Author of “The New Capitalist Manifesto” and of "Betterness: Economics For Humans", director of the Havas Media Lab, Umair Haque is a great mind that in 2011 was ranked by Thinkers50 among the top 50 best and most influential business and management thinkers of the world.

There is no doubt about the deep disconnect between consumers and brands, between citizens and institutions all over the world. Too many brands and too many institutions simply don't deliver what they are promising. Brands continue to push consumers to buy more, newer, faster, cheaper, bigger junk products. The outcome of this industrial approach to consumerism is opulence, the industrial definition of prosperity, a plague of our time where we all are losers. Consumers spend money that don’t have to buy things they don’t really need, the environment can’t sustain this model of growth any longer.

The challenge for companies and for institutions is not to continue to give “more, bigger, faster, cheaper”, but to genuinely care about the impact of their proposals on people’s life, to contribute to individual and collective wellbeing to help people and society to fluorish.

That’s a tremendous motivation for a quantum leap that allows companies and institutions to repair the broken relation with consumers and citizens. It’s a new approach that has proved its value: brands and institutions that already got serious about it and deliver more meaning, more wellbeing for every single penny invested, simply outperform the competition and redefine new market spaces. Companies and institutions are facing such a big opportunity that they can't afford to miss.