Curbside Insight

Marketers and agencies are always looking for new ways to understand consumer trends. And once a trend is detected, it often gets a slick name like Frugalista or Greenwashing. Finding such trends can often take untold hours of consumer interaction and sizable budgets. But what if you don’t have the time or the budget? Enter Recyclovision.

There is currently a convergence on the horizon between household recycling and consumer self-examination. The little, green tubs many of us leave for pickup once a week often say as much about the individual or household as anything else. This is due in large part to the fact that most everything we consume is wrapped in plastic, and the expansion of which kinds of plastic can be recycled (my community recently added types 5, 7 and 10).

I recently went Eco-Diving just outside my neighborhood over a three-week period, and here’s a sample of what I surmised, with the prerequisite fancy, trend-based monikers:

1. Imbibers: Many of my neighbors prefer imported beer to domestic, with an emphasis on Mexican and German. Chardonnay was popular, but there was no dominant brand, telling us the wine industry is still very fractured with low awareness. A few homes bought lower-dollar wine in volume, but most showed assorted standard-sized bottles.
2. Targetites: The households have more young boys than girls, with an estimated median age of around 7 to 8 based on different toy purchases. My neighbors are almost uniformly Target shoppers with no sign of Wal-Mart at all.
3. Anti Life Lockers: Privacy concerns don’t seem to have hit home, with many homes recycling prescription-medication bottles with information on the label.
4. Pot Luckies: Despite the recession, people are still entertaining fairly regularly (as told by the use of disposable dinnerware). This may pose a more cost-efficient alternative to dining out.

This is, of course, just a sampling. It should be noted that this is fairly unscientific but still very telling and a more honest means of gauging consumption behavior than consumer interviews.