Matt Wuerker 2010: Fight for fickle kids

Hate your cell phone provider?

Change it.


Husband bothering you?

Walk out.

Rabbi got you down?

Switch religions.

Why not? These days, it seems like everyone else is throwing off the chains of the past, too.

Thanks to the Internet, proliferating consumer choices and a dramatic shift in American culture, voters and consumers are more impatient — and more fickle — than ever before. They’re less beholden to old attachments and more willing to make dramatic changes in lifestyle and preferences — whether that’s for a cell phone provider, a spouse or even a religious preference. It’s a trend that some say fueled the rise of Barack Obama as a political force and one that, if he’s not exquisitely careful, could undo him just as easily as it sped his dramatic ascent.

An emerging group of political practitioners and social scientists is examining the trend and finding that loyalty — at least the kind of loyalty that once kept consumers bound to products and voters bound to political parties — is rapidly becoming a thing of the past.

That has profound implications for the future: As old attachments continue to fall away over the coming decades, American culture, politics and business will become ever more tumultuous as leaders and institutions try to stay ahead of an ever-quickening pace of change, chasing an increasingly fickle and mobile population. Election cycles tend to be driven by hot demographic trends. Think of George W. Bush’s victory among soccer moms in 2000 and Rahm Emanuel’s battle to win NASCAR dads in 2006.

The 2010 election cycle may well be dominated by a fight for the “fickle kids.”

Democratic pollster Peter Hart offers up a raft of statistics to back up the trend — which is spreading beyond the young to every age group. He says his polling shows that Americans over 65 are more willing to get a divorce today than ever before, even after a near lifetime of being married to the same person. College students are more willing to transfer to a new school. And, he said, more than 40 percent of Americans will change their religion at least once in their life — throwing off generations of core beliefs for something new and appealing.

All that, he said, can be deeply unsettling to his business and political clients, particularly because the speed with which consumers change their minds can be breathtaking. Leaders get paid to build and maintain large followings for consumer brands and political ideas. But how can you keep customers and voters who no longer want to be kept?

For leaders, Hart said, the new reality is this: “You can go from top to bottom and bottom to top much more quickly.”

Just look at the hottest new trend in marriage: the 50-year itch.

Linda Lea Viken is a 32-year veteran divorce attorney in Rapid City, S.D. She said she’s seeing a dramatic uptick in the number of divorces among senior citizens. “I’m doing divorces of 50-year marriages,” she said. “You want to say to yourself, ‘You’ve made it this far — are you kidding me?’”

She says the trend is driven by everything from longer life expectancies to the impact of Viagra on the sex lives of seniors. But she also thinks it’s a result of older people mimicking attitudes they’re picking up from younger Americans. “We’re becoming a little bit of a ‘me first’ society,” she said. “It’s becoming difficult to really understand what people want because it’s what they want right now. But tomorrow, they might want something else.”

Stanford University political science professor Morris Fiorina is convinced that both political parties haven’t yet grasped the scale of the change that’s happening in society. Republicans, he said, made the mistake of assuming that the divisions they exploited in the 2000-2004 elections were much deeper and more durable than they actually were — and were shocked by vote swings in 2006 and 2008 that would have seemed inconceivable in 2004. Not to mention, he said, “the emergence of Obama out of nowhere.”

“Obama benefited from the looser ties people have today, but the flip side is that he cannot count on the depth of support that a winning candidate might have had a generation ago,” Fiorina said. “And, of course, if ties are looser, then change can occur faster than if the ties bind more tightly.”

For Hollywood studios, velocity of public opinion undermines their ability to guarantee a big opening weekend for the next blockbuster. Today, if a studio doesn’t earn back 40 percent of the cost of a movie during its opening weekend, the film will most likely never turn a profit. That’s because public opinion forms on blogs, Facebook pages and Twitter feeds within hours of the first showings of the movie. Potential moviegoers who loved the advertising campaign can be turned off in seconds as they find out their peers didn’t like the first screening.

Movie studios now live or die by that kind of instant buzz, said Pete Snyder, a former Republican political pollster and CEO of the Internet marketing firm New Media Strategies. “Gone are the days where millions in television and newspaper ad buys can guarantee a strong showing on opening weekend,” Snyder said. Customers’ opinions are moving so fast, he said, that Internet word of mouth can make or break a movie even before it debuts.

One company that is renowned for its ability to thrive in a high-velocity world full of deeply fickle customers is Apple Inc. After it introduced the iTunes online music store in 2003, the Apple iPod music player became a monster hit that redefined the way Americans listened to music, and the company sold tens of millions of units. Many companies would ride that kind of success for a decade or more. But Apple launched the iPhone — a product that would chip away at iPod sales — in the summer of 2007.

To stay ahead of the decision curve, Apple is deliberately destroying one of its iconic products. As a result, Apple is one of the few companies thriving amid a global economic collapse, reporting a 15 percent increase in quarterly profit in the second quarter of 2009, at a time when many companies are struggling to simply stay in business. Sales of the iPhone, the company reported, are up 303 percent. By contrast, iPod sales are down 11 percent. The company expects sales of “traditional MP3 players to decline over time as we cannibalize ourselves with the iPod Touch and the iPhone,” said Apple chief financial officer Peter Oppenheimer.

Democratic political consultant Joe Trippi first saw the power of the fickle vote in 2004, when he ran Howard Dean’s presidential campaign. Thanks to the Internet and a then-new group of social networking tools, Dean was able to quickly attract a national following as he campaigned for the 2004 Democratic presidential nomination. But as soon as Dean placed a disappointing third place in the Iowa caucuses in January of that year, Trippi said, the Dean followers deserted him almost as quickly as they’d come.

“It was like a nanosecond before they were out,” Trippi said of Dean’s followers. “A lot of people inside the campaign were shocked at how fast people moved by.”

On the other side of the political spectrum, Tony Perkins, the head of the socially conservative activist group Family Research Council, said he sees an increasing restlessness in his own largely Christian political base, where people are more willing to abandon the loyalties of the past.

“People who maybe grew up as a Baptist but now they’re more comfortable in a Pentecostal church,” Perkins said. “People are much less bonded to a denomination.”

Anecdotally, that restlessness goes beyond the Christian faithful. “In our synagogue, we find a large number of Christians who are allowing their children to be brought up Jewish,” said author Joel Kotkin, who studies social trends. That would not have happened as recently as a decade ago. “Now, people go through phases in their spiritual lives; [they’ll] switch congregations because the pastor or the rabbi changes.”

One of the beneficiaries of the willingness to consider new ideas is the Mormon church, which has seen its membership grow nearly 30 percent since 1998, to more than 13 million today, reported a spokesman for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

All of this has dramatic implications for Obama, who may find over time that his legions of followers were easier to gather than they are to keep. “We see Democrats with quite a large lead in party affiliation,” said Hart. “That used to be good for a generation — now it’s good for an election cycle.”

Hart comes to a bleak conclusion: “Loyalty,” he said, “is something that is totally in the past.”

Abby Phillip contributed to this story.