Each time we come across these manipulated messages, we lose a little more faith in anyone’s ability to tell what is actually healthy and what isn’t.
Most of us are tired of being burned over and over. We try to deal with this confusion by becoming more skeptical of new health claims (or more inclined to try them and move on to the next more quickly). Instead, we go back to the indisputable basics.
More sugar is bad. More vegetables are good. Eating less will keep you slim. A similar mentality is affecting how we approach work, as well.
Workplace Health Fads: Sitting and Fidgeting
By now, you’ve probably heard the latest health maxim, “sitting is the new smoking.”
Research has demonstrated that the amount of time people with desk jobs spend sitting can severely impact their long-term health.[46] Many businesses have created innovative products and services to address this problem. Flexible desks allow you to make your desk higher, so you can stand and work. Exercise ball chairs and other devices meant to improve the ergonomics of your seating promise to transform your posture and how you feel at work.
Fidget spinner and fidget cube (Photo Credit: www.fidgetcircle.com)
Outside of nutrition and fitness, the way we work has led to another fast growth area for plenty of fad-driven products. Popular products like fidget spinners and fidget cubes support those who need to address anxiety or attention challenges, and plenty of tech gadgets have come out recently to remind, prod, and shock us into sitting up straight, taking breaks, drinking more water, or using mindful techniques like meditation to become more productive in every waking moment.
Like the products and ideas in other categories, few of these are likely to last a particularly long time,and each adds to the growing trend of Fad Fatigue, whichdescribes how more and more of us continue to feel.
Why It Matters
As consumers, we are used to seeing new health products or ideas hit the mainstream and rapidly gain popularity. What we may not appreciate is just how many industries (like fitness) depend on new fads appearing and disappearing. This cycle of fads is causing fatigue among consumers. We are tired of hearing about the latest and greatest health or fitness product,and are too skeptical to believe in them, precisely because we’ve heard so many similar proclamations before.
As consumers, we are used to seeing new products, business models, and experiences hit the mainstream and rapidly gain awareness and popularity—whether they include exercise, health, diet, office productivity or, frankly, any other industry. What we may not appreciate is how the non-obvious trend of Fad Fatigue can affect any company seeking to innovate and create sustainable products, services, and experiences for their customers or employees.
This does not mean consumers are developing an immunity to falling for fads. Rather, people are getting tired of products and services more quickly—and they are moving on to the next just as quickly. This means it will be more important (and harder) than ever to keep customer attention focused on your current offering, and find ways to drive loyalty for your services, products, and company.
How to Use This Trend:
Innovate with more strategy–Often, companies will mistake invention for innovation. They are not the same thing. This common mistake can lead to shallow ideation, one-dimensional product/service ideas, and undifferentiated engagement with your customers. In other words, more Fad Fatigue. Instead, the most successful organizations we have studied (and often help to advise) challenge themselves to look beyond products to consider new approaches and business models that integrate greater purpose and deliver more robust experiences to delight their customers.
Build a gateway approach–One way to leverage long-term value out of a fad or “short-term engagement” is to develop a plan for your next product/service, or an idea that builds on the success of the first fad. Ask yourself, how can I capitalize on the attention from this fad to deliver on my next product or service, and make it something that will last longer? One method we often use is considering how to widen the circle of a target audience to attract attention from more people, like late adopters and people who may have heard about the fad, but are unlikely to be the first to act upon it. This second circle of people can help you extend the life of a fad beyond its initial adopters, and potentially engage in a way that is more sustainable. It can build more loyalty, as well.
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Extreme Uncluttering
What’s the Trend?
To simplify daily life, people shed their excess “stuff,” and seek pared-down experiences and ways to unclutter their digital identities too.
The annual ritual of writing this book has given me a disturbing tendency toward impulse purchases. If I hear about an interesting product, I usually try it. My justification, of course, is that these purchases are all part of the research for this book. The predictable problem is that it leads me to accumulate lots of stuff I don’t need.
Though I may have used my annual research process as the perfect defensive rationale for my own clutter, I’m not alone in feeing like I have far too much of it. A lot of people share this uneasy relationship to excess “stuff,” inspiring the steady rise in a cottage industry of organizational experts. Most famous among them is Marie Kondo, the Japanese author of the bestselling The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up (who we wrote about in the 2017 edition of this book). Kondo advises people to only keep those items that “spark joy,” and get rid of the rest. Earlier this year, Swedish author Margareta Magnusson offered a more unusual take on the importance of decluttering. In The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning, she shares the principle of döstädning (dö meaning “death,” and städning meaning “cleaning”)—the act of cleaning or uncluttering as you become old in order to unburden your heirs of this task when you eventually die.
The trend toward simplifying our lives has morphed over the years, starting with the desire to declutter our excess stuff. We first reported on this in 2011, with a trend we called Desperate Simplification. Then, in 2016, we identified Obsessive Productivity, a trend that showed people simplifying everything in order to improve their productivity. The next year, we predicted another trend called Mainstream Mindfulness (which describes the rise of mindful practices and meditation in business as a method for decluttering our minds, fostering innovation, and increasing well-being). Finally, in 2018, we introduced Data Pollution (a prediction describing how much unnecessary and useless data companies and people are increasingly forced to manage).
This year, we’ve found that as people become more conscious and aware of the things they want around them, they develop an overwhelming sense of clutter in their daily lives, which drives them to make drastic changes. For some of us, this is leading to a process of decluttering our belongings—both physical and digital. For others, this is more of a mental journey that involves more mindful living and reducing life’s distractions, or decluttering relationships that do not serve us.
We call this trend prediction Extreme Uncluttering–our term for describing the increasing number of people who are not just simplifying through reevaluation of the things they own, but also by removing the stressors or distractions, from noisy venues to in-your-face branding, that lead them to feel mental or emotional “clutter” in their daily lives.
Uncluttered Venues, Uncluttered Experiences
One way people are choosing to declutter the distractions in their daily lives is by making more mindful choices about the venues they visit or support.
According to the 2018 Zagat National Dining Trends Survey, the top complaint reported by diners is the level of noise at restaurants.[47] More and more, people are feeling overwhelmed by overly stimulating environments such as loud cafés, bars, or eateries (often blaring with multiple unnecessary televisions reporting what I sometimes call “feel-bad breaking news.” Several entrepreneurs are trying to find new ways to help restaurants deal with this problem and help people find the best restaurants for them. Apps like iHEARu and SoundPrint measure a
nd rate the ambient noise levels of restaurants in real time, letting people decide whether to visit that venue or not.
In Spain, a campaign called “Comer sin Ruido” (Eat Without Noise) urges restaurants to promote a quieter dining environment. More than 50 restaurants have pledged to be less noisy as a result of the campaign, including several with Michelin stars.
Other restaurants are offering pared-down or “uncluttered” experiences, including the Dans Le Noir in Paris. This famous restaurant offers diners the opportunity to eat in a pitch-black room, allowing guests to focus their senses on the taste and texture of food, not on how the food or the environment around them looks. The idea that flavor—not appearances—should be the focus of an eating experience is also increasingly moving chefs in fine restaurants to a deliver a simpler and more elegant plating style. “It’s really about letting the dish and ingredients speak for themselves,” explains the executive chef of Bâtard in New York.[48]
The movement toward less-cluttered experiences is not just driven by the people seeking them, but also by venues purposely creating them—even if customers might not want them. For example, the live entertainment world has often struggled with two seemingly unrelated problems: how to get people to focus their attention on the performance rather than their phones, and how to prevent people from recording bootleg videos of it.
The company Yondr has created a product that addresses both. Their mobile phone “pouches,” which lock devices and prevent their owners from using them, have been gaining popularity at concert venues and comedy clubs. Patrons are required to “lock” their phones in the pouches, which are only unlocked when a performance ends or a patron leaves the venue. Most of the venues using the pouches are primarily interested in locking phones to combat piracy, but they are also encouraging patrons to be more present and enjoy the show with fewer distractions.
Yondr phone-locking platform
The Yondr platform has been so successful that even schools are piloting the use of these pouches to help students focus in class by avoiding the distractions of their phones. In September 2018, a new policy took effect in France,banning students under the age of 15 from bringing mobile phones to school: a bold move to help kids declutter the stimuli that affect their concentration and learning.
Uncluttering Digital Distractions
The fact that venues and even schools have to physically remove mobile devices to help us avoid their distractions points to a troubling reality: digital clutter may be (and, in some ways, already is) more prevalent and concerning than physical clutter. And it might be far more difficult to get rid of. As this reality becomes clearer to people, it has led to a growing movement toward digital wellbeing: the idea that we need to keep the amount of technology we use in check before its detrimental costs (such as its addictive quality) outweigh its benefits.
Google has been trying to develop tools to help people achieve digital wellbeing. New features for their latest Android mobile phones include an “app timer” that sets limits on how long a user can spend on a specific app. Another feature is the “Shush” gesture, which switches the phone into “don’t disturb” mode when a user puts the phone facedown. Google has even developed a “wind-down” feature that switches a phone to grayscale as soon as the user’s predetermined bedtime arrives.
Social media platforms are also proactively investing time and resources into trying to help people declutter the distractions caused by technology. Facebook recently prototyped a tool that allows users to see exactly how long they’ve spent on the platform. Instagram, meanwhile, now posts a big green checkmark, along with a message “You’re all caught up” when a user has scrolled through all new posts from the past 48 hours. This prevents users from wasting time scrolling through posts they might have already seen, or that are old.
Uncluttering Our Digital Identities
In early 2019, the European Union’s highest court will offer a ruling on one of the Internet’s most contentious topics: the right to be forgotten, or the right of individuals to request that a website remove their personal data.
In 2018, Google revealed that of the 2.4 million “right to be forgotten” requests they had received from Internet users, it had only complied with less than half (only 43 percent) of them. In many cases, they did not comply with the request because “the page [being requested to take down] contains information which is strongly in the public interest.” As Google’s response to these requests show, the right to be forgotten touches upon issues of freedom of speech, censorship, privacy, and more.
For the average person, the right to be forgotten is not a question of techno-politics, but rather something far more basic: do I own the information about me that exists online? In most cases, the answer is no. However, more social media platforms have taken steps to give people more control over their data.
Google has long offered the ability for users to download the information the company collects about them through a tool called Google Takeout. Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram all offer single buttons that allow users to export and download all the images, status updates, and information they have shared on the platforms in the past. Amazon allows users to see a history of their conversations recorded with voice-activated Alexa devices, and to delete them if you choose … though they proactively warn that “deleting voice recordings may degrade your Alexa experience.”[49]
There are also signs that the desire to declutter digital content about ourselves may be a coping mechanism for social media overload and a desire to have more control over the way we portray ourselves in the online world.
In mid-2016, Jessica Contrera, a reporter for The Washington Post, shared an interesting and perhaps slightly worrisome (if you happen to be the parent of a teenager) story of what it was like for a 13-year-old girl growing up with the constant distraction and stresses of social media. At one point in the article, she describes how the teenager self-consciously curates her social media presence. “There are only 25 photos on her page because she deletes most of what she posts,” Contrera explains. “The ones that don’t get enough likes, don’t have good enough lighting or don’t show the coolest moments in her life must be deleted.”[50]
This is an example of how our fight against digital clutter intersects with our constant battle to define and curate our digital identities. As the tools for controlling our digital identities get better and better, it is not surprising that people will start to use them to cultivate only the side of themselves that they are most comfortable sharing. While adults may be open to sharing their vulnerabilities and “real” selves, teens will often understandably opt to present the side of themselves they find most flattering, or that will gain them so-called “acceptance.”
Decluttering Brand Messages
At Perfumarie, you never know what you are going to smell.
Owner Mindy Yang believes the best way to find your ideal perfume is to try several of them, without knowing the brand or being exposed to any marketing messages about them. Based in New York’s SoHo neighborhood, her store features a line of 32 perfumes that consumers can sample “in the dark,” so to speak. Once a person identifies their favorite scents, she reveals what the brand behind them are.
The idea behind Perfurmerie’s unusual retail experience is that a product’s branding, packaging, and imagery can “clutter” a consumer’s purchasing decision. By removing the actual brand from product advertising, companies are “decluttering” the buying experience, leading consumers to focus their purchasing decisions on the qualities of the product rather than their brand perception. McDonald’s tried such an approach in a bold advertising campaign featuring Mindy Kaling. In these TV spots, the star wears a yellow dress and stands against a red backdrop, recreating the fast-food chain’s iconic brand colors. She speaks vaguely about “that place where Coke tastes so good,” and never mentions the name McDonald’s.
Heineken has taken a similar approach when advertising its popular beers to millennials. Global senior
brand director Gianluca Di Tondo told Fast Company that the company has chosen to skip taglines in favor of more emotional storytelling, because “taglines are always open to interpretation.”[51]
Perhaps the company most invested in this strategy is home-goods maker Brandless, founded by entrepreneurs Tina Sharkey and Ido Leffler. The e-commerce company makes low-priced food, beauty, and personal care products by working directly with manufacturers, cutting out middlemen, and avoiding brand messaging. All items are sold for around $3 in their online store, where the intent is to declutter your purchasing decisions by offering “better stuff for fewer dollars.”
Brandless personal care products.
Why It Matters
Early last year, in a desperate attempt to curb my impulse purchases, I tried a Google Chrome browser plugin called Icebox. Icebox works by replacing the “buy” button on over 400 different popular ecommerce websites, including Amazon and eBay, with a “Put It on Ice” button. This button allows users to save the item and receive a reminder to purchase it a week later. The tool offered an elegant way to help me consider whether I really needed whatever I was about to buy.
In the coming years, as the Extreme Uncluttering trend continues to grow, we expect to see more tools and features like IceBox. Consumers will turn to digital solutions to declutter all aspects of their lives—from curbing their impulse to accumulate more stuff to helping to avoid the distractions that keep them from truly enjoying experiences or living the way they want.
Non-Obvious 2019- How To Predict Trends and Win The Future Page 12