Today I Learnt a New Word, and more ...

"Transumer” – what a word! While driving to work this morning, I heard this new word over my favourite radio station – Class 91.3, hosted by Joe Augustin and Petrina Kow.

According to Petrina, “transumer” is a combination of 2 words – transit and consumer.
It refers to those frequent travelers who spent many hours in transit at the airports, and it is a new group of consumers in a niche market – great target for companies which are looking for new market and new customers!

I was curious about this new word, so I decided to ‘google’ this word when I reached the office. And this is what I found out:

According to Trendwatching.com, an independent and opinionated consumer trends firm, when the terms TRANSUMERS and TRANSUMERISM were first discussed in 2003, the focus was solely on consumers in transition, i.e., travelers, and the many novel and innovative shopping opportunities at airports, train stations and hotels.

However, this TRANSUMERS trend has now been expanded to non-travel, as consumers are slowly but certainly mirroring travel behaviour in their daily life, where the temporary, the transient, is increasingly being valued in this Experience Economy. Huh, EXPERIENCE ECONOMY - another new term that I learnt today.

Now, I wonder how many new words/terms out there which I did not learn in school? I thought about technoprenuer, spam, spyware, dunch, netizen, etc. and many more.

I remember many years ago when I first came across the word CO-OPETITION (think it is a title of a book), I was amazed. This is a combination of 2 words – cooperation and competition, a word coined to describe cooperative competition.

Another word that comes to my mind - GLOCALIZATION. No prize for guessing it right, this is a combination of the words “globalization” and “localization”, a term invented to emphasize the importance of “think globally and act locally”.

My examples of new words can go on and on. Interested to find out more new words, just google “new words” and follow the search results.

Now … what will be the next new word to be invented? Well, your guess is as good as mine :-)