Walker Smith writes: For the past three years, since the economic crisis ballooned, I’ve been writing a regular column called Looking Up, on the ways for businesses to manage through recession and tough markets; I wrote the last one in the series earlier this month.

I wrote the first Looking Up in October, 2008, just over a month after the global financial system went to the edge of collapse.  (I’m not being melodramatic here; if you need a stark reminder of just how close we came to financial meltdown during the eight days from September 12 to September 19, 2008, James Stewart’s New Yorker essay “Eight Days” is still chilling).

The column had three purposes.  It translated financial concepts, to help people navigate the macro-economic news. It provided evidence and examples, to show that there were still opportunities in the market. And the third, and most important, purpose of Looking Up was to offer insights and guidance about how to reach consumers effectively during the Great Recession and subsequent stagnant recovery.  Over three years, Looking Up focused on delivering insight and inspiration to our clients.

And looking back on something like a hundred issues, I see that three themes repeated themselves over and over again. They’re worth repeating here.

Innovation.  The single most effective way to thrive in a downturn is to innovate. Reams of academic research have demonstrated this across past downturns and across geographies.  There are hundreds of examples of successful innovations introduced during the depths of past recessions, along with hundreds of examples of defunct companies that went bust waiting out a recession while competitors innovated. The logic is simple: innovation sparks new demand, creates new jobs and advances the overall productivity of the economy, which is the key to prosperity.

No other theme has been mentioned in Looking Up as often as innovation, one of the core practice areas of The Futures Company. If you had to take just one thing away from Looking Up, it would be: innovate!

Sourcing growth.  The biggest challenge facing companies at the moment is sourcing growth.  Unemployment, stock market volatility, cuts in government benefits, deleveraging and housing price declines all mean that household budgets remain tight. But there are pockets of strength in the consumer marketplace; more can be found through close scrutiny and shrewd analysis.  A number of MONITOR methods, such as Dynamax, have been developed to identify this enduring spending potential.

Practice optimism.  Consumers take their cue from businesses.  Optimism is contagious (as research has shown time after time).  If you want consumers to be buoyant again, you need to help. Conversely, if your marketing echoes their worst fears, don’t expect them to be cheerful. There’s a virtuous circle here: if businesses look up, then your customers will too.

Global MONITOR is an innovative, strategic, future-focused Global Insights programme for clients and agencies. It identifies the key dynamics shaping the world and the consumer marketplace, as well as potential implications for your clients’ businesses. If you want to know more about Global MONITOR, please call Simon Kaplan in the United States, or Deniz Erdem in Europe.

The picture at the top of this post was originally published by Global Envision – well worth a visit – and is used with thanks. 

Alex Steer writes:

There was a lot of discussion in our London and New York offices last week about a short video called A Day Made of Glass. It’s produced by Corning, which makes specialized glass products, including mobile and tablet touchscreens, and the video explores a day in the life of a family in a not-too-distant future in which (surprise) there are screens, especially touchscreens, in just about everything.

The first thing that struck us was Corning’s imaginative approach to the dry task of selling high-tech glass. It’s a great illustration of what can happen when you apply a bit of futures thinking to your brand. It’s also smart as a piece of brand planning, focusing on the consumers at the end of the supply chain, not Corning’s B2B customers. Creatively, it’s well executed.

But it’s the futures aspect which has provoked the debate. The video is cheerfully optimistic about the screenification of the entire world, as you’d expect from a sales tool, and cheery optimism runs through the creative work too, presenting a perfect upper-middle-class family – mum, dad, kids, all so happy and healthy-looking – that feels more like a nod to the heyday of Madison Avenue than a look to the future.

Some of the futures thinking isn’t bad. Consumerism is one of the strongest forces defining technology innovation, and this trend is everywhere in A Day Made of Glass. Glassland is about user experience, good design and straightforward, seamless interaction. All the devices assume a world of rich information and always-on connectivity.

Which is what also makes this an extreme scenario.It assumes there are no limits to our attention, or our wish to interact with everything in the way we currently interact with our phones or tablets. The prevalence of touchscreens led one of our Senior Consultants to compare it to another video, for Microsoft’s Future of Work scenarios. In both, ‘the future looks very much like the waiting room at Heathrow Terminal 5’.

In information-rich markets like the US or the UK, the desire to stay updated is already clashing with the recognition that there’s too much information, and we’re looking for more efficient filters. There’s also an emerging awareness of the importance of continuous partial attention in our interaction with media, and the need for interfaces that are useful even when they don’t have our full attention (such as radio or TV).

The continuous interested multitasking imagined in Corning’s world seems, frankly, exhausting. Said one of our SVPs: ‘The woman emailing from her bathroom? I can pretty much guarantee that if you email me anything before I’ve washed my face and brushed my teeth in the morning you’re not going to get a “yes”.’

So in the end we were a bit sceptical. We also worried about the sheer energy cost of all those screens. But hats off to Corning for producing a thought-provoking piece of work that got us talking about the future of media and technology.

Andrew Curry writes:

I’ve been working on a Futures Company report on The World in 2020 for the last couple of months, and since I’ve end up doing much of the work in the evening I’m delighted to say that we’ve just published the summary edition, and the full version has just gone into production. The summary edition can be downloaded from our website, although registration is required.

The World in 2020 is the first in a series of ‘Futures Perspectives’ reports which we’re publishing over the next few months.

It takes a high level view of the big drivers which are shaping the world, and looks at some of the innovation spaces which may emerge as a result. Here’s are a couple of extracts:

The financial crisis of 2008 represented an ending, but not a beginning. We are in a liminal moment, betwixt and between, when there are more questions than answers, but when, increasingly, our assumptions about how the world works are open to challenge and interrogation. … Liminal moments such as this one can last a decade or more, before opinion coalesces around a new set of operating assumptions about how the world works.

Over the next decade, we’ll see much tougher resource constraints – energy, food and water, and resources will all be under pressure – as well as the continuing long economic shift towards Asia. Issues involving technology and inequality will also be influential. It will be harder to make money in the coming decade. As a result, businesses will have to rethink their approach:

The changing economic environment creates the dilemma of new yet alternative prospects for different types of customers. The emerging middle class across much of Asia and Latin America will be very different from the debt constrained consumers of Europe and the United States. Globally, the
costs of basics such as food and energy are likely to rise over the next decade, so discretionary income will be lower than some project. In the richer countries, the experience of recession will create demands for more social behavior from businesses.

Business critic Umair Haque talks of the “meaning organization” that builds “authentic prosperity.” As he writes in a blog post, “An isolated notion of ’profit’ is obsolete: it’s an arid industrial-age conception of a currency-focused construct that’s built to trivialize everything but what a firm owes its ’owners’.

Tom Richardson writes:

What people need is still more important for business than what businesses happen to be able to create – even though the gap between these two sometimes seems quite large.

Without research, and the freedom to pursue ideas that might never be profitable, some of the world’s most successful companies might never have become so. But this is different to throwing money at services that people haven’t told you they want, simply because these services seem to offer something “innovative”.

Innovation is the monkey to our organ grinder. It exists to find new ways of approaching age-old needs, such as reassurance, simplicity and community.

IBM, for example, has been working on a supercomputer called ‘Watson’ that can understand a question posed in colloquial language and respond vocally with an accurate, factual answer. The company says it’s designed for trawling through piles of papers such as legal documents to find an elusive fact.

Poor old Watson; destined to infuriate. It may respond to one of our needs (more time to do things) but even 99% accuracy isn’t good enough for a lawyer. Education helps us develop the ability to evaluate competing claims and make judgments about the information we really need. Understanding the use of language is only one part of that.

Why are we so bad at identifying tools that respond to human needs? They’re our needs, after all. Take Wolfram Alpha – again, an incredible product – that will make a lot of money through an expensive premium subscription that offers complex mathematical modelling. But at its launch in May 2009, it was seized upon by sensationalists at ‘the next Google’.

What Google has done, brilliantly, is to work hard in private on their sterile algorithms, while presenting a likeable human face to its users, with a visual identity that is colourful and simple. Google, like the iPod, is a human technology.

Wolfram Alpha, meanwhile, is a technology for technologists. It arrogantly (there I go again with the irresistible urge to anthropomorphise) tells you the answer, rather than humbly fetching information for you to interpret, like Google. If it gets the answer wrong, there’s no way to click back, think and discriminate.

The same delusion applies to social media. We know that no-one wants to be friends with washing powder. The company knows that plonking its washing powder down on Facebook makes it look awkwardly like the try-hard kid at school.

And, sadly, you can imagine the conversation around the water cooler in the Marketing Department:

“But have you seen the numbers?

“We have to be a part of this. Let’s ride this wave, let’s jump on board, let’s join the conversation!”

No. Go away. Really. No-one wants you here. You’re the wasp in my garden. And by the way, I resent your digital cold call.

The image at the top of the post is from the Museum of  Mid-Century Illustration, and is used with thanks. http://www.plan59.com/main.htm

Tom Richardson writes:

In the London office we like to shake out the weekend with a ‘Monday Morning Meeting’. It’s a tradition that goes back some twenty years, and it’s a way of finding time to think out loud and be provocative, to explore ideas and have them contested.

These meetings are important because we spend a lot of our time on specific client problems, often dealing with one industry or even one type of product for long periods, but these clients rightly expect us to be well-versed in wider trends.

Finding a balance between these is crucial to being effective. The role of research is to help clients to be able to decide and to act, so we have to see trends in context.

This week we used a balloon debate as a way of thinking about the future. We created a list of 100 services, products, institutions or ideologies, pulled them out of a hat, and stood up to defend our selection’s importance to the world in 2050.

Everyone had ten minutes to prepare and a minute each to make their case.

Round one saw ‘dictatorship’ go up against ‘IKEA’, ‘the National Trust’, and ‘dietary supplements’.

Andy Stubbings, a Senior Consultant, made a persuasive case for IKEA with a sobering vision of a world in 2050 in which energy scarcity, resource conflicts and overcrowded cities made the servicing of needs – not wants – the prevalent retail model.

Lawrence Wykes’ defence of dictatorship focused on the inevitable inefficiency of democracy in a resource-scarce world, while Carol Storey’s case for dietary supplements focused on population growth and malnutrition.

My deeply personal defence of the National Trust as a bulwark against the insidious creep of disposable architecture was not persuasive enough to put me through to the final round alongside Pets, IKEA and Dictatorship. Alas!

In the final round, IKEA came out on top for 2050, despite concerns about deforestation and global warming, because of its consumer focus, logistical precision and sharp eye for the wider external factors influencing its business. (For example, it’s a leader in using rail for its freight distribution).

So – did the exercise serve its purpose? I think so.

It forced us to articulate our opinions. And more than that, it made us think about the future in terms of what will be necessary, rather than what will be possible. Too many predictions – and technology pundits are particularly guilty here – focus on what we are capable of doing because it makes good copy.

But change and innovation lives in a messy space between consumer need, external constraint, and evolving business models. In other words, it needs an understanding of human behaviour, drivers of wider social change, and business opportunity.

By justifying our choices in a competitive setting, we had to anchor our arguments in these unforgiving contexts.

The picture of IKEA’s headquarters is from Wikimedia Commons and is published under a GNU Free Documentation licence.

Andrew Curry writes:

Sometimes you stumble on good news by accident. So it was recently when one of our analysts – while researching something else – found some excellent coverage in the trade press (which we’d missed completely) of a project we’d done late last year for Red Bull. The project was about how consumer manage their energy levels, a subject we’ve been interested in for about a decade, when we first started to thinking about the idea of ‘consumer currencies’ which went beyond money and time. The Red Bull project enabled us to take a far closer look at how consumers think about energy levels and manage them, day-to-day and even hour-to-hour. In particular, we found that consumers were very aware of energy levels at different times of the day, and the idea of ‘transformational energy’ emerged from the research – making sure that you have the right energy levels to be set up for the next part of your day.

Red Bull used this insight as part of a new creative platform, “Want to Squeeze The Day Dry?”, which launched in May. The campaign was developed both to bring former Red Bull customers back to the brand, and also to inform retailers about the value of the whole energy category. Yannis Kavounis, the Futures Company Director who led the research, observes:

The energy category has only been around since the late 90s, so it’s really amazing to see how savvy and sophisticated consumers have become with their energy needs, and how to satisfy them, in such a short period of time. Gone are the days where people talked about time management and physical kick. Today, it’s about holistic energy management with a wide range of desired energy modes; transformational energy fits really well in this, as people’s efforts focus on managing energy levels throughout the day and making the most of it.

The photograph at the top of the post is by Andrew Curry. It is published here under a Creative Commons licence.

Eloise Keightley writes:

Consumers may claim they want ethical brands – but what do they really mean? American evidence suggests that a desire to be ethical does not necessarily correlate with a propensity to buy ethical: Brandweek has reported a survey that found that even among consumers who called themselves “environmentally conscious”, more than half could not name a single green brand. A study at the University of Minnesota’s Carlson School of Management found that while people were likely to buy energy efficient light bulbs from the shops, they tended to opt for less efficient traditional bulbs when shopping online – and this attitude extends to white goods, electronics and domestic cleaning products. There is a classic disconnect here between stated attitudes and actual knowledge or behaviour.

This is partly because of the nebulous way in which “ethicalness” is measured, from the consumer’s point of view. For instance, whilst a vague sense of altruism may drive consumers to make choices they deem ethical, it’s unlikely that the majority fully understand what ethical trademarks denote. There is a recognition that Fair Trade, for example, equates with some sort of ethical standard but consumers often cannot define what that standard is. Consumers also find it hard to distinguish between ethical trademarks and can confuse their policies.

In any case, ethical innovation has historically proven to have a limited shelf life – due as much to legislative progress as shifting consumer values. Only a few years ago, cosmetic brands in particular were falling over themselves to tell consumers that their products were developed without the need for animal testing. These days, few brands bother. Lack of animal testing has become a hygiene factor (mainly due to changes in legislation) and consumers have established new, less standardised and more subjective ethical benchmarks for brands to respond to.

It’s unfortunate that the value of ethical trademarks deflate the more ubiquitous they become. If McDonalds can win awards for its free range eggs, consumers may well wonder about the rigour of free range certification and imagine that ‘free range’ is a tiered or varied notion. Bad press also dilutes the currency of ethical initiatives: the BBC has accused Live Aid of misappropriating the money it raised and there has been a rise in well-publicised literature that calls into question the very nature of humanitarian aid. We have no commonly understood, credible metric for ethics.

Some pioneers of ethical retail have argued that it is not enough to use ethical standards as a USP.  American Apparel CEO Dov Charney, whose business is synonymous with the anti-sweatshop movement, has remarked: “If you want to sell something, ethical or otherwise, appeal to people’s self-interest.” In other words, brands need to marry sound ethical values with products that are inherently desirable if they are to last.

The picture at the top of the post is from Green Mountain Coffee, and is used with thanks.

Denise Hicks writes:

Lobbyists 38 Degrees are one of the many organisations that have become heavily involved in protesting against the BBC cuts. In response to the huge amount of opposition, particularly to the potential closures of 6music and the Asian network, 38 Degrees have managed to raise enough money to launched a billboard campaign in protest.

They have just posted a first concept of the proposed billboards on their site and are asking for public feedback.

Now it’s not a great concept in my opinion and pretty much misses the point. As you can imagine, akin to a YouTube commentary, the feedback is varied and entertaining, with comments such as…

• ‘Poor miserable counterproductive lack of imagination.’
• ‘it’s very white’
• ‘I’d suggest that you start again from scratch.’
• ‘Driving past will cause confusion and accidents ala the wondabra advert’
• ‘I think it’s lovely’
• ‘I would suggest just typography – big letters “NO TO BBC CUTS!” or somesuch’
• ‘does it need to be “clever”?
• ‘The DDM (Detracting Demographic Monkees) are at it again’
• ‘You have paid an ad agency for this? If so, I am very disappointed. May I suggest you talk to some other companies instead? Airside are superb’

See what you think… I’m sure they’d be grateful for any (constructive and informed) thoughts!

Last Thursday was something of a watershed for the UK government. Data.gov.uk was launched, becoming one of a growing number of government portals giving us access to reams of official government data. That might not sound terribly exciting, but for businesses and research organisations that use official and reliable information, the announcement may fundamentally change the way they operate.

Government data has traditionally been stored in departmental silos where it is difficult to access. Many aggregation sites, such as the ONS, are notoriously hard to navigate.

The Guardian has been campaigning for such an initiative for some time,  although its progress could only be described as incremental. In one of a number of articles on the site (you can find them here), they trace the birth of data.gov.uk to a comment made by Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the man who invented the world wide web, to the Prime Minister at a dinner for recipients of the Order of Merit:

“Gordon Brown said to me, ‘How should the UK make the best use of the internet?’ and I replied that the government should just put all of its data on it,” Berners-Lee recalled. “And he said ‘OK, let’s do it’.”

The site has been open to developers since October, in which time – without wanting to rely too heavily on one newspaper – The Guardian has created a portal which allows you to search for data from other ‘open government’ sources. It’s rather ambitiously called World Government Data, although currently supports only Anglophone countries. It mimics other efforts to combine official data from around the globe in an accessible way.

Why is this good news? Firstly, it seems only fair that taxpayers have access to information whose collection they have financed. Secondly, releasing such a vast body of data to the public enables a greater pool of talent to find ways to use it, in building new applications or finding new insight.

Ito World, for example, created some great visualisations using transport data . They were also responsible for this amazing video showing the edits made to OpenStreetMap over the course of 2008:

Greater access to data like this can have profound consequences. Members of the online mapping community scrambled together data from various sources to create an OpenStreetMap of Port-au-Prince that aid workers could use to help co-ordinate their efforts. Whilst their work was undoubtedly appreciated, it would have been made far easier with greater access. Here’s to Open Data.

The image above is used with kind permission of Jason Hawkes.

Yannis Kavounis, the head of our Millenials Knowledge Venturing team, talks to Tom Ding

Tom: Yannis, I have been meaning to ask you about Millenials and the recession…

Yannis: Recession, anxiety, layoffs… I’m personally exhausted from all the speculation and debate around it. Let’s talk about something more uplifiting: change and our future.

Tom: Sure. But where will the change come from?

Yannis: Well, not from government and politicians. They are only trying to resolve the problem using the same tools and context that caused it. So what’s left? Us – ordinary people, and Millennials of course. Millennials are connected and aware of the power of the collective. They have the technological and creative tools to take risks. And most importantly they’re young, not jaded and realise that grassroots overhaul of our economy and values is the only way forward.

Tom: I have seen a few diffferent versions of Millennials and Generation Y, what is your definition?

Yannis: At The Futures Company we say Millennials are the cohort of people born between 1979 and 1992, or roughly those aged between 16 and 29 at the moment.

Tom: OK. So give me some examples of these new values you talk about…

Yannis: So, for instance, I love how some of us are still rooting for ownership (intellectual or physical) as a fundamental principle of our economy. Well, guess what, Millennials are teaching us that modern business models can be based on more fluid and open concepts such as access and open source. Think of a world where you don’t ‘own’ but you ‘share’ – as and when you need to. Who needs iTunes when you have Spotify?

Tom: Yes and everyone I know has started using Spotify all of a sudden. I read that they just got their millionth subscriber in the UK, around the same time that the billionth application was downloaded for the iPhone – which I guess is open development, if not true open source. But is all this generational change about technology?

Yannis: Well, hasn’t generational change always been about technology, through every stage of human evolution? The interesting thing about current technology is how Millennials are using it and the role it plays in their lives. For them, it’s the means to an end, not the end itself – it is the greatest facilitator of societal change at the moment. I see Millennials as the generation that will use technology to help us enter a new age of realisation … be that in the economy, consumerism, or through our social values.

The picture is borrowed, with thanks, from wearesuperfamous.com

(edit: The Futures Company definition of Millenials is those born from 1979 to 1992, not 1982 to 1992 as originally written – a typo, apologies)