that was very far). That this efficiency-driven expansion could not go on forever was both disappointing (hence, the recent retrenchment) and foreseeable. From now on, the more retailers commoditize their brands, the more they will simply look like everyone else.

I think you'll see this fashion-friendly mentality start to shape b2b marketing too. Now that anyone with a few hundred dollars worth of software can create and distribute content, it's no surprise that b2b marketing is drowning in a lot of me-too content that is also getting ignored.