Identity, and the Shifting Sands of Brand Loyalty
The Hyper-Individualistic Consumer
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Welcome to the UNCX Newsletter
The shift to hyper-individualism and multiple modes is shattering traditional loyalty and traditional experience playbooks.
Here’s why, how and what to do about it.
Let’s go!
Consumerism in Flux: Consumers Are Changing Faster Than Brands
The Old Rules Are Gone
Your customers aren't who they were yesterday—and not who they’ll be tomorrow.
We used to operate with a clear, comfortable, model.
Predictable consumers.
Strategies based on demographics.
Standard life stages.
Purchase behaviours aligned with social norms.
We were born into a place, likely died in that same place, and probably lived just like our parents did.
All the big questions had all the answers. All already mapped out.
But the rules changed somewhere, and people were thrown into the dizziness of freedom.
That’s hard for us humans. We like structure, clarity, and meaning.
The idea was simple: Find your audience, understand their need, speak their language, and build loyalty.
But that model is dissolving. And not quietly.
The linear life path—school, career, marriage, house, retirement - that world has fragmented. And in its place? Multiple life scripts, written in real-time.
So we increasingly define ourselves differently, through unique experiences and meticulously curated multiple identities.
Consumers changing jobs, partners, locations, identities, passions and experiences—and brands—frequently. Shape-shifting across their days and weeks.
And while consumers rewrite the rules of identity, consumption, and engagement, we’re still playing the old game, optimising for a customer who no longer exists.
The Rise of the Shape-Shifting Consumer
—> Consumer hyper-individualism is when consumption is driven by and reinforces the sense of the individual as a unique, self-sufficient entity.
It prioritises personal needs, desires, and identity expression through market choices, and often above collective and shared consumer experiences. It’s not just a need for personalisation; it's a deep-seated shift with implications.
This is Consumorphosis—a term I use to describe the constantly evolving, context-driven nature of today’s consumer behaviour and a mash-up of "consumer" and "morphosis"—the process of consumer transformation.
Consumers now exist in multiple identities:
The high-performance professional at 9am.
The mindful parent by 3pm.
The adventurous foodie by 8pm.
The self-reflective seeker at midnight.
Each version has different needs, priorities, values, and preferences—and expects us to recognise and respond accordingly. These are identity modes.
This fluidity isn’t chaos.
It’s agency.
Liberation.
Segments? Consumers are designing their own. Shifting across them. Using the technologies that empowers them to do so.
What’s Driving This Change?
First, the Evidence:
Personalisation and Customisation Mania: From bespoke sneakers to streaming algorithms tailored to individual tastes, markets are saturated with personalised demands. We are having to target individuals, not demographics.
The "Experience Economy" Boom: Consumers increasingly value unique, personalised experiences – travel, wellness retreats, niche hobbies – over material goods.
Experiences are seen as more authentic markers of individual identity.
"Self-Care" as a Consumption Category: The booming self-care industry, often deeply intertwined with consumption, reinforces that individual well-being is paramount and achievable through targeted purchases – bath bombs, meditation apps, organic food – and sometimes prioritising individual needs over broader social concerns.
Social Media as a Platform for Individual Branding: Social media platforms incentivise individuals to curate and present highly individualised consumption as a key tool for self-expression and lifestyle signalling. Influencer culture showcases how individual taste and consumption can be social currency.
Declining Collectivism in Consumerism: Compared to previous generations, there's less emphasis on shared experiences and community-based consumption, with the dominant narrative often leaning towards individualistic fulfilment through market choices.
Second, the Root Causes: Why Hyper-Individualism is Flourishing
Societal shifts and evolving trends:
Renewed Ideology of Individualism: We’ve long valued individualism, but this has intensified, with thinking and culture shifts emphasising individual autonomy, self-reliance, and personal freedom.
Weakening of Traditional Communities: Urbanisation, mobility, and the decline of traditional institutions have slowly weakened social ties in some respects. Consumption can fill the community void, offering identity and belonging through market choices.
Increased Social Mobility and Agency: Greater emphasis on individual agency and the belief in shaping one's destiny leads to consumption becoming a tool for self-expression, achievement, and upward mobility.
Capitalism and Consumer Culture as Engines: As we increasingly target individual desires and anxieties, we fuel individualised consumption as a path to happiness and status.
Technological Advancements and Digitalisation: Mass customisation, e-commerce, social media algorithms, and data-driven marketing all contribute to unprecedented levels of individualised consumer experiences and identity.
Psychological Needs for Identity and Differentiation: In complex societies, individuals seek to establish unique identities, and consumption provides a readily available, culturally sanctioned means to achieve this – a form of "identity work."
The "Therapeutic Turn" and Self-Focus: Contemporary culture's emphasis on self-awareness and personal growth, while positive, can inadvertently reinforce a hyper-focus on the individual self and individual solutions, translating into a consumerist approach to "self-care."
Powerful forces are at play
1. Digital Empowerment
Social platforms, personalisation engines, and AI have handed consumers the tools to curate their own digital and physical realities. Algorithms can make consumers feel seen, heard, and served.
2. Cultural Shifts
Research by Pew (2023) shows that 71% of consumers prioritise personal self-expression over group conformity. Identity is no longer a singular, stable construct. It's fluid, situational, and multi-dimensional.
3. Post-Pandemic Reflection
The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated self-reflection. People questioned priorities, redefined success, and re-evaluated who they wanted to be. The result? More experimentation, more reinvention, and a rejection of life on autopilot.
4. Climate and Social Consciousness
Climate anxiety, economic pressures, political instability—these macro stressors are pushing consumers to seek meaning, flexibility, and alignment with their values. They want their purchases to reflect their evolving beliefs.
Identity Is Now a Tapestry
Today’s consumer uses brands to build, broadcast, and redefine their sense of self in different moments:
They’ve moved from “I am what I buy” to “I buy what I am—right now.”
Are You Falling Behind?
Because we haven’t yet rethought our approach to CX and loyalty.
1. The Segment Fallacy
We’re still targeting "millennials," "working parents," or "urban professionals"—one identity at a time. It’s simplistic and increasingly irrelevant.
2. The Journey Illusion
Customer journey maps assume linearity. But modern consumer behaviour is messy. It’s looping, fragmented, sometimes emotional, and very unpredictable. Google calls this the "messy middle"—a space of exploration and evaluation that doesn’t follow a straight line.
3. The Loyalty Myth
We still think customers stick with one brand.
But consumers borrow brands, momentarily, to serve their needs in a specific context.
Starbucks got it. The same customer is in four different identity modes in a day. Nike got it too. It’s no longer about targeting one type of athlete—it’s about recognising the same customer may be an athlete, a fashion enthusiast, and a social activist—all in the same week.
—> Emerging Forms of "Loyalty"
Value-Based Loyalty: Consumers are fiercely loyal to brands genuinely aligning with their personal values (ethics, sustainability, inclusivity). This is a conscious and deeply held loyalty.
Experiential Loyalty: Rooted in consistently positive and personalised experiences. Brands that deliver seamless, enjoyable, and memorable interactions across all touchpoints cultivate this loyalty.
Situational Loyalty: Context-dependent and fluid. Consumers may be loyal to different brands for different needs and situations, demanding relevance in specific moments.
Conditional Loyalty: Earned and maintained, not assumed. Brands must continuously prove their value and relevance to retain loyalty.
Community-Driven Loyalty (Paradoxical but Powerful): Brands fostering a sense of community around shared values or interests can cultivate loyalty, even within a hyper-individualistic context, by providing connection and belonging.
—> Strategies to Capture New Loyalty
Radical Personalisation: Move beyond superficial customisation to deep data-driven understanding of individual needs and values, delivering dynamic, personalised content and experiences ethically and transparently.
Exceptional Experiences Across All Touchpoints: Create seamless, user-friendly, and delightful omnichannel experiences that go beyond basic functionality and deliver "wow" moments.
Value-Driven Authenticity: Clearly define and communicate brand values aligned with contemporary concerns. Ensure actions match values, demonstrating genuine purpose and transparency.
Community Building: Foster online and offline communities around shared brand values, interests, or experiences, enabling user-generated content and building a sense of belonging.
Agile and Adaptable CX Design: Move beyond fixed personas to "Jobs to Be Done" thinking and contextual understanding. Embrace iterative, data-driven design, and create flexible, modular CX architectures.
What Should You Do?
The good news? Use a new playbook:
1. Design for Modes, Not Segments
Shift your focus from static personas to dynamic states.
Ask not just "Who is our customer?" but also "When are they our customer?"
2. Create Flexible Experience Ecosystems
Don’t lock consumers into a funnel. Design experiences that flex—modular, adaptive, and responsive to who the customer is in their moment.
3. Try Elastic Messaging
Start stretching. Your tone, channels, and messaging must resonate across different identity modes.
4. Empower Your customer’s Identity Expression
Customers want to co-create, customise, and contribute. So give them the tools to shape your brand into something that fits them—not the other way around.
5. Rethink Loyalty
Accept it’s not about ownership anymore—it’s about presence. Be there in the right moment, with the right relevance.
Here’s one example of how a brand can create experiences to made themselves a more integral part of their customers’ lives - and carve out space in the broader culture.
Get the F*** Out (by Eventbrite)
Used for over 5 million events in 2023, Eventbrite saw a role for itself in combating the loneliness epidemic by building out promotions for events designed to help people “GTFO (Get the F*** Out)” of their houses to interact with people IRL. They promoted GTFO and Date, showcasing events for singles; GTFO and Eat Week, with events for foodies; and GTFO and Celebrate, which highlighted holiday and New Year’s Eve events. GTFO and Date drove an 83% increase in singles and dating events. Eventbrite also partnered with TikTok to integrate its ticketing tools with the platform, allowing content creators to easily host their own ticketed events.
You Can Start Here
Map the identity modes your customer shows up in.
Train your teams to recognise and adapt to those modes.
Audit your brand voice and visuals across these different customer states.
Build messaging architectures that stretch.
Kill the linear journey map. Replace it with modular pathways that adapt to different customer behaviours. Know where the emotion is in the map.
WHY IT MATTERS
Consumerism Redefined
Consumerism is changing. Not over, but as we knew it now very different.
It’s become a complicated, fluid pursuit that’s moved beyond ‘things’ into ‘self’. Driven by hyper-individualism and accelerated by technology and global events, it's moving beyond simple acquisition to a complex pursuit of self-expression, personalised experiences, and value alignment.
Traditional brand loyalty is broken, and we must adapt to this new reality.
The future belongs to those who understand the hyper-individualistic consumer—their desire for unique experiences, their fluid identities, their value-driven choices.
The challenge - and opportunity - is in moving from simply selling products, to optimising, and instead create meaningful experiences and embodying authentic value and values in this era of consumerism redefined.We're serving shape-shifting humans navigating an increasingly complex world. They’re curating themselves, in real time, through the choices they make.
Your job isn’t to pin them down. It’s to meet them—where they are, as they are.
This is the work of modern CX leaders.
This is Consumorphosis.