Derek Maxfield on How Technology Continues to Reshape Consumer Behavior

Derek Maxfield has never bought into the idea that technology changes people. He does believe that it reveals what people always desired and did not have the infrastructure to act on. That distinction matters in the way he approaches his work.

The dramatic shifts in how consumers discover, evaluate, and purchase products over the last two decades are commonly framed as technology imposing new behaviors on a passive audience. Maxfield asserts that the more accurate read is that technology has been steadily removing the friction between consumer desire and consumer action, and that the behaviors that appear are latent impulses finally given room to operate at full speed.

This intrinsically changes how businesses should think about what comes next. If technology is a friction-removal mechanism instead of a behavior-creation engine, then the direction of change is more predictable than it may appear in the middle of disruption. Consumers will continue to move toward whatever makes the gap between wanting and having smaller.

They will continue to trust voices they have chosen over institutions that interrupt them, and they will continue to expect the personalization and immediacy that digital tools have conditioned them to receive. Understanding those trajectories points less to predicting the future and is more a matter of reading the present clearly.

From Passive Consumption to Active Participation

One of the most consequential behavioral shifts of the digital era has been the collapse of the distinction between consumer and participant. For most of commercial history, the consumer’s role was fundamentally passive as brands made products, advertising created desire, and retail converted that desire into a transaction. Digital technology dismantled that architecture methodically.

Review platforms gave consumers a public voice that brands could not control. Social media gave them an audience just as creator tools gave them the ability to become producers themselves. The result is a consumer who expects transparency, accountability, and the ability to participate in a brand’s story rather than simply receive it.

Derek Maxfield has tracked this shift as it plays out across the direct sales and digital commerce industries, and he is unequivocal about its permanence.

“The consumer who expects to be heard is not going back to being a passive recipient,” he notes. “Every business that is still operating on the assumption that communication is one-directional is operating on borrowed time.”

The Acceleration of Expectation

Technology accelerates how quickly consumers expect the things they want. Each improvement in delivery speed, checkout simplicity, or personalization accuracy sets a new baseline against which every subsequent experience is measured. Amazon’s introduction of two-day shipping did not just make Amazon more competitive. It reset consumer expectations for every retailer in the space, regardless of whether those retailers had the logistics infrastructure to match it.

When one platform makes product discovery genuinely intuitive, every other discovery experience feels clumsy by comparison. What makes this acceleration particularly consequential is that it operates asymmetrically, as consumer expectations rise quickly and reset slowly.

A brand that delivers an exceptional experience earns goodwill that compounds over time, while a disappointing one faces a recovery period disproportionately long relative to the original failure. The margin for mediocrity has been shrinking for two decades.

Personalization as the New Default

The expectation of personalization may carry the most long-term commercial weight of all the behavioral shifts technology has accelerated. Early digital commerce operated on a broadcast model where the same homepage, the same promotions, and the same email to every customer was the model.

Data infrastructure has made those practices actively alienating to consumers accustomed to experiences that reflect their individual preferences and context. Personalization at scale was once the exclusive domain of companies with significant engineering resources, but the barrier has dropped substantially. Now, recommendation engines, segmented communication, and adaptive content have become accessible features rather than advantages reserved for the largest players.

“The reason a creator’s recommendation feels personal is that it often genuinely is,” Maxfield notes. “They know their audience. They’ve spent years learning what that specific community cares about. That’s a form of personalization that no algorithm has fully replicated, because it’s rooted in a real relationship rather than a behavioral data set.”

Trust as the Most Disruptive Technology

It can seem reductive to identify trust as a primary driver of consumer behavior change, but the data consistently points in that direction. Institutional trust in media, advertising, corporations, and government has declined steadily across most developed markets for more than two decades, and into that vacuum, individual voices have moved with remarkable speed. The creator economy is, in significant part, a trust economy.

The commercial influence creators carry is a function of credibility built through consistency and genuine accountability, not reach alone. Consumers who follow a trusted creator are delegating commercial judgment to someone whose values they believe align with their own. The creator-centric platform Curated, led by Maxfield, is building infrastructure designed around exactly that reality.

What Businesses Must Accept About What Comes Next

Maxfield is adamant that we cannot consider the behavioral shifts technology has accelerated to be a phase. Consumers are not going to become less informed, less vocal, or less expectant of experiences that feel personally relevant. The trust that creators have built with their audiences is not going to transfer back to institutions that have not earned it.

“Technology keeps raising the bar,” Maxfield says. “The businesses that embrace that will find a more loyal customer on the other side. The ones that resist it will find that consumer patience has limits.”

What businesses must accept is that the consumer relationship is now genuinely two-directional, and the brands that succeed will be those that treat that reality as an opportunity and build accordingly. The companies that will define the next decade of commerce are the ones with the clearest understanding of what consumers have always wanted. That is, to be known, to be heard, and to be served by people and brands that have genuinely earned their trust.