Non-Obvious 2019- How To Predict Trends and Win The Future
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What’s the Trend?
Aiming to change years of growing distrust, banks finally uncover their human side by taking a more simple and direct approach to services and communication and develop real relationships with their customers.
Trend Longevity Rating A
Every new financial crisis underscores the importance of more human interactions between us and our financial institutions. While this trend has been happening across multiple industries, the effect on banking (and consumer banks in particular) has been pronounced.
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What’s the Trend?
Crowdfunding evolves beyond films or budding entrepreneurs to offer anyone the opportunity to seek financial support to do anything from taking a life-changing trip to paying for a college education.
Trend Longevity Rating C+
While the many sites featured as part of this trend remain available for people to use, the trend didn’t quite explode in the way I predicted. This is one of those ideas that sees a steady stream of attention and usage but never quite accelerated beyond that.
2013 Marketing & Social Media Trends
What’s the Trend?
Brands create awe-inspiring moments, innovative ideas and dramatic stunts to capture attention and demonstrate their values to the world.
Trend Longevity Rating C
While 2013 was a watershed year for brands to use big moments for inspiration, the new model for this involves creating an effort for social good and standing for something bigger versus simply creating an entertaining moment of theater to inspire.
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What’s the Trend?
Organizations discover that taking people behind the scenes of their brand and history is one of the most powerful ways to inspire loyalty.
Trend Longevity Rating A
As social platforms splinter but also grow in popularity, the necessity for brands to share their backstory in multiple ways continues to grow. Add this to the rising consciousness of consumers about the ethical business practices of companies and desire for a reason to believe in a brand’s mission and this trend is and will continue to be critical.
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What’s the Trend?
In an effort to satisfy increasingly empowered patients who have become unreachable through pure marketing or advertising, Healthcare organizations have begun create more useful and substantial health content.
Trend Longevity Rating A
In the healthcare industry, content continues to be golden because empowered patients gain more confidence and increasingly turn to the web before seeking information from other sources. There are no signs that this behavior will diminish in the near and farther future.
2013 Media & Entertainment Trends
What’s the Trend?
The quality of e-learning content explodes as more students consider alternatives to traditional college educations.
Trend Longevity Rating B
Learning and higher education are simultaneously changed by this growth of people who choose to learn new skills and industries without requiring a degree to display at the end of it. While this has not overtaken traditional degree-granting programs, it continues to gain in popularity.
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What’s the Trend?
With an ever increasing digital culture, the few interactions we have with the print medium become ever more valuable.
Trend Longevity Rating A
The basic human behavior outlined in this trend—that we place even more value on the things that are printed because they are so much more rare—continues year after year … so much so that this was one of the trends I brought back for the 2017 report with more nuances around print in various other situations.
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What’s the Trend?
Aspiring authors, lacking a platform, and seasoned publishing professionals, in need of ambitious talent and content, team up to create a new “do-it-together” model of publishing.
Trend Longevity Rating B+
This trend inspired me to start Ideapress Publishing as a new venture to bring together some of the top tier freelance publishing talent and authors. There were plenty of other similar ventures to explore this idea as well – but the focus on this as an exciting new area waned somewhat over the years since this trend was first published.
2013 Technology & Design Trends
What’s the Trend?
Thinking small becomes the new competitive advantage as slight changes to features or benefits creates big value.
Trend Longevity Rating A-
If anything, this trend has accelerated dramatically in recent years as more brands adopt a lean startup mentality that encourages them to make incremental changes to products in ways that can deliver value. The quest to do this in a meaningful way is ongoing, particularly in the technology industry.
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What’s the Trend?
In an attempt to make data more accessible, new tools and technologies allow people to visualize content as part of their social profiles and online conversations.
Trend Longevity Rating A
Visual interfaces continue to be commonplace and popular. This is one of those trends that was emerging at the time when it was first written but today more than four years later is seems so obvious that it hardly qualifies to be called a trend – yet that remains perhaps the ultimate test of longevity for a trend, and reaching this level of ubiquity is one sign of success.
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What’s the Trend?
Design takes a leading role in the introduction of new products, ideas and campaigns to help change the world.
Trend Longevity Rating A
The growth of design thinking as well as an increasingly reliance from the global community on seeing solutions to global problems posed by designers led me to bring this trend back for my 2016 report. Since that time, the importance of design serving a “heroic” purpose to solve society’s biggest challenges has continued.
2013 Economics & Entrepreneurship Trends
What’s the Trend?
New services and technology make it easier for anyone to invest in local businesses and buy from local merchants.
Trend Longevity Rating A
Whether you examine this trend in relation to the growth of local commerce or as fueled by investment and interest in mobile commerce platforms and experience, the fact is consumer experiences continue to become more local more custom and more personal … and so this trend is likely to continue.
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What’s the Trend?
Business leaders, pop-culture, and ground-breaking new research intersect to prove that our ideal future will be led by strong and innovative women working on the front lines.
Trend Longevity Rating A
There is no denying the role of women in business, culture and politics has grown year after year. Today there are more female leaders, role models and celebrated citizens than ever before—and it is a wonderful thing leading to interesting related trends, like this past year’s Fierce Femininity trend.
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What’s the Trend?
The proliferation of smart phones coupled with new mobile apps and startups let consumers optimize and enhance the process of online shopping for faster purchases of everything from fashion, to home goods to medical prescriptions.
Trend Longevity Rating A
Thanks to increasing competition among retailers and a rising tide of new productivity tools online, the task of optimizing each of our shopping experiences has continued to be a top priority leading to better mobile first interfaces, one button shopping apps, and the ability to buy anything anywhere at the touch of a button.
The 2014 Non-Obvious Trend Report Overview
Original Publication Date: February 18, 2014
Original Format: eBook + Visual Presentation
Full Book: www.nonobviousbook.com/2014
THE BACKSTORY
This fourth edi
tion of the Non-Obvious Trend Report was expanded to feature categories for trends for the first time instead of simply listing 15 in random order. Those categories are the ones used in every consecutive report since that year.
In an effort to build visibility, in 2014 I also made the full report freely available online with a bonus ebook available for sale on Amazon. The corresponding ebook among those who needed to implement and put the trends into action.
This edition also corresponded with an exponential growth in the volume of public speaking and workshops I was being invited to deliver and was also the year that I left Ogilvy (after 8 years) and finally started my own group to focus on trend research, keynote speaking, consulting and teaching full time.
RETROSPECTIVE: HOW ACCURATE WAS THIS REPORT?
Due to the new category driven approach, I was able to be more disciplined with my predictions. Desperate Detox, Subscription Commerce, Collaborative Economy, Obsessive Productivity, Branded Utility and Curated Sensationalism were all big trends that described entire movements and they received a lot of attention. This report also incorporated some of the healthcare specific trend research that my co-author Fard Johnmar and I published that year in our industry vertical book about trends in health called ePatient 2015.
2014 Culture & Consumer Behavior Trends
What’s the Trend?
Consumers try to more authentically connect with others and seek out moments of reflection by intentionally disconnecting from the technology surrounding them.
Trend Longevity Rating A
Technology is only becoming more omnipresent in our lives, and this trend was so impactful that it was an easy selection as one to bring back in 2017 to include in this year’s report.
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What’s the Trend?
As more media and entertainment is available on any device on demand, consumers binge and are willing to pay extra for the convenience.
Trend Longevity Rating A
Streaming options continue to expand and consumer behavior follows. Media Binging is a trend that will continue and has also influenced some later trends that have been featured in subsequent reports, such as this year’s trend of Deep Diving.
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What’s the Trend?
With thousands of life-optimizing apps and instant advice from social media–savvy self-help gurus, becoming more productive has become the ultimate obsession.
Trend Longevity Rating A
The past few years have brought plenty of new bestselling books talking about optimizing your life, hacking your daily chores and saving time. To say people continue to obsess over their own productivity is becoming an understatement – so this trend is clearly continuing to have a big impact.
2014 Marketing & Social Media Trends
What’s the Trend?
Consumers seek out true authenticity and reward minor imperfections in products, personalities and brands by showing greater loyalty and trust.
Trend Longevity Rating A
While this was the first year that this trend was predicted, it was so powerful that a version of it was included in the 2015 report (Unperfection) and it is making another appearance in my latest report because of its continued importance.
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What’s the Trend?
Brands use content marketing and greater integration between marketing and operations centers to augment promotions with real ways to add value to customer’s lives.
Trend Longevity Rating A
As content marketing continues to dramatically change the way that marketers communicate with their audiences, there have been dozens more examples of brands using this trend. It’s impact was also important enough to bring it back to include in my 2016 Trend Report.
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What’s the Trend?
Content shared on social media gets more emotional as people share amazing examples of humanity and brands inject more of it into marketing communications efforts.
Trend Longevity Rating B
This was one of the trends from the previous year that was negatively affected by the fatigue some media consumers are starting to experience from overly dramatic media stories and click-baiting headlines. Though we continue to find human stories irresistible to read and share, this trend no longer has the impact it once did when first predicted.
2014 Media & Entertainment Trends
What’s the Trend?
As the line between news and entertainment blurs, smart curation displaces journalism as engaging content is paired with sensational headlines to drive millions of views.
Trend Longevity Rating B
Media continues to deliver over-the-top headlines and sensationalism that continue to negatively affect consumer trust in media – but consumer sentiment has turned against this type of technique. Despite the fact that its effectiveness is rooted in an understanding of human psychology, the growing awareness of exactly why these links are so irresistible is created a backlash effect.
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What’s the Trend?
The idea of expertise itself shifts to become more inclusive, less academic and more widely available on demand and in real time.
Trend Longevity Rating A
Learning through experts online in many formats is still a big trend and one that is powering some of the fastest growing learning platforms online today (including many profiled in this original trend). We officially have on demand access to experts in many ways online and it is a beautiful thing.
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What’s the Trend?
Across media and entertainment, traditional gender roles are being reversed, assumptions about alternative lifestyles are being challenged, and perceptions of how people are defines evolve in new ways.
Trend Longevity Rating A
The reversing of gender roles continues to be a big opportunity for brands to get their messaging right, or wrong, when it comes to speaking to these diverse groups through marketing and communications – but the broader aspects of this trend were what encouraged me to bring it back in 2016 and continues to be relevant.
2014 Technology & Design Trends
What’s the Trend?
New data breaches are leading to a new global sense of paranoia about what governments and brands know about us—and how they might use this big data in potentially harmful ways.
Trend Longevity Rating C
As more tools enter the market to help consumers protect their information and take back control of their privacy, this paranoia is shifting to empowerment. All the warnings and attention on privacy are leading some people to ignore the warnings while others take back control. Either way, “paranoia” is no longer the ideal term to describe our relationship to privacy.
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What’s the Trend?
As big data leads brands to overload data with cute infographics and superficial analysis, they also add more confusion about what all this data really means, and how it can inform decisions in real life.
Trend Longevity Rating B
Connecting all the data we collect on ourselves in a meaningful way continues to be a challenge, and we are indeed still “overquantified” but there are new ways that this data is being put to use and reflected back as a useful mirror of our activities. The more these things happen, the less “overquantified” we feel as consumers.
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What’s the Trend?
As communication becomes more visual, design gains more respect and becomes an everyday business requirement. At the same time, demand for design skills also explodes, leading to easier access to bite-sized chunks of design expertise.
Trend Longevity Rating A-