Once upon a time, there were groups of people called consumers, who found themselves at the end of a linear process, and who made purchasing decisions that were rational and based on need. Then there were sellers, who promoted the practical, functional and advantageous costs of products and services, because they knew very well that this was what the consumers were looking for.
In the era of the fiction economy, that world of linear and predictable markets no longer exists, even in times of crisis. And so the type of consumer we have just described has become extinct, leaving room for a new consumer, whose purchasing decisions are guided by very different factors.
Of course, price is still important to this type of consumer, but what really matters and makes the difference are the symbols, the values, and the messages that the products and brands convey.
With the explosion of the internet and social media, the emotional and narrative component has come to dominate the rational one. In fact, if we pay attention, we will notice that most of the information we are fed every day is conveyed as a narrative. We live in a world where the distinction between reality and fiction is becoming increasingly blurred, and this is why it is important to understand how to create stories that enchant.
Every day, because of the different devices we interact with, we are subjected to such a vast amount of information, that we literally find ourselves daydreaming through a lot of it. Recent studies have highlighted that we spend much of our daily lives (and our time online) in a sort of daze, a neurological state that is considered similar to dreaming. Our eyes are open, but we are in fact dreaming: we are always in on-life mode, meaning that we live in a dimension in which it is no longer easy to distinguish the real world from the digital one.
