Future Trends to Affect your Company or Brand

From soothsayers to palm readers, astrologists to futurists, the unknown has always proven to be an irresistible attraction. Not knowing what lies ahead, especially in these tumultuous times, is frightening and not just for business. Stock markets gyrate violently when gripped by uncertainty – the discounting of fear is another hedge fund arbitrageur calculating the likelihood of panic and fear tumbling into mass hysteria.

It’s a good time therefore to look at what makes a brand, well, a brand. Because not all brands are. In a nutshell, those brands that stand for something compelling and authentic, believable and campaignable are going to be the one to survive and prosper in good times and bad. It is precisely those brands where the experience matches the promise, where the functionality is closely matched by the inner longings of self-expression.

Fundamentally that’s what brands have become. A shorthand for self-expression. It’s the greatest gift that commerce has ever given to culture. Look around you. Look at the people, places, things and experiences that attract or resonate with you. Now take these experiences online and join the social networks, podcasts, or shopping sites that attract you.

This is how we build our world.
So trend spotters will note that these times will generate more likelihood that time savers of whatever form who consolidate anything remotely relevant, from food to information will be increasingly sought after. I therefore bring you a consolidated trend update as a means to check whether your brand will survive and prosper.
In the beginning:
Your brand has to have a promise, or an offer ( we call it a BIG IDEA), that is easy to understand, that is useful or relevant to consumers.
Your brand must also be easy to do business with: ethical, interesting, innovative even in its most basic utilitarian behaviour.
Your brand must tell a story that is true, makes sense or touches emotionally.
Now let’s see what trends are out there that might influence the behaviour or rationale of your audience:

• Mass production and globalisation got us into this mess (apart from bankers’ greed and total inability to get it that if you lend money to people with no money, you’re hardly likely to get paid back!), artisanship and local communities will get us out. People are going to stay closer to home; not just because petrol is expensive, but also because people tend to retreat inwards as times get tough. So downsizing, retrenchment and mass unemployment are certainly possibilities as is the rise of the entrepreneur as single enterprises. Brands that focus on the essential at great value will prosper.

• The basic fundamentals of the global economy haven’t changed – just our perception of it. India and China are still huge growth markets, sucking in raw materials at an astonishing rate. An increasingly prosperous middle class is refining its taste for fast food and fine dining. Overpriced property will find its bottom and then go up again, as increasing populations still migrate to capital cities and seek work there. One thing is for sure, you can’t make land anymore. Not that you ever could.

• The organic movement will grow, albeit at a slower pace. Cost fundamentals will still be outweighed by a move towards healthier eating as the anti-aging bandwagon rolls across the baby boomer generation. People are looking for more locally grown foods that support a healthier environment and a healthier lifestyle.

• It will grow in importance as companies seek to scale down by scaling up. Special purpose portals will proliferate with embedded transactions, info on-demand, and decision-support. Web 2.0 will move towards Web 2.5 as it becomes more intuitive and easy to use. And if it’s not, it will be left behind, burned by the Wiki’s and blogs. Speed is king as larger pipes enable seamless integration – from wireless, to mobile to digital TV. Other buzz-words include real-time data mining, knowledge engineering, online information storage and smart encryption.

• Green is still green, despite what some pseudo-trendy new york ad agencies will have you believe. The fundamentals haven’t changed. The USA is still pursuing bio-fuels which will have a knock-on effect on food prices and food allocation. We’re not reducing our CO2 levels fast enough to reverse global warming. Weather patterns are shifting, increasing hurricanes, earthquakes and unseasonable weather as the arctic glaciers fall into the sea. Population increases and migrations to developed countries, a reduction in birth rates with a corresponding rise in an ageing population is having a costly effect on our planet’s food, water and natural resources.

• Resilience, pro-activity, left-field thinking will become more commonplace as whole populations downsize, re-evaluate work-life balance, change careers, countries and lifestyles. Back to basics will become commonplace. Look for women in leadership, men at home, minority rights rule, DIY boom, cooperative enterprise, community power, individual and artist power, skill banks and, the balance of power shifts back from ‘multi’ to ‘uni’. From the conglomerate to the individual.

Finally management consultants and trend futurists will do OK as the former borrows your watch to tell you the time – useful in good times and in bad, while the latter relies on short-term memory syndrome. People will forget my predictions for 2012 by, oh, next week as time moves even faster and our attention span decreases with information overload!

Future Trends to Affect your Company or Brand

The rise of a new world order. Consumers become co-creators.

A conversation with some Doha bankers the other day” “Oh, the global credit crunch hasn’t affected us in Qatar”. I bit my tongue. “My brain was screaming, “Are you for real”?
Apart from the fact that it’s people like you, sitting in ivory towers in London, New York Frankfurt and Beijing that caused this mess in the first place. Don’t you get it, finally, that the world is one BIG global village? Who was it who said that if a butterfly flutters its wings in Brazil, it causes a tornado in South Carolina? We’re all one! When you reduce everything to its smallest constituent element, whether it’s a rock or a human, it’s all vibration, tiny electric charges. That’s it, that’s what you and I are made of.

OK, I digress perhaps. Causative formation is a topic that interests me. My point simply is that this ‘credit crunch’ and the aftermath is a seismic reaction of a much deeper malaise. The fundamental changes that are taking place in society are signs of a macro trend that will affect everyone’s lives, everywhere. It’s the dawn of a new enlightenment where people power rules.

Many of us know someone who has lost his or her job. That person now is moving into his or her own one-man business. The days of staying in a job for life are gone. We don’t believe in corporations anymore, we don’t believe in BIG business. We don’t want to be sold to.
We don’t even believe in government anymore if you review the decline in voting numbers over the years. These are HUGE changes.

Many of us (bankers excluded) have cut back spending, trying to live within a budget and buying only what we have the cash to pay for. So we’re looking at utility and functionality rather than ostentatious “it looks great, but it doesn’t do anything”. This, combined with the other macro trend, “save our planet – think green” means that we re-visit design from the basis of how, when and where we dispose of a product, what it can be made of that’s reusable, recyclable or bio-degradable as a function and format of design, even before we start drawing, visualizing or creating. This is a sea change to our thinking. Gone is “bling-bling” of the nineties and noughties. Now we’re into retro chic, back to basics, chicken soup ‘cos it’s good for you’ careful living.

The new consumer is saying, “where’s the value?” and “why should I bother” when you try and sell your products. Financial services companies of all persuasions are sinking faster than Venice in the minds of the public. Their brands are no longer credible.
“Hello?” Are you trying to sell me something?” Do you know who I am? No?. Well find out and try and get to know me first. Financial institutions are shouting about safety and security. Really? And where were you when the bonuses were being handed out?
“Safety” and “Security”, the buzzwords of old are just not credible anymore. We, the public want innovation with real, tangible benefits for us, the consumer (yes it is OUR money!), based on an honest, transparent, authentic PARTNERSHIP in the financial services sector.

The worst recession since the Great Depression is now nearly over and people who survived this ordeal are now seeing the first green shoots of recovery. This will lead to a renewed focus on spending, after salting away any savings they had under the mattress. But it won’t be the big-ticket items that they will be spending on. It will be the necessaries: food, shelter, and clothing. And when we say shelter, we’re talking about doing up your home, rather than buying a new one. Clothing will be more about accessorizing for that jacket, rather than a new suit and food will be cooked at home rather than blitzing out in that new Gordon Ramsay restaurant. Having said that, people will be looking for new experiences to celebrate their survival and rebirth. So travel, probably in your country, rather than long haul, films and DVD rentals as well as sporting and cultural events should see a rise in numbers. We’ll need new cars to get there, but probably more hybrid models and smart cars than Hummers, for which the death-knell is already sounding.

Fundamentally this crisis has accentuated and positioned brands even more at the centre of communications. For brands, after all, are the greatest gift that commerce has ever given to culture and people will buy brands now even more based on what these brands say about them.
Does this brand reflect my values, as well as provide value? Does it communicate and resonate with who I am and who I want to be? Does the company that make them have a corporate social positioning that is authentic and that I believe in?
And finally the clarion call is going out to change the moniker given to us, we, the people. We are no longer “consumers”, buying products and services as an amoebic reaction to artificial stimulus (advertising) of perceived needs based on fear, must-have or peer pressure. This is so 20th century. We have moved on from that. In the main. Now the environment is one based on truth, authenticity, honesty, value and values.
We are co-creators. Talk to us as equals. Involve us in the process, whether through crowdsourcing, social media and networks or digital engagement. The balance of power has shifted. We are now in charge and demand to be heard. The genie of awareness and enlightenment is now truly out of the box.

The rise of a new world order. Consumers become co-creators.