Our web of relationships is becoming less rich than that of our parents and grandparents. We are constantly moving across the world and losing touch with childhood friends and relatives. Alby Anand Kurian writes that this gradual weakening of links has created what he calls the “neo family”, which includes the pet as a child and an AI assistant, with implications for corporations targeting this new type of consumer.

My children, as they were growing into their teen years, discovered friends – not the kind they went to school with, but the kind that appeared every day on the television set between seven and eight pm. For an hour, their evening was peopled by Rachel, Ross and Chandler, Joey, Phoebe and Monica. As I watched my children grow and live and learn, I realised that Friends was as much a part of their lives as their friends in school; they were ‘people’ in their lives – and these six of their ‘friends’ will have played no small part in their growing up.

This is no paean to Friends, however. This is a recognition that, more and more frequently, those who fill our lives may no longer be ‘real’ people, of flesh and blood – they are what I term as “neo people”. A milder version and form of it has always existed, of course. “Psmith” from the Wodehouse novels was part of my own growing-up years, as well as those of my childhood friends. For the generations that came much before us, there were folk tales and mythology; these were rich in characters that seemed as real as one’s neighbours and family. But there is a vast qualitative difference now – what has changed is the emotional landscape of our world.

Our foreparents led emotional lives that were extraordinarily rich. They may have lacked creature comforts but, perhaps almost in compensation, they seemed to have been at the centre of a vast and intricate web of relationships. If we were to map their emotional life, it would have looked a little like this:

Figure 1. Our foreparents’ emotional landscape

You can see how crowded and closely packed our foreparents’ emotional life was. Now, contrast this with our own. We live and travel across the world; we lose touch with our childhood friends, collegemates and sundry relatives. We live in one part of the world or one part of a country for a time and then move to another. Even if we live all our lives in one part of the world, we shift homes, graduating from modest homes to swanky ones and then downsize as we grow older, so our neighbourhood stays constantly in flux.

I was speaking to some young people recently; they were talking to me about their experiences. Even though they had not left their home countries, in the last few years they had left their hometown where they grew up, their families, the schools they had known and their best friends. They had moved to a campus in an unfamiliar town and made a fresh set of friends; then they had left the campus, the professors and the fellow students they knew – to move to the big metropolises for work, where they met new colleagues and made fresh acquaintances. Their physical as well as emotional landscapes were constantly shifting and changing.

Prosperity, and an increased awareness of individual rights and individual freedoms have necessarily meant a gradual weakening of traditionally strong tribal roots, cultures and codes. Prosperity has meant a transition from a time when everybody shared everybody’s life, (because there was greater safety and security in numbers), to single-child, single-parent families where the teenager shuts himself in the privacy of his room (sharing it, perhaps, only with his laptop and his cell phone). That is a big leap in terms of individual and group behaviour patterns and these developments have happened rather quickly, in evolutionary terms.

Whether this is all to the good or not is the subject of another discussion; what is relevant here is that it does leave an emotional vacuum – and nature abhors a vacuum, even an emotional one. “Neo people”, as a consequence, have come to play a stronger role today than ever before.

The neo family

So, if we were to map the changing emotional landscape of our consumers, it would probably look like this – I call it the “neo family”. Some would call it the family of the future; I would qualify that by saying that the future is already here, at the very edges of our present. We can see the large emotional gaps that now exist.

Figure 2. The landscape of today’s consumer

Two members have made a significant entry into the neo family, to fill these gaps. One is a familiar one, which is morphing before our eyes; the other is a complete stranger. The first entrant is the family pet – usually a dog or a cat. Some generations ago (it is perhaps difficult to believe this now), dogs were seen as handy animals to have around – as guard dogs, hunting dogs, sheep dogs or draught animals. They were rather large and looked fierce, like their ancestor the wolf. In the next stage, dogs evolved into the human’s best friend and today, in the last phase, you can see that the fierce animal of yesterday is morphing to look increasingly like a human baby with the most endearing eyes and appealing expressions. There are video reels and video shorts of dogs being hand-carried or taken around in prams by their pet parents, their Mum or Dad. Notice the transition from “pet owners” to “pet parents” that has taken place – that shift is a culturally significant one.

The other realm we are entering now is beyond what we could have conjured up ever before in our history. A companion that artificial intelligence can generate and run for you is the perfect compendium of all that you could wish, in every way – and you can have him or her ever at your command. How could the messy, imperfect creatures that we are ever compete? (And if it is a messy, imperfect creature that you wish, why AI will provide that for you too – with lover’s tiffs and reconciliations, as well.)

AI can go well beyond this, however. Imagine, in the real-life passing of a loved one, a consumer is now able to recreate an AI substitute. Supported by the loved one’s data, the AI companion will not only look quite similar to the loved one, but it will also convey thoughts, and ideas and conduct conversations that are strikingly similar, as well. It all seems rather strange and even rather unsettling but is it the harbinger of things to come? The future is already here – with apps designed that work reasonably well to fulfil the need for AI companions.

Value

I have drawn on two rather quixotic illustrations. However, what are the implications of all of this for corporations who are making more mundane everyday products, and nothing as exceptional as an AI companion? We have grown up believing that the customer wants performance, quality and value (in the book, The Game Changers, you will find former P&G Chairman, AG Lafley, write eloquently about this). Does the concept of “neo people” and the “neo family” take this belief apart? Not at all, but it does go beyond it – customer satisfaction or even customer delight will soon not be enough. Our products must be “neo people” in our customers’ lives, part of their “neo family”.

Yes, of course, the customer wants performance and quality and he will demand that in the future, as well – but in an increasingly flat world, these will soon be taken for granted. The difference (in terms of quality and performance) between products will become increasingly narrow. Corporations will take technological leaps from time to time, but this will not give them much lead time – the competition will catch up quickly.

It is the definition of value that is changing – the “neo people” concept redefines the value that products bring to customers, today and in the future. The edge will belong to corporates that bring this value to the products that they market. Even for everyday products from toothpaste to detergents, corporations could learn, from the AI experience, how to create relationships that are personal and individual. The data and algorithms of today do make that possible. Perhaps, when we work to include and incorporate this, we will find that our products become “neo people” in our consumers’ lives, part and parcel of their neo family.

• This blog post represents the views of the author(s), not the position of LSE Business Review or the London School of Economics and Political Science.
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