Driving me round the trend ...

 

My trend-weariness was setting in already over three years ago, I see. This year, I’ve even looked at some of the AI summaries of trend reports and, maybe predictably, haven’t seen much to inspire me. It really does seem to be a load of (crystal) balls.

A new-ish genre in the trend oeuvre - in addition to category trends, consumer trends, media trends, tech trends et al - is marketing trends aka The Future of Marketing. One such is the Cap Gemini report I commented on a few weeks back.

Another is McKinsey’s State of Marketing Europe 2026.  In case you’re wondering how McKinsey work out the future of marketing in Europe, they do it by looking in the rearview mirror. Via a survey of 500 senior marketing decision-makers across 5 countries, backed up with a few depth interveiws with CMOs and academics. 

The stunning conclusion is that “marketing leaders are returning to mastering the basics but simultaneously advancing with utilizing modern tools.” Gosh. 

To get on in 2026, marketers must: Be Trusted, Be Effective, Be Bold. As opposed to ...

Golly gosh indeed. Who’d have thought it? 

There’s a rather hectoring tone about the report - in reference to AI: “Unless European marketing leaders rapidly change their attitudes ...”

Yes, tut, tut. Watch out before the cruel VUCA world gobbles you up, or the Burning Platform turns into an inferno.

The 50-page report has no less than 10 named authors (which doesn’t include Claude or ChatGPT), plus a list of industry experts as long as your arm, plus numerous McKinsey experts and colleagues. Not to mention all the others named who offered “editorial support."

There’s something “too many cooks” about this. It’s a report on an opinion poll, where the questionnaire has been designed by McKinsey. The 500 senior marketing decision-makers, I’m sure, work on a fascinating and diverse range of brands. And are, most likely, a varied bunch with some marked differences in character, in experience - and I’m sure in the way they approach marketing. 

Yet they’ve all been reduced to data points to make generalisations of the LCD sort, rather than HCF. Standardised to fit McKinsey’s frameworks, questions, flywheels, playbooks, agenda and whatever else.

The result is a rather bland, self-fulfilling prophecy. Seek and ye will find.

This stuff is all bad enough, as far as I'm concerned, when McKinsey does it.

But where McKinsey sucks, so do many lesser mortals, out to make a quick buck.

The author/s of this “Industry Pulse Report" report will remain nameless. The industry in question is digital media and advertising. 220 UK digital media experts were questioned in the survey that forms the basis of this - ahem - sales pitch.

But just look at this one chart:

The “experts” were asked what was suitable content to be adjacent to their brand. 

Around a quarter of these experts think it’s not just OK but positively “suitable” for your brand to be next to content that contains inaccurate information, mis/disinformation, or hallucinations. Or content that provides an ad-spammy or cluttered user experience. 

With the rise of synthetic respondents, I am beginning to wonder about the “experts” who find time to take part in these surveys. 

From Accenture to Zukunftsinstitut

 

Here we go again - it’s that time of year, when all the futurologists and trend forecasters and other shades of seers and sages get those reports out on what we might expect for 2023. There used to be a manageable handful of these, but now every agency worth its salt and pepper wants to have a go. Thankfully, these days, there are bright and helpful people who curate these things, or at least bundle them altogether on one convenient link. This collection, for example, is put together by a group of six strategists, plus various collaborators across Europe and Asia. They started their good work during Covid and have compiled the trend reports since 2020.

I hope I’ll get a chance when things calm down a bit to look at some of the better of these reports. But at the moment, it makes me weary just opening the thing up. There are 76 prediction-type reports and then, on top, 25 round-ups of the last year. Where to start? It’s at this point that I start to see the attractions of AI to plough through this lot and pull out the mega-ultra-über-meta trends.

Was it easier in days of yore? Well, maybe, as trend-forecasting was confined to the printed page - reports you’d pay for, articles in the better journals - and books. Queen of it all was Faith Popcorn (still popping around), and I’ve got here the 16 trends outlined in Clicking in 1996 - twenty-six years ago, before GenZ were born. ’Scuse the shaky technology:

Look at the first three. You’d be forgiven for thinking this was published yesterday, or at least some time once we’d got the worst of the pandemic behind us. Oooh. Virtual Reality! What’s that, then? Sounds new-fangled. Not that Metaverse business, is it? Where you can go on a Fantasy Clash of Clans Adventure from the comfort of your own Cocoon? What century is this, anyway?

And so it goes. Yes, it’s got a middle-class US bias, but ... “stressed-out”, “affordable luxuries”, “spiritual roots”, “personal statements”, “caring and sharing”, “warmly embraces the freedom of being an individual”, “busy, high-tech lives”, “simpler way of living”, “better quality of life”, “angry consumer - pressure, protest and politics”, “icon toppling”, “endangered planet, social conscience, ethics, passion and compassion” ...

One reason that Ms Popcorn’s predictions stand the test of time is that there is precious little mention of specific technology. The focus is not on what we’ll be doing, or how, but on the “why?” - the human motivations behind all this. 

Amid the change- and doommongers' obsession with the disruptive, VUCA, every-changing world, the panics, urgency and desperation, the conviction that things will never be the same again, it’s quite reassuring to pick up a paperback from the last century and realise that the summary of those 76 reports was languishing on your bookshelf all along. 

 

Frydays for Future?

I haven't taken the plunge into Veganuary this year, but I have used the first week to catch up on some reading - and the subject of two reports that have been lingering around since last year is The Future of Food.

Sainsbury's Future of Food report is entertainingly written, with scenarios from 2025, 2050 and 2169 depicted visually and verbally. Jellyfish is on the menu.

And Knorr's Future 50 Foods concentrates on non-animal ingredients we should be looking to for healthier people and a healthier planet. Currently, the human race is limited when it comes to what we eat: 75% of global food comes from 12 plant and 5 animal species. The Future 50 covers cereals, grains & tubers, beans, legumes & sprouts, vegetables, mushrooms and nuts & seeds. I played a little game with myself to see how many I'd seriously never heard of. Here are the 16:

Laver seaweed
Black turtle beans
Bambara beans
Cowpeas
Marama beans
Nopales
Fonio
Khorasan wheat
Teff
Orange tomatoes (yup, OK, I've heard of these as in not yet quite ripe ...)
Beet greens
Broccoli rabe
Pumpkin leaves
Enoki mushrooms
Maitake mushrooms
Saffron milk cup mushrooms
Lotus root
Ube (Purple yam)

It's distinctly possible I may have eaten some of these unknowingly, although I don't think I've consumed jellyfish without my knowledge.

And while I'm on the subject of food and future, there has been a flurry of articles this week about edible or consumable packaging and utensils, and doing away with packaging altogether.

The humble ice cream cone has to be the role model here. There are toothpaste tablets in bags - Just like paste, without the waste. Or how about toiletries packaged in soap? Or straws made from seaweed or flavoured flour?

Maybe jellyfish shopping bags will be the next big thing? Beats crocodile handbags.

The constancy of change

Just before Christmas, I commented on a post by Paul Feldwick, of The Anatomy of Humbug fame.  He'd compared two quotes about young people and advertising, over four decades apart:

Audiences these days, especially younger millennials, are super adept at seeing through cheap efforts to sell to them. If brands want to engage they need to be authentic and subtle.
Andrew Mole writing in Campaign Sept 2016

The under-30 generation loathes sham and hypocrisy... ‘tell it like it is’ is the touchstone.... more wit, honesty, verve, self-deprecation and irreverence.
Lee Adler writing in Business Horizons, February 1970

Can you spot the difference?

As I was in the midst of the annual deluge of innovation and trend reports, almost all of which start with some commentary about the "pace of change," I asked Paul whether he knew of any quotes from way back then about the extraordinary pace of change. He pointed me in the direction of this:

Whang! Bang! Clangety-clang! Talk about the tempo of today - John Smith knows it well. Day after day it whirs continuously in his brain, his blood, his very soul.

You can read the rest of A.B. Carson's 1928 description of an ad-man here.

There's a certain amount of arrogance in thinking that we live in times of greater change than ever before. But even the ancient Greeks knew that the only constant in life is change. I should think John Smith and his colleagues back in 1928 believed that the the electric, jazz world of the 1920s was "peak change" or whatever expression they used. 

As I read yet again about autonomous this or that, gameifying whatever, cryptocurrencies, smart cities, extended reality, voice technology, facial recognition, artificial intelligence and all the rest, the real world outside continues to confound the shiny new world of the future where everything works on demand. 

Maybe it's a fall of snow that makes everything grind to a halt. Maybe it's artificial stupidity instead of artificial intelligence. Things don't work, things get broken, unpredictable stuff happens.

Annoying, yes, but charming too, in the way that perfection lacks soul.

OK, time to scurry off to catch that train.

The Internot

I read a fascinating article this week in the HBR, entitled Marketing in the Age of Alexa. The article charts the rise of AI platforms and voice assistants, painting of a picture of a life where the skilled digital assistant accompanies its human owner? partner? master? slave? 24/7 in home, car, mobile device and so on and so forth.

But hang on. Voice assistants may become increasingly skilled, through AI, I don't debate that. However there will be some aspects of our lives that they will never have information about, unless we so choose. And that includes most of what happened or was made more than, say, 10 years ago.

Spotify won't have a clue that I may decide to dig out old vinyl from my teens and play Iggy Pop at full blast from my 1980s sound system. Or set up my wind-up gramophone from the 1930s outside on a sunny day and listen to 'On the road to Mandalay.'

The are furniture items, books, toys, crockery, photographs, letters, bicycles, bedknobs and broomsticks that will never be connected to the internet of things (unless we want them to be.)

Beyond that, there is the whole of nature, which grows without a code or chip.

And beyond that, there is the future.

The AI platforms have no connection to this world and don't "know" - as far as they can know anything - that it exists.

Maybe it's one strategy for rebel brands today to plant themselves firmly in the world of the internot.

The Funeral of a Computer

I've said before that one of the hazards of being a trend forecaster is that sometimes, you get it wrong.

But apart from the nuclear bomb and the new ice age, there's very little in the predictions of these teenagers, asked in 1966 by the BBC's Tomorrow's World what life might be like in the year 2000, that's so completely wrong, even if some of it took a little longer to start happening. I wonder what these people - now well into their 60s - think today of their predictions?

Robots and computer funerals, madmen and atomic bombs, overpopulation and radiation.
Automation and people out of work.
People will be regarded as statistics and not actual people.
Boredom, everything the same, people the same.
Housing problems, people squashed together and cramped - or living under the sea.
Battery farming, artificially-reared animals.
Rockets and sputniks interfering with the weather. The sea rising.
Black and white, rich and poor all living mixed together.

Very dull, no fun or anything.  And - cabbage pills.

Go, amazon, go!

It's  official, I think. The store of the future is here today. Well, not here in downtown Bruchköbel, but in - where else? - Seattle. Amazon have launched their first no queues, no check-outs Amazon Go grocery convenience store. To get into this cornucopia of convenience, all you have to do is scan your Amazon Go app and it's 'Open Sesame.'

In you go, pick stuff off the shelves, put it in your bag and out you go again. Change your mind? Dither? It's all covered, via the crafty technology (computer vision, sensor fusion, deep learning - as used in self-drive cars) There are loads more photos here.

Part of me is excited about this, but part is alarmed. Not so much by the shot in the link of that flock of cameras, but by seeing the Amazon branding all over those food products and meal ideas. Being a little behind the times, I still associate Amazon primarily with books and stuff.

I suppose the source of the alarm is the audacity of it - the assumption from the Amazon people that they have a right to infiltrate every area of my life, including those where their competence is questionable. What'll be next? Pharma?

I read another article this week, in The Economist, about Google, Facebook, Amazon and Co. These brands have such power in terms of data held that they do pose a threat to healthy competition. What is the solution? Difficult to say.

But I have a feeling that, in the end, people need something more than convenience alone. However fast and seamless 'shopping' (if I can call it that: it seems more like shop-lifting) at Amazon Go is, if those make-a-meal kits taste as bland as they look, people will vote with their stomachs and seek out fresh ingredients, or their friendly local bistro, or a greasy junk-food fix. At least for some of the time.

I do wonder at what point the tide of opinion will turn that Amazon has Gone Too Far?

Good news for you, bad news for me

With the hurricanes bashing America, the catalogue of terrorist attacks and the fighting talk between Mr Trump and North Korea, it's all too easy to get depressed about the future of the human race. And hot off the press is the CAF World Giving Index, which shows a decrease across the globe of the % of people claiming to help a stranger, donate money to charity or volunteer time. More bad news.

I read a fascinating article in The Guardian a few weeks back, which looks in detail at the 'New Optimists' - a group of academics and commentators who take the fact-based view that, actually, if you look at it longer-term, life for the human race is improving as a whole. Diseases are being eliminated, child mortality is down, literacy is is on the up, there's less poverty and so on. I've blogged before about Hans Rosling, one of the key figures in this group.

The article gives the New Optimists' main argument for why people are nevertheless pessimistic and fearful for the future: it's an evolutionary one to do with survival. If your default setting is that there's a wild beast about to jump on you and gobble you up, you're more likely to survive long-term than if you take the view that gobbly wild beasts are the stuff of fairy tales.

The author makes a point towards the end of the article that these long-term, objective fact-based views are all well and good, but unfortunately all of us, as human beings are prone to being selfish, childish, egotistical, and emotion can take over from the sensible 'view from outer space' in the heat of the moment. Why should I care about infant mortality in the third world when I've just lost my job?

I agree - happiness works through the specific, the personal. Much as we may mean it when we say 'I'm really happy for you' to a friend, in our heart of hearts, we know our own feelings of happiness are so much more intense. When we use facts and stats in brand communication, it is important, too, to allow for personal relevance. How does that connect with me, and how I feel? Getting to the human beings behind the statistics may sound like a cliche, but it has been said loud and often for a reason.

Another thing about joy, and happiness is that it only exists when we have also experienced the opposite. As human beings we need melancholy, sadness, fear and the rest of the so-called negative emotions.

Only then do our lives - and the world - start making sense.

Halfway to the future

I love looking at my collection of business books from yesteryear, especially those that have the word 'future' in the title. One such is The Future of Brands, edited by Rita Clifton and Esther Maughan, which was published in 2000 to celebrate Interbrand's 25th anniversary. It's a book that was maybe ahead of its time, as it was a collaborative, co-operative effort. Rather than the Interbrand staff pontificating about their view, the editors questioned 25 different people on their 'vision of brands in 25 years' time.'

The 25 people represented some major brands of the time, including Starbucks, BMW, P&G, Samsung, The Body Shop and Reebok. In addition, other personalities a little further away from marketing and branding were included, such as Spike Lee, Paul Smith and one Sepp Blatter.

How well has it held up? This book was conceived and written in the last century, pre 9-11, pre Web 2.0 and in the days when the Interbrand Brand Value Table was topped by Coca Cola, Microsoft, IBM, GE and Ford. Google and amazon were nowhere to be seen and Facebook hadn't been invented.

The answer is, unsurprisingly well. The brands people felt would remain classics and be successful in the future - meaning in 2025 - included Coca Cola, Disney, Ben & Jerry's, BMW, CNN and Adidas. OK, there was rather a lot of mention of Gillette, Yahoo! and Kodak, too - with maybe the strangest anomaly for a 21st century reader being the 15-year-old surfer raving about the brand Kodak - but by and large, over halfway to the future, those predictions are holding up.

What was maybe more difficult was to predict which successful brands of the late 20th century would not fare so well. The obvious answer of Marlboro has been proved right, but it was interesting to see several commentators wondering how McDonalds, Microsoft or Aldi/Lidl might fare. Looking at McDonalds' latest business results, it looks as if they certainly aren't going to go out without a fight. And those German discounters are definitely going from strength to strength.

Ten observations on Brand Futures are listed at the end of the book:

A brand with no clear vision has no clear future
Values-led marketing will create stronger brand relationships
Brand relationships are created for people, by people
The next journey for many companies is inside
It will be increasingly important to understand what makes a brand valuable
Stakeholder brands for a stakeholder society
Individual brands for an individual society 
Simplicity, simplicity
If you don't plan the future you want, you get the one that shows up
Brands have the power to change people's lives - and to change the world

Have these passed the test of time?

10/10.

From here to arrogance

When writing a strategy, or a plan, particularly one of those that's meant to motivate and gee up a whole department of people, it's very easy to over-estimate the significance of now.This isn't surprising, perhaps, as one of the first questions you ask when developing a strategy is: Where are we now?

The inevitable consequence is that we determine 'now' to be of the utmost importance and load this arbitrary point in time with meaning. I've done it more than enough times - and here's another example, in the Manifest for Change from the new APG chair, Dom Boyd, entitled Future. Now.

I'm not against the sort of claims that 'there's never been a more exciting time to be in this industry' as a way to motivate people, but I am a little cynical about whether such statements are universally applicable.

Every generation likes to think they are part of a 'golden age.'

Another tendency that I'll own up to, which over-emphasises the here and now is the 'from - to' way of summarising what's going on in the environment. I'm very fond of the kind of transformations:

From online and offline to always on/off

From touch points to never-ending customer journey

From USP to brand purpose

From one-way messaging to engaging conversations

And this is all OK. It's a way of looking at the world and explaining what is going on. But 'going on' is the key point here. The world is in constant change.'To' is not really an endpoint. Things will continue evolving.

I wonder if over-use of the word 'journey' is to blame. I like to remind myself that 'the map is not the territory'. Using the 'journey' metaphor or the 'from - to' construction is merely taking a snapshot on the way to a future that we can't predict, however clever we are at trend-spotting.

And maybe that's what makes our job as planners exciting, whatever age we live in.

Roll up, Roll up for the Future!

It's a shame that I've already got something planned for next weekend, otherwise I'd pop over to London for the Future Fest, organised by Nesta, an innovation charity,

There's a packed programme - at a very reasonable price - of talks, experiences, debates and tastings arranged around 6 themes:
Future of Democracy
Global Cities
Machine & Human Interaction
Money
Music
Thrills

The speakers include Edward Snowden (from a safe distance, I expect) as well as Dame Vivienne Westwood and Baroness Helena Kennedy QC. Experiences include the Sweetshop of the Future and the World's First Neurological Thrill Ride.

I love the idea of this - back in the 19th & 20th centuries there were all those huge exhibitions in glass palaces that celebrated the majesty of now. I guess it's indicative of our progress as a society that we revel in the glory - or the horror - of the past, or hope for the future, without too much consideration of the present.

Must put it in the diary for next year.