Doing business with those you know.

• Author: Hall, Robert
• Position: Marketing Solutions

Scott Ballum ... started the Consumer Reconnection Project: a yearlong effort to only make purchases if he could make a personal connection with someone along an item's production chain.

--Rebecca Sheir, National Public Radio, 1/19/09

Bloody Monday is the name given to a day--January 26, 2009, to be exact--when 71,400 jobs are lost. Blue chip companies like Caterpillar, Starbucks, Pfizer, Google, and Microsoft bleed jobs and whole companies disappear at an alarming rate. Economists keep bidding up their unemployment projections--7 percent. Who'll give me 8 percent? Now 8.5 percent. Nine percent?

The marketing question is how will the current state of the economy change longer-term customer buying attitudes and behavior? Aside from a short-term migration from luxury items to lower--cost purchases, what strategic shift will take place? Let's begin by looking at how the current marketplace assigns cause and blame for how we got here.

It seems a global age of electronic information and transactions has accompanied us to this cliff. It used to be that people mostly purchased and did business with people they knew. They bought food, borrowed money, got their cars repaired, and went to restaurants owned and operated by locals. Even things manufactured from far away, like cars, hardware or clothes were sold and serviced locally. However in the last few decades we have given ourselves over to global, specialized and fragmented institutions, especially as we migrated to large urban centers. Now we mostly do business with people we don't know. We buy our coffee at Starbucks, our drive-through meals at McDonald's, our discount items from Wal-Mart and other stuff at Target. Our money, whether invested in stocks and bonds or in interest-bearing or income-producing products, is mostly with strangers. Perhaps no example is more illustrative of our dis-connected world than our current mortgage debacle where mortgages were originated, packaged, securitized and sold around the globe.

This was the ultimate world of disaggregated relationships. Depositor, lender, borrower, packager, seller, and investor--all like blind mice on the transaction merry-go-round that had no room or tolerance for relationships. The compelling urge from an earlier time to give a heads-up--"Gee, I don't know, I sit next to them at my son's baseball games" or "We attend church or belong to the PTA with them" has long since washed away. In the electronic information age here in...