Virgin Blue Magazine - Jan 2007

Chris Sheedy meets the NEOs, a breed who are reinventing our world.

When entrepreneur Bill Tikos, a literary agent, web publisher and brand owner, feels he needs a new challenge, he packs his laptop, BlackBerry and iPod and takes off to another country, usually for about three months.

“I don’t want to establish myself in one city for too long, so I stay for three months, maximum, in each city,” the 35-year-old says. “If you have a laptop you can work anywhere in the world. I get a lot out of meeting a new group of interesting people. It motivates me.” Tikos has been jetting between New York, London and Sydney to meet publishers about turning his website, www.thecoolhunter.net, into a news-stand magazine. He’s in discussions with producers keen to turn the Coolhunter brand into a TV series and with editors about publishing works from his list of authors (including this writer).

Welcome to the life of the NEO, an ever-changing, always-evolving world of individualism, planned success, advanced technology, premium products and high spending. The breed was identified by Ross Honeywill and Verity Byth, authors of NEO Power: how the new economic order is changing the ways we live, work and play (Scribe Publications, $32.95) and founders of the Centre for Customer Strategy and the NEO Group.

NEO stands for ‘new economic order’, and is the name of a breed of people that Honeywill and Byth claim are “charting a new course and reinventing the world”. Tired of often-meaningless social groupings, such as Generation X, Generation Y and Baby Boomers, Honeywill and Byth surveyed half a million people, examining over 2,000 social and behavioural characteristics, to discover what drives us as human beings and why we behave the way we do. The two major groupings that came out of the study were NEOs and Traditionals.

“NEOs are highly individualistic,” Honeywill says. “They are very much in control, architects of their own lives. They believe success is a matter of planning and not a matter of luck. They’re motivated and attracted by things that are beautiful, by design and by desire, as opposed to Traditionals who are motivated by price, deal and discount.”

NEOs are also very demanding, Byth adds. “They are likely, because of their curiosity of the world, to move through a range of interests in their lifetime rather than sticking to one. If you are a Traditional – somebody who thinks the world should look the same most of the time – you would find a NEO less stable but more intense. A NEO’s intensity can be difficult for some people.”

Tikos began his career in the marketing department of a record company. After just two years as a full-time employee he went out on his own to manage bands, but soon a discussion with a friend would cause another change in career direction. “My friend had an idea for a book, but he couldn’t get any agents to show interest and he had no idea how the publishing industry worked,” he says. “So I said, ‘Let me have a go.’ I basically pretended I was a literary agent, found the right people to speak to in publishing companies and soon there was a bidding war for this book.”

It’s a classic NEO story, but it doesn’t end there. Tikos began writing a regular column, called The Cool Hunter, for Sunday Life magazine. The more he discovered about new, cutting-edge products, the more fascinated he became with the subject: “I became obsessed with finding great, new items that were innovative, unique, ahead of their time and beautifully designed. I developed an intuition about what was cool. I was excited whenever I found something completely authentic, shiny and new.”

This desire for beautiful, unique products that connect with a user’s lifestyle is a key ingredient in the NEO existence, and they’re not afraid to spend up big to get what they want. In fact, NEOs often see purchases as investments in lifestyle. And where Traditionals use mass-marketed brands as an outward expression of who they are, NEOs connect in a less conspicuous fashion with brands and products that will enhance their lives.

“NEOs are inconspicuous consumers attracted to beautiful design,” explains Byth. “A good example is the difference between an ad for an iPod and an ad for Dell computers. Both promote technology products, but in the iPod ad the design of the product is valued. The Dell ad, with its grid pattern and a whole bunch of features crammed next to each image, emphasises that function and price are what counts. If you see a brand where design stands at the fore it will probably be a NEO brand.”

So, just how many NEOs are there? The research done by Honeywill and Byth revealed an enormous population of NEOs in Australia – around 4 million, in fact. In the US there are 59 million. “In America they’re a country within a country,” Honeywill says.

And they’re not restricted to one specific sex or age group. That’s a whole lot of buying power, and a massive group of people not attracted by sales. In fact, they’re often turned off by cheap deals.

“In general NEOs will be a little bit sceptical about a discount because it implies that you’re leaving something out or taking some options away,” Byth says. “On the other hand, Traditionals value discounts because it means they’re not paying for anything they’re not going to use.”

“For a marketer to reach and motivate a NEO they have to have a particular way of doing business,” Honeywill says. “To reach and attract them the brand needs to align with the NEOs’ values, attitudes, expectations and ambitions. Unless you can do that in an authentic fashion the NEOs will spot you a mile away as a plunderer.”

When it comes to brands who have managed to attract the attention of the NEO breed with impressive sales increases as a result, on top of the obvious example of Apple and their exquisitely designed computers and iPods, Honeywill nominates Lexus and David Jones.

For seriously tech-savvy NEOs a great deal of their pre-purchase research – an important part of the NEOs’ process of falling in love with a brand or product – is done online. By way of illustrating the thought patterns of NEOs as opposed to Traditionals, Byth says: “Imagine you wanted to take a holiday in Queensland. If you were a Traditional you’d be ringing a travel agent, looking at a brochure, saying, ‘I’ve got $3,000 to spend, how much holiday can I get for that?’ A NEO would be looking on the internet, checking out the experience, the food, the accommodation, the spirit of the place, and falling in love with it.”

From that description there may be a little NEO in us all. It’s time to embrace the NEO world order.

HOW TO SPOT A ‘NEO’

• High discretionary-choice consumers, not basic-needs consumers
• High spending capacity, more than anybody else, to fuel their constant consumption
• First attraction is the product itself and the experience it will deliver, price is then simply the cost of that experience
• Have a preference for premium lifestyle products
• Seek unusual and extraordinary experiences in food and drink
• More willing than anyone else to try something new
• Feel in control of their own destinies
• Regularly use the internet
• Heavy readers of magazines and newspapers
• Have a strong sense of ethical responsibility

HOW TO SPOT A ‘TRADITIONAL’

• Occasional consumers motivated by sales and promotional events
• Low-spending propensity
• Attracted to a cheap deal
• Place importance on price ahead of quality and function ahead of design
• Use branded products as external symbols of who they are
• Prefer tried and true ahead of the new and challenging
• Believe life is determined by luck rather than under their control
• Slower to adopt new technology

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