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. 

Paradessence

 

I’ve got a list of books that isn’t so much To Be Read as At-Some-Point-In-My-Life-This-Looked-Terribly-Interesting-And-I’ll-Make-A-Note-Of-It-And-Read-It-One-Day. Many of these never get read and drift to the oblivion of the depths of the list. The Savage Girl by Alex Shakar is one that I rescued just before it floated off into obscurity. I’d noted it about ten years ago, when the book was already ten years old.

Here’s the review I published. I wasn’t too savage, but it wasn’t an easy book to read:

---------------------------------------------------------------------------

The Savage Girl

 

Without giving away too much, the subject of cryogenics features in “The Savage Girl”, and I felt rather as if I’d defrosted something frozen in time, or opened a time capsule as I read this novel. It was written at the turn of the 21st century, certainly pre-social media and Web 2.0 which makes it oddly quaint in places. 

 

The novel is a satire on marketing, trend-forecasting and the consumer society. Not the sort of book I normally read for leisure, but I’ve worked in advertising and marketing more years than I care to mention, so thought I’d give it a go.

 

I found the novel quite difficult to get into. Because of its age, a lot of what may have seemed futuristic at the time of writing seems a bit - so what, or what the? - today. One character sits looking at an array of giant computer screens, pulling out patterns. Well, today we have ChatGPT and tomorrow who knows? The characters are by-and-large grotesques - not human enough for you to care about any of them, yet not outrageous enough to be amusing. Sometimes, it all seemed a bit pretentious and just too clever for its own good.

 

Having said that, there were some excellent ideas along the way. The story forsees lots of stuff going on today - the metaverse and virtualism, shifting truths and echo chamber bubbles. I did cringe at some of the passages evoking those ghastly bullsh*tty brainstormings and insight sessions that I’ve participated in. And the concept of “Paradessence” - paradoxical essence or “two opposing desires that a product satisfies simultaneously” (such as stimulation and relaxation) - is spot on. “The job of a marketer is to cultivate this schismatic core, this broken soul, at the center of every product.”

 

The question of whether we are heading for the “Light Age” - the optimistic view - or the “Lite Age” was also interesting once I finally got the distinction.

 

All-in-all, thought-provoking in places, but wish I’d read this novel when it (and I) were 20 years younger.  

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

There’s a long lecture by one of the obnoxious characters in the book, which examines Ernest Dichter’s The Strategy of Desire, Soviet propaganda and American marketing, and the development of irony and “now” - post-irony. All interesting ideas, which are commented on in this review and interview with the author. 

The “Paradessence” idea is one I’ve banged on about frequently in this blog - and I liked the examples in the book:

Coffee - stimulation and relaxation

Air travel - sanistised adventure, exoticism and familiarity

Ice cream - eroticism and innocence

And while one character refers to this as “a schismatic core/broken soul”, his less cynical colleague expresses it as the “magic” - the sneakers that enable you not just to grip the earth and stay grounded, but to soar into the air and your dreams, too.

I wonder how much money has been made over the years from touting the paradox-resolution brand essence idea around, dressed up with a clever-clogs name and a fancy model?  

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. 

 

Nothing new under the (shaded-off from the Earth) sun?

 

I do love all those lists of trends and innovations and predictions of stuff that’s really, eventually, going to happen this next year. A lot of these articles take the form of lists of 22-whatevers this year, and typical is this one from The Economist on emerging technology to watch in the next 12 months.

There’s a mix on here, of the here-we-go-again science fiction cliches (Flying Electric Taxis, Space Tourism), the ones that are already on my radar (if radar isn’t too primitive a technology to refer to) - the Metaverse, Hydrogen-powered Planes, Vertical Farming and Personalised Nutrition, for example.

And the ones where I think - yes - great idea - bring it on tomorrow! Container Ships with Sails, or Vaccines for HIV and Malaria, for example.

But with one of the 22, I sorted of shrugged my shoulders. I’m talking about Virtual Influencers - see Lil Miquela/Miquela Sousa above.

The article highlights how these virtual influencers won’t get embarassingly drunk at a party, or old and wrinkly, as if this was something new. But there were plenty of pre-teen/young teen virtual influencers back in the last century. And many of these are still influencing today - for example, the Scooby Doo gang selling sunglasses. In fact, Velma is probably responsible for the entire Geek Girl fashion industry single-handedly.

Whether officially attached to a brand, or generally influencing fashion and music, pre/teen characters have long been a tried and trusted standby to attract young audiences. Like today’s virtual influencers, they can’t grow up and commit some unspeakable crime, or be caught on camera associating with dubious and unsavoury sorts - it’s all nicely under control. And they can welcome new pals and chums into the gang to fit with the prevailing social climate, too.

It probably all started with these two:

By the late 80s, a “Kids’ Club/Gang” was almost a mandatory. At Saatchi UK, we worked on the launch of Burger King in the UK:

Maybe the most influencial virtual influencers in North America in the mid/late 20th century were these guys - and I think they are still going - they really nailed the multi-media thing, with comics, a TV show, a No. 1 international hit single, promotions with all manner of brands - for example, this carboard record you could cut off the back of a cereal box:

Pour a little sugar (or healthier option) on it, honey!

Once again, the technology changes but the idea (or need) not so much.

 

Going overground

One of the better articles I've read about Post-COVID-19 culture is this one from Sturm und Drang. What I like here is it's not someone pontificating about the New Normal (groan) and "what we're all going to be doing/thinking" but instead outlines some of the key tensions that will be in play:

Online and Real World
Health & Safety and Getting out and living for the moment
Personal Freedom and Group monitoring
Self-reliance and solidarity
Humanity and nature

One thing that is certain is that the COVID-19 crisis will accelerate transformation and movements that are happening anyway. Take the first of Sturm & Drang's tensions - the shift online. Music and film and gaming were being created and played from bedrooms, our lives were becoming increasingly streamed and the couch potatoes and nerds were inheriting the earth.



People are learning to live without coffee to-go, or anything to-go for that matter. There's a certain power in having the world of work, leisure and everything in between at your fingertips, from the comfort of your four walls.

Maybe there will be a massive, irreversible shift online in all spheres of life.

Or maybe not. In the two world wars of the last century, entire young generations had their freedom curtailed by having to do their duty and go out and fight, or otherwise work night and day for the war effort. For the current young generation, COVID-19 is their war.

People of my generation used to bewail the fact that being confined to their bedroom was no longer a punishment for a teenager.

But maybe it's beginning to be. Days and weeks of unrestricted online access. Not just that, but parents, grandparents, teachers all invading the online world of the young: from making idiots of themselves on TikTok to hi-jacking YouTube for serious learning. One can sense an urge to rebel, to get out. Not going underground, but overground into the wild world of the Internot.

Perhaps this is another trend that will be accelerated by the crisis.

Who knows, maybe the young will spend their summer like Richard Jefferies' Bevis:

"It was living, not thinking. He lived it, never thinking, as the finches live their sunny life in the happy days of June. There was magic in everything, blades of grass and stars, the sun and the stones upon the ground."

Aufschnitt 2: Brits, Yanks agree/disagree over social concerns March 2007

Here comes the second in my series of offcuts from the archives. Apologies as usual to my vegetarian friends for the visual.

At the end of a scorching week, I've got a topical one - an article from March 2007 about Millward Brown's ReputationZ study about the main social concerns on both sides of the Atlantic.

The astonishing thing here is that, while the Fridays for Future protestors were crawling around in their not-terribly-environmentally-friendly nappies, Climate Change was the number 1 concern in the UK. But this topic didn't even feature in the US top 10, with Obesity being the main concern there.

Another finding for those marketers who have suddenly discovered Purpose is that more than twelve years ago there was already a strong feeling that companies should behave responsibly and ethically, although the tendency was for "buycotting" rather than boycotting - supporting those companies you approve of rather than punishing those whose ethics or working practices you find to be lacking. Of course, back in those pre-mainstream social media days, it required a lot more effort to "call someone out".

What about today? I did search around to try and find a comparable study, but failed miserably, so if anyone can help, please leave a comment. I suspect that smoking risks and irresponsible drinking may be lesser concerns today. I did find this article from Grayling which lists the main social issues for the UK as:

1. Hate
2. Mental Health
3. Climate Change
4. Obesity
5. NHS

In addition, I suspect that plastic, inequality, poverty and immigration would be issues for both UK and US. But look at those top 2 - linked, without a doubt, to each other and related to the explosion of social media over the last decade. Of course, social media is here to stay, so the question is how technology and brands in this area can support solutions rather than further contributing to the problems.

If anyone can tell me where "climate change" now stands amongst concerns in the US, I would love to know.

Unchain your brain?

Photo from Francis Frith

I would imagine a New Year's resolution to work less, or at least work more productively when you're sitting at your desk, and unchain yourself from the desk(top) now and again, is a popular one this year.

There's even a movement, with the clever title Wednesday Offternoon , led by psychologists and behaviour change experts, to encourage companies to give their staff an afternoon off mid-week. It's not the full four-day week, but a step in the direction of increasing productivity and happiness in the workplace, and decreasing stress.

An admirable idea, but the cynical part of me suggests that the "free" afternoon will be used catching up on all the dreary bureaucratic must-dos that overwhelm the 21st century workplace, with its obsession with form-filling, controls, assessments and so on.

But looking around at semi-rural Germany, where I live, in some ways the glorious "Wednesday early-closing" days that I remember from my early childhood have never really gone away. There are shops in our town who still have early closing on Wednesdays. Many have a lunch break - which can be up to two hours - and it's not so very long ago that almost every retail establishment closed its doors at 13:00 sharp on Saturdays. Schools still finish at lunchtime, and the majority of workers seem to knock off on Fridays at mid-day, judging by the state of the roads at this time. 

Is this a quaint leftover from the past, a stubbornly analogue way of working that doesn't quite fit in the 24/7 always-on digital world?

Or have the Germans maybe known all along that efficiency only comes from giving it a rest now and again?  

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.

It's not just digitalisation

I have had a bit of an Aha Moment this week. I've been banging on in this blog and in my work, about digital and analogue, and how increasingly the division is disappearing. How customers don't really distinguish between on- and off-line, or the different online channels, and that it's the brand behind it all that matters.

I've now learned that we're in the 4th Industrial Revolution, a term coined by Klaus Schwab, Executive Chairman of the World Economic Forum, and that this isn't just about "phygital" - it's about the fusion of technologies blurring the lines between the physical, digital and biological spheres aka cyber-physical systems. Some of those technologies are robotics, AI, nanotechnology, quantum computing, biotechnology, the Internet of Things and 5th generation (5G) wireless technology.

For the record, here is the series of Industrial Revolutions:

1st Industrial Revolution: in the 18th/19th century, when rural moved to industrial and urban, powered by steam

2nd Industrial Revolution: 1870 - 1914, the age of mass-production, powered by electricity

3rd Industrial Revolution aka Digital Revolution: this started in the 1980s, it's about automation and the internet. We're still in the midst of it although we're now seeing the beginnings of the

4th Industrial Revolution aka Industry 4.0 which is about the embedding of technology into human beings and society

An interesting implication of this is found in the speech by Mark Carney entitled "The Future of Work".  Thanks to Good Business for highlighting this in their super newsletter.

While previous industrial revolutions meant that machines will take on tasks previously done by human hands, today, tasks involving cognitive (head) work are increasingly being automated. Does this mean a resurgence in the importance of the human heart? One can only hope so.

Age fluidity

When I was a lass, our corner shop was always well-stocked with sweet cigarettes. As well as packs that mimicked grown-up brands, all the TV stars of the day, human, animal and robot, had their own offering, complete with cards to collect - just like Grandpa.

And, if you got bored of getting your pretend-smoking kicks in this form, there was always Spanish Gold:

Mmmm: can still taste the coconut!

Fast-forward a few decades, and my husband recently tried to get some e-cigarette refill in the UK with a vague taste of tobacco and failed, miserably. Instead, he was offered a vast array of flavours that wouldn't be out of place at a 6-year-old's birthday party:

Caramel, Cola Pop, Juicy Blueberry, Liquorice Torpedo, Bubble gum, Marshmallow, Blue slush - need I go on?

It was all rather reminiscent of those over-priced milkshakes in Starbucks that masquerade as coffee - vanillacaramelbutterscotchcheesecakefrothochinos - or whatever they call themselves.

Or the alluring colourful bottles of homogenised baby food dressed up as trendy hipster smoothies.

Not to mention alcopops, alcoholic ginger beer and beer with banana flavour.

I've blogged about Kidults before, but maybe, as all these items seem to be liquids, perhaps the correct term for this trend is Age Fluidity.

Humans vs. Androids

Summer always seems to be a time for catching up with reading, and I've noticed a flurry of articles on two opposing (or are they?) themes.

There are articles heralding doom and gloom for advertising and brands because, after all, in the very near future, we'll be delegating absolutely everything to our AI assistants and there ain't no room for good old advertising, or, if there is, a robot will be "creating" it.

And on the other hand - no! Intelligent humans - real intelligence - are going offline and experiencing JOMO - Joy of Missing Out. Enough is enough with Smart this and Smart that.

Or maybe the two aren't mutually exclusive - delegate everything that doesn't bring you joy and fulfilment to your AI assistant, leaving you more time for that that does.

But how to judge what does and what doesn't? Something else for the too-difficult pile.

A lot of this can be summed up in an excellent article from The Book of Life which lists 8 ills of modern life:

Perfectibility
Optimism
Individualism
Exceptionalism
Meritocracy
Anthrocentrism
Romanticism
Novelty

And 8 "consolations" for these:

Brokenness
Melancholia Universalis
Dependence
Ordinary Life
Tragedy
Transcendence
Good enough
Recurrence

OK, until an AI assistant can "understand" the subtlety of why the top list are labelled "ills" and the bottom "consolations", I'm off for a bit of JOMO!

Change happens. Get over it.

One of the core questions for marketing people has always been centred around how to adapt and transform in an ever-changing world. There's an interesting and useful analysis here by two authors from the agency Flamingo, who have examined change in a wide variety of fields, and constructed a simple model showing four strategic directions a brand could choose - Guide, Translate, Create and Pivot - along with good examples of brands who have used those different strategies.

I like this analysis, although it does tiptoe into an area that seems to be, in my mind, rather over-played currently: that of the VUCA world "out there."

There can be few readers who haven't heard about VUCA from some source or another, but in case you haven't, the acronym stands for Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous.

This acronym didn't come from some marketing consultant, but from the U.S. Military, in the context of Afghanistan and Iraq in the 1990s.

Is this really how we want to see the world we're operating in? Are our brands weapons in some kind of war?

I don't think so.

What if we thought of it this way:

For 'Volatile', read 'Spontaneous'

For 'Uncertain', read 'Surprising'

For 'Complex', read 'Diverse'

And for 'Ambiguous', read 'Enigmatic'

Because it's not us against them, there is no world "out there", "external" and "internal". We are all part of the world.

It's the role of brands not to provide stability in the sense of stasis and resistance to change, but rather to provide a clear purpose and direction as part of a wonderful, multi-facetted, animated, rich and mysterious world.

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.

Especially for you

2018, the trend forecasters inform us, will see yet more leaps forward in brands getting close up and personal with their customers.

Right on cue, I received the flyer above a couple of days ago, through the good old post. It's not from a huge global brand, but from a local sports store, informing me of a loyalty bonus I've earned. I have to say that receiving something with my name literally on it made me feel quite special. Especially as I am about to set off to the slopes. I was flattered by this little surprise, a lot more so than if it had been sent via email.

But maybe that's the point. The surprise is that it combines what we used to call old (flyer) media with new (personalisation) technology. No-one would be surprised to receive something of this sort via their smart phone, for example.

This raises an interesting issue about people's expectations. We say again and again that people's expectations from brand communication are changing, but we seldom stop to think what that really means. What it does mean is that personalisation will become so commonplace that it won't be a surprise any more. It will become par for the course, expected, maybe not even noticed any more, in the way that people want Smart Home technology 'so seamless it's forgotten.'

We all have the same tools at our disposal. Being first to use these may win you a few temporary points for novelty value. But it's only when the tools are used in a fashion and to a purpose that is unique to your brand and what it stands for that will build lasting attachment.

Boxing Day, Decade, Century?

Around this time of year, I like to get nostalgic and have a look at advertising and brand communications from days gone by. Now, forgive me if I get lazy for once, but I have found a fascinating write-up of some Christmas ads all the way from the 1980s by Mike Oughton, Creative Director of McCann, in Campaign.

Have a look - you can marvel and revel in the pre-digital masterpieces of Oxo, IBM and Coca-Cola. It was a different world. But the one that makes me most nostalgic, maybe because the brand has disappeared from the UK High Street, is Woolworth's. 'The Spectacular Woolworth's Christmas Show' to be exact. It's got everything - celebrities, sports stars, technology - and tapes. Piles and piles of them.

Tapes aside, I'm quite amazed at how much technology (if you can call it that) was on offer at Woolworth's at the time. And just how much is crammed into the ad - apart from the celebrities, there are brands upon brands, and prices, and music, all-singing, all-dancing.

Now compare that with the Amazon ad above. I think it's a great piece of branding and definitely watchable, but there's also something slightly sinister about it. It's all about the boxes, and the Amazon logo, and whatever is inside those boxes doesn't get a look in. It's certainly single-minded.

Contagious, in their report on the coming trends, talk about 'Amazonification' and describe Jeff Bezos as 'The Man in the Cardboard Castle' - a reference to world domination if ever there was one. Where will Amazon go next? Banking? Pharma? Who knows?

Bots, boxes and Mr Bezos - the future belongs to you?

Out and about

2016 was full of shocks for the pollsters and indeed, many bright young things working in advertising and marketing. How could we have got things so wrong? What? The collected opinions of my Facebook friends don't constitute what the Great British Public is thinking? I thought that if I 'de-friended' a few of those people whose views I didn't like, then they'd disappear into a puff of ether and I'd never have to be troubled by them again.

I blogged about the return of the Untrendy here and so far, 2017 has been full of references to bubbles, echo chambers and the like in everything from song lyrics through to advertisements (Heineken springs to mind) so I suppose at least there's awareness now that that the world is full of different views, not all of which may be palatable to us personally.

As a marketer, there's no way you can guarantee that your brand will be desired and bought only by people whose demographics appeal to you, or whose worldview co-incides with your own. So what can you do, to find out how other people tick? At the risk of sounding obvious, you have to go out and meet them, observe them, talk with them, listen to them. And not through the filter of the screen. The agency Ogilvy and Mather announced their intention, last year, of sending their planners out and about around the country, under the banner 'Get Out There.'

My first reaction as an old fogey in this world was a wry smile and something of a sense of bemusement. Surely this is what planners at ad agencies do? It appears not. Kevin Chesters, the Chief Strategy Officer at Ogilvy in London is quoted as saying that only 2% of creative briefs are informed by original first-hand research.

When on earth did we lose touch so badly?

Once I'd gulped and realised just how dire things had got, I had a look at the Get Out There blog.  There are clips and articles about Oldies in Eastbourne, the question of Brexit in Boston, Christianity in Hereford and so on. Yes, you could pick holes in stuff like the journalistic approach (picking on towns that are 'extreme' in one sense or another and packaging it all up with video clips and snappy headlines) but that's the way of the world these days. I trust that there's some good substance and insight behind the public exterior and in the end, at least they are doing something rather than debating and pontificating.

I notice the Marketing Society is re-naming its 'Brand of the Year' 'BRAVE Brand of the Year' to reward risk-taking. I'm looking forward to seeing a brand marketing to appeal to people out of the hipster London bubble.

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.

His ideas will live on

I am very saddened to hear of the death yesterday, at 68, from pancreatic cancer, of Hans Rosling. For those who are not familiar with this Swedish 'edutainer', I blogged about him here.

Hans Rosling had a talent for explaining the world, life and the human universe on the basis of facts. It sounds dry, but it never was. As an example, here's a short article about 5 ways the world is doing better than you think. 

In these days of negative thought and 'alternative facts', he will be sadly missed.

The Age of Paradox?

Polarities, opposites, tensions, contrasts, paradoxes - whatever you call them, it's my belief that these are the key to a strong brand. I have blogged about how being able to synthesise apparent contractions in human needs and desires (the need for individuality and to belong to something bigger, the need to be effective without causing harm, the need for the familiar and the new and surprising) is vital to being a successful brand - here, here, here, here and here (!)

Nice to know I'm not the only one harping on about this. The 5th Trend Report of IHG (InterContinental Hotels Group) is entitled The Uncompromising Customer: Addressing the Paradoxes of the Age of I.

The main theme of the report is, especially in this day and age, people don't want either/or - they want the best of both worlds: 'the best trade-off is no trade-off.'

I'm not sure whether this is particular to the age we live in: I can remember endless arguments about Health vs. Taste/Indulgence and Effectiveness vs. Care from my advertising days in the last century. But the authors of the report describe 'The Age of I' as reflecting one huge human paradox - the desire for inclusion in a meaningful group while protecting and expressing one's individuality.

Within this mega-paradox, the authors have defined 4 sort-of-mega paradoxes:

1. The Paradox of Separate but Connected: The new definition of connection
2. The Paradox of Abundant Rarity: The changing definition of luxury
3. The Paradox of Seeking a Better Me and a Better We: Responsible Individualism
4. The Paradox of Do It Myself and Do It For Me in My Way: Rethinking Consumer Control.

These are not a bad place to start in terms of positioning your brand. Think about which tensions or paradoxes exist within human needs, wants and desires associated with your product, service, market or territory. And what is the unique energy within your brand that you can use to resolve that paradox?

That's all folks!

Oh, sorry. Wrong cartoon.

Experience Pass

It's a bit alarming to think that I first went ski-ing 40 years ago. But maybe less alarming to think that I'm still keeping it up, with a trip or two almost every year. There have been huge changes, of course, in that time - with the equipment for a start. Skis are short and light and nippy these days, and boots warm and hi-tech and moulded to your feet if you so desire. It's difficult to spot someone without a helmet these days. And let's not get on to the fashions.

The lifts, too, have changed beyond recognition. When I started, there were drag lifts, single chairs or double (like the one above) if you were lucky, and a packed cable car to get everyone up from the valley. These days, chairlifts and gondolas have heated seats and probably Glühwein service.

In all this, we don't think much about the once-humble lift pass. These used to be a bit of card with your photo, which the lift operators checked manually to allow you on the lift, or not. But these days, the lift pass has evolved into more of an Experience Pass.

In combination with the SmartPhone, or even without, the lift pass can get you a printout at the end of the day about how many km you've skied, how many lifts you've used and many other metrics. If you wave the thing around at various photo locations, you don't even have to fumble around in gloveless hands for your camera or phone - holiday snaps will be delivered as though by magic.

All of this reminds me about how marketing people are talking about cities in the context of future mobility and urbanisation. Look at Urban-X (a MINI-backed start-up) for example who are 'Engineering the City as a Service' and whose Mission is:

We believe in a world of abundant, accessible technology that connects and empowers urban life. We believe every city will be a platform upon which the tools of the metropolis will be built. We are Engineering the City as a Service to meet the challenges of rapid global urbanization. We will achieve this via hardware and software that provide necessary infrastructure, technologies, products, and services.”

Wow.

A ski-resort is, of course, a microcosm of a city, brimming with early adopters, be it for the latest ski equipment or the latest technology.

But in all of this connection and participation and technology, I wonder if something gets lost. I love the action and bonhomie of a ski holiday as much as the next one, but I also love the silence of the mountains.

It's telling that the strapline on the Ischgl website is almost portentous: Relax. If you can ...