Posts filed under ‘trends’
The new normal is still here, and here to stay
Eleanor Cooksey writes:
“I’ve found the cost of living has gone up substantially and it has had a huge impact on my life. I am not buying luxuries as often and I will change the way I deal with my finances.”
This sobering quote comes from a Scottish man we spoke to as part of our fifth in-depth review of how UK consumers are responding to the current economic situation. In our breakfast briefing held in London last week to launch this review, we highlighted four themes which describe the current environment:
- The New Normal is firmly embedded: Reflecting the broader economic uncertainty, individuals feel the outlook is gloomy: 25% feel the UK economy is going very badly these days, an increase of 10% compared to when the survey was last carried out six months ago. People are even less optimistic about their personal financial situation with almost half thinking they will be worse off over the next 12 months. The message is clear: no one expects things to go back to how they were and we are learning how to cope.
- Rising prices are hurting:Though inflation has recently dropped a fraction, our data showed levels of anxiety about rising prices similar to those seen in 2008. Many of the people we spoke to were highly sensitive to these changes, whether this was about an increase in the cost of petrol or bell peppers.
- Savvy shopping matters to consumers: 43% of consumers have had to dip into savings to make ends meet and they are trying hard to make their money going further. Deals and special offers are still very much part of this, but consumers are doing more than that: they are giving serious thought to what they really need and what they really don’t. One lady in Staines realised she didn’t have to spend £70 every six weeks at the hairdresser and could use a £3.50 home dye kit instead. However, she wasn’t going to cut back on her expensive make-up and perfume.
- It’s a constant struggle to stay on top of things: In our last survey, we identified three groups who represent the various responses to the current financial downturn, and this time round, ‘All Hands on Deck’ were the only group which had increased in size. Though people in this group feel the struggle to make ends meet most acutely, making the most of your budget is relevant to everyone, even for the relatively unaffected ‘Plain Sailing’ group. All want to feel they can loosen their belt without losing it.
I’ll finish with a quote from a young woman in Sheffield which sums up the dilemma the New Normal presents for some:
“I could lose my job tomorrow, so I should plan to protect myself against that – but then again, I could lose my job tomorrow…so why not live for the moment?”.
There are limited places available for a repeat of this breakfast briefing on 12th May. To find out more please contact Karen Kidson.
The World in 2020
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’.
Spreading the love
Pen Stuart writes:
We are in love. Or more precisely we were on Monday morning, soaking ourselves in the warmth of a topical subject that doesn’t always feature high on client priorities, even as it leads personal ones. And in true Futures Company fashion, we wanted to know what’s happening next in the heady world of love. So began a session mapping the trajectory of this ideal, trying to understand how core emotions have been shaped to construct the Hallmark ideas that are all around, especially in the run-up to Valentine’s Day.
Paradigms of love are often at odds with realities. Take for example the 1950s ‘golden age’ of housebound wives who expressed their love by presiding over a newly close family. In practice, with household consumerism an essential ingredient of this ideal home, it was possible only because women were entering the paid workforce.
Yet it was these (misleading) ideals that captured the public imagination, and became a crucial way for brands to connect with consumers. In turn this was overthrown by a new ideal that fitted better with people’s hopes and dreams for equality of opportunity, providing new zeitgeisty opportunities for brands. Many commentators say that love today is in crisis, pointing to family dissolutions and the rise of single-parent households, but a narrow focus on demographic trends misses out the continuity of love, warmth and feeling within shifting families. And millennials, who will shape the future, are increasingly interested in the pursuit of happiness, which they associate strongly with, you’ve guessed it, “love”. If love isn’t dead, it’s worth mapping how meanings of this might change.
So we delved through themes such as the joys and sorrows of work, which has been re-interpreted and re-negotiated as women come to influence it more strongly, as a place of emotional fulfilment. The broader economic context looks set to make divorce – said to cost £25,000 – a luxury consumer good.
Add to this a pinch of escalating expectations, a dash of ageing populations, and a liberal sprinkling of new scientific claims and technological possibilities and we came to a few scenarios for the new shape of love. Ranging from ‘pursued perfection’ to new spaces of tolerance and ‘flexi-ships’, the heartening thing was the hope and exciting possibilities that remained. But enough! I must go and spread the love.
The image at the top is ‘A love for the arts by Delacor‘, published here under a Wikimedia Commons licence.
17 February 2011 at 9:03 am thenextwavefutures Leave a comment
After the floodtide of prosperity
Andrew Curry writes:
Our chairman, J Walker Smith, was one of the experts invited to contribute by Marketing to its ‘Forward Thinking‘ essays this year. His theme: that we’ve reached the end of “the floodtide of prosperity”, which is changing consumer behaviour, and that marketing will have to follow suit.
But, as he writes in his contribution, this is about more than just the aftermath of the financial crisis:
Three major cycles are coming to a close nowadays, only one of which is economic. One is technological; one is demographic. All three are opening onto something new in the face of unprecedented resource constraints. … Based on where we see these three dynamics headed, the macro consumer trend to watch will be the emergence of lifestyles reflecting an overarching outlook of ingenuity.
And this is made more necessary by the emerging environmental constraints we face, which include a whole range of scarcities – from water to fish to timber – as well as climate change. The result is that we’re moving into a new world in which the new consumer assets are ‘vigilance’ and ‘resourcefulness’.
Consumers are being forced back onto their own skills and smartness. There are no ready answers about what to do in a world in which economic risk is top of mind, technological engagement is ubiquitous, generational priorities are upended, and resource limits necessitate temperance.
All of the ‘Forward Thinking’ essays can be found here.
24 January 2011 at 9:17 am thenextwavefutures Leave a comment
The future’s blue – and yellow?
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.
28 October 2010 at 1:31 pm thenextwavefutures Leave a comment
Changing transport
Andrew Curry writes:
I was asked to speak at an event held last week in Leuven in Belgium on The Future of Transport by Said El Khadraoui, an MEP who’s a member of the European Parliament’s Committee on Transport and Tourism. I went because it was a chance to revisit a large scenarios project I directed a few years ago, for the UK government’s Foresight project, on Intelligent Infrastructure Systems, and because some of the other speakers were at the forefront of work on intelligent transport systems. (And not, of course, because Leuven is the home of Stella Artois).
Transport is a problem because its carbon emissions keep on growing – unlike every other sector – and because it is almost completely dependent on fossil fuel to power it, against a backdrop of expected long-term price increases. One speaker argued that given the carbon impact and the risks, and given also the level of external costs generated by transport, it is likely that transport – especially car use and road freight – is simply too cheap.
The argument which I teased out of the Foresight scenarios was that one of the problems is that we confuse the benefits of mobility with the benefits of access; a century of increasing car use has made services and facilities more distant, and therefore harder to access by anything other than a car. The long-run solution is to redesign the built environment to reverse this process. This takes a generation or more, although it is starting to happen; there are more food shops closer to homes, and road space, certainly in towns, is being taken away from cars across Europe.
In the meantime, technology offers both carrots and sticks. The combination of wireless technology, open data, and smartphones opens up the possibility of applications which make public transport more attractive, and alternatives to car ownership more feasible. This requires more than just better, live information. It also requires the smartphone or a smartcard to be a form of authentication (not necessarily identification), of permission, and preferably of payment as well. The stick is some form of road pricing; the technology is well advanced, and the reasons for implementing it more pressing. The Netherlands is likely to be the first, although Belgium is not far behind. One other issue that’s becoming more prominent is that of the noise impact of traffic.
Leuven is a university town with quite a lot of industry associated with it (a Belgian equivalent of Oxford, perhaps). One of the speakers conjured up a vision of the city using technology to manage its transport issues better – everything from guiding traffic and managing traffic flows, to a drivers’ reserved parking space, to integrating information about different transport systems, to supporting car sharing, to helping people use bikes or walking instead of travelling by car.
The picture at the top, by Andrew Curry, is of the Grote Markt in Leuven, a ‘shared space‘ used by pedestrians, cyclists, and service vehicles. It is published here under a Creative Commons licence.
Opening up in Latin America
Crawford Hollingworth writes:
We’ve been doing quite a lot of work in Latin America in recent years, and it seemed both inevitable and desirable that we’d want to open an office on the continent, not least because – in terms of social change – it’s one of the most innovative regions on the planet. And we’ve now managed to do this – working in partnership with Ogilvy in Buenos Aires. We’ve been lucky to find two outstanding people to launch the office for us, in Bernardo Geogheghan and Sebastian Codeseiro, who’re flanking me in the picture above.
I visited Buenos Aires for the launch, and while I was there I was interviewed by Clarin, Argentina’s largest paper. Here’s part of the interview – approximately translated.
- What emerging trends are we seeing?
“One of the trends that we analyze is that people feel that we live in a society which has greater risks than at other times. The way this risk emerges in each society is different. In Europe is related to the fear of others, the immigrant, and also with the possibility of a new economic crisis. In the U.S. it is the risk associated with the possibility of terrorist attacks. In Latin America it has other components linked to problems such as poverty and insecurity of property and people. In each area the trend is expressed differently.
- What other phenomenon can be anticipated for the coming years?
I think the one of the most important trends is the rise of protectionism in many forms and at many levels – national to regional and even at a city level [imagine a sort of new medievalism in which cities only care for, support and protect themselves]. This will be brought about by growing global and local power struggles, resource issues and social unrest.
The rise of Wordle
We’ve been having a debate in the office about the merits of Wordle. These are Russ’ thoughts.
Russ Wilson writes:
Wordle, word clouds, Tagxedo: all online apps for taking a load of data in the form of words and presenting it in a design friendly way. As a lover of language I’m all for anything that encourages people to explore words, think about how and why they’ve been used and analyse their meanings. However I’m not really sure that any of these tools do this.
I have two main issues with Wordles, and they’re exemplified in the wordle above, based on David Cameron’s coalition speech. First, they remove the word from its immediate context. Take the word interest, represented as one of the more frequently occurring words. But it could equally indicate curiosity and engagement or interest payments. The Wordle doesn’t help; it only tells us the word occurred often in the speech. Similarly, coalition also figures prominently. But it doesn’t help with context. We can’t tell, for example, whether they said ‘this is a coalition’ or ‘this is not a coalition’!
The second issue is that frequency is being proposed as an indicator of importance, but that’s not how we actually interpret speech. Imagine a Wordle which captures responses to a question such as ‘What do you think of the coalition?’ One person might say the new government is ‘absolutely the most important and exciting change in politics in living memory’; others might respond that it is ‘quite troubling’, ‘not very troubling’ or even ‘not troubling’? The Wordle would look, well, troubling:
Frequency of use is simply that – frequency of use.
Wordles do look good. But they become dangerous when presented as meaningful analysis. They don’t tell the right story, and worse, they are also capable of telling a completely different story altogether. Yet the mainstream media are happy to present them as semi-serious analysis: The Guardian says that from its Wordles for Nick Clegg and David Cameron’s acceptance speeches ‘you can get a good idea of the two leaders’ use of language – and which words were important to them’. As a linguist I know there are many ways to explore their language use, but I don’t think I would include a Wordle as a method of analysis or of display. Their visual appeal gives them more credence than they deserve.
As a final test, here is a Wordle of this post – do you think it reflects the views I’ve expressed above?
Keeping Track
Eloise Keightley writes:
The industry for personal informatics is certainly one to watch. There’s even been talk of a ‘movement’ and unsurprisingly, the iPhone has spawned a host of personal informatics applications. These applications are tantamount to an omphaloskeptics’s dream: pretty much any variable of life can be tracked to the most granular degree. Users of personal informatics sites can log everything from vegetables consumed and number of migraines suffered to variations in mood and their feelings about particular places.
Perhaps evidence that consumers are seeking certainty in these uncertain times, the sheer number and variety of personal informatics applications suggests not only a rising interest in self-analysis (or an increasingly narcissistic society) but a desire for more control over one’s personal life. For starters, these tools help you to learn from the past and plan for the future – if you ate too many calories this week, you know exactly how many to remove from your diet next week. However, much of the allure of personal informatics lies in the visualisations these sites can produce with the raw data. Sites such as your.flowingdata.com allow users to create custom visualisation pages for what they’re most interested in and encourage you to ‘play’ with the data.
In theory, brands could have an enormous pool of data at their disposal should these tools become mainstream enough to attract sufficient users. While many personal data tracking accounts monitor health and leisure habits, many others track brand usage, product usage and attitudes towards brands. Personal informatics could help brands spot emerging competitors faster and track whims and fads with more agility than conventional methods. However, criticism of social networking sites that have deployed their members’ data for commercial gain mean that brands need to tread carefully: an assumption that you own the data simply because it is publicly available is imprudent.
On the other hand, brands are beginning to wake up to the potential of incorporating personal informatics into their business propositions – most notably Nike, through its joint venture with Apple and a handful of health clubs to produce the Nike + iPod package. It’ll be interesting to see how others follow suit.
The above image comes from Mapmaker, a user of the Mycrocosm personal informatics website, and is reproduced here with thanks.
A history through objects in a post-material world
Eleanor Cooksey writes:
I have been enjoying the current BBC Radio 4 series ‘A History of the World in a 100 objects’ in which Neil McGregor, the Director of the British Museum, tells a history of humanity using objects from the museum’s collection. As I listened to his intricate description of the pestle, it made me realise that objects, things, ‘stuff’ – or however we like to call them – still have a very important role to play in our lives.
It is often easy to assume we live in a ‘post material’ world, but in a post credit crunch recovery marketplace, should we re-evaluate how we think about ‘stuff’? Looking at data from our 2009 Global Monitor Survey suggests that it is perhaps worth reviewing our hypotheses. Consumers are less likely to agree that they have all the material things they need: in the UK, this dropped from 60% in 2008 to 56% in 2009. In fact, the only market surveyed where feelings of material satisfaction have increased is Australia. Moreover, though we may not have everything we need, we are also less likely to buy more as spending without consequences is no longer in favour. Again, all markets – bar China – are showing a greater reluctance to take on debt. This suggests we are more likely to value what we have now.
Our research also suggests that people are still as interested in spending on experiences as accumulating possessions, but this is less about extreme experiences, and more about the enjoyment of simpler pleasures. Such pleasures, in fact, could consist of listening to something interesting on the radio, or going to a museum.
The image above is from the BBC’s ‘A History of the World in 100 Objects‘ website, and is used with thanks. For more information about accessing Global Monitor, please contact our UK Marketing and PR Manager, Jennifer Childs.
