Non-Obvious 2019- How To Predict Trends and Win The Future
Page 23
Trend Longevity Rating A
The steady shift in B2B marketing best practices is continuing to take shape thanks to a small number of highly influential advertisers. As more brands look to the examples of GE, Intel and IBM – they are increasingly inspired to create more marketing that is simultaneously more fun, broad, relevant and strategic.
* * *
What’s the Trend?
As behavioral measurement tools build a detailed map of our personalities, multiple industries will be able to use this information to bring likeminded people together and provide more transformative learning and bonding experiences.
Trend Longevity Rating A
There is no doubt that organizations are getting much better at using the data that they have to better understand consumer personalities and cater to those. As this data translates into things like customer journey maps and personas, the trend of matching communications to consumer personality will continue.
* * *
What’s the Trend?
Brands begin to focus on a combination of content marketing and a greater integration between marketing and operations to provide value through usefulness in customer’s lives.
Trend Longevity Rating A
As content marketing explodes, this trend is undeniably going along with it. The idea that brands can and should provide more utility for their potential customers is leading brands to invest in creating quality content, shifting marketing spending and creating a revolution within marketing that shows no signs of slowing down.
2016 Media & Entertainment Trends
What’s the Trend?
After years of being ignored, niche demographics, multicultural citizens and their cultures find new widespread acceptance through a growing integration of diverse ideas and people in entertainment, products and politics.
Trend Longevity Rating A
Even as xenophobic political sentiment lingers in many places around the world, the generational shift towards acceptance and embrace of multiple cultures is allowing this trend to have a continued impact in the business, art, media and culture of today.
* * *
What’s the Trend?
The desire for authentic experiences leads to a willingness from consumers to earn their right to consume, offering businesses a chance to build more loyalty and engagement by letting consumers “pay” for products or services with more than just money..
Trend Longevity Rating B
There are still many situations where consumers want to earn their chance to be a customer and feel the pride in achieving their place – yet a growing skepticism of experiences and products means that anyone selling anything has to work harder to meet the bar of whether they are even worth the time before a consumer will engage. This trend still has impact, but only selectively.
* * *
What’s the Trend?
A fundamental change takes place across media and culture, where traditional gender roles are being reversed, assumptions about alternative lifestyles are challenged, and perceptions of what makes someone belong to a particular gender, ethnicity, or category are being upended.
Trend Longevity Rating A
The number of people who now define themselves with something other than the traditional descriptors of male or female is growing every day. As a result, this trend has become even more critical as a way to understand and react to the sentiment by avoiding any accidental stereotyping in communications or recruiting new talent.
2016 Technology & Design Trends
What’s the Trend?
An improved quality and lower costs for virtual reality allows creators to tell more immersive stories and let people see the world from another point of view – growing their empathy in the process.
Trend Longevity Rating A
If there was a higher grade than A to give, this trend would most likely earn it. Over the coming year, the examples of how virtual reality will be used to engage, improve and quantify human empathy will probably become too numerous to count. If virtual reality is truly an empathy machine, 2017 will be the year this machine moves our entire culture forward.
* * *
What’s the Trend?
The combination of growing personal and corporate owned data mixed with open data creates a new challenge for companies to go beyond algorithms for data management and rely on better artificial intelligence, smarter curation, and more startup investment.
Trend Longevity Rating B
Data continues to “overflow” and create problems of measurement and analysis, but as the latest 2017 data trend (Self-Aware Data) shows, the overflow is no longer the same challenge it once was because of greater automation of data and the ability to act in real time based on this automation.
* * *
What’s the Trend?
Design takes a leading role in the introduction of new products, ideas, and inspiration to change the world in nuanced, audacious, irreverent, and sometimes unexpectedly heroic ways.
Trend Longevity Rating A
The continued presence of design competitions to celebrate new solutions for global problems and a suite of tools to help anyone bring more design thinking to their own jobs means that this trend of putting design on a pedestal and asking it (and designers) to create “heroic” solutions will continue.
2016 Economics & Entrepreneurship Trends
What’s the Trend?
Companies desperate to bring more innovation into their enterprise turn to a new model of intrapreneurship modeled after the best business incubators—bringing innovators in house, providing support and resources, and starting innovation labs.
Trend Longevity Rating A
The slate of Innovation Labs and new efforts chronicled as part of the writeup for this trend are now starting to produce early results. These early successes will legitmize the idea of this trend and cause more investment and attention from organizations into creating their own programs in this space.
* * *
What’s the Trend?
As more people go through a prolonged period of emerging adulthood, a growing range of technology and services help to automate all aspects of their journey to adulthood.
Trend Longevity Rating A
If there was any doubt that this trend was describing something significant, just look at the advent of new tracking products to measure everything about life, co-living arrangements and other facilities that ensure people have partners to help carry the emotionally and physically into adulthood.
* * *
What’s the Trend?
Thanks to our reduced attention spans and “always-on technology”, a built-in necessity to be productive in every moment is rapidly evolving into an obsession that underpins every brand interaction or other experience they have.
Trend Longevity Rating A
To say that technology has made us all hyper aware of those moments when our time is valued or wasted would be even more of an understatement than when this trend was originally written 3 years ago. Productivity is still an obsession – and looks to stay that way.
The 2017 Non-Obvious Trend Report Overview
Original Publication Date: December 5, 2017
Original Format: Hardcover + eBook
Full Book: www.nonobviousbook.com/2017
THE BACKSTORY
This year was the most extensive report so far, with not only 15 brand new trends predicted but also a newly expanded appendix with full analysis and grading of every previously predicted trend. Some of the most popular trends from this year included Fierce Femininity, Passive Loyalty, Unperfection, Precious Print, Invisible Technology, Robot Renaissance and others. Over the year, the volume of keynote speaking I was doing and workshops my team was delivering also increased—which drove even more visibility for the trends. In addition, in this year many of the translated editions of the book started to come out—growing our global audience for the trend report.
RETROSPECTIVE: HOW ACCURATE WAS THIS REPORT?
Unlike the 2016 edition of the report, this 2017 edition came out a full month earlier and sold extremely well through retail and directly to large organizations to share with their teams. This edition of the book was also awarded the prestigious Axiom Award for Business Books (Silver Medal for Business Theory) and was featured widely in the media. In 2017, multiple foreign editions were also released, including a special edition in China which also featured new regional examples for each trend and an increasingly global point of view. Given the recency of these trends - we spent a lot of time researching whether they were still relevant and ultimately decided all of them had enough examples and acceleration to merit the grades we assigned.
2017 Culture & Consumer Behavior Trends
What’s the Trend?
Over the past few years the fierce, independent woman has emerged, redefining the concept of femininity and reimagining gender roles.
Trend Longevity Rating: A
This trend has accelerated dramatically. Current events and the political and cultural climate are opening up discussion about how we perceive women’s place in modern society. Women are finding more and more support from men in positions of power. We see this trend continuing to accelerate into the coming years.
* * *
What’s the Trend?
A global shift toward individualism has led to a surge in side businesses and a renewed appreciation for what makes people unique.
Trend Longevity Rating:A
People continue to create value out of their hobbies, passions, and personality quirks. Every day we see more examples of successful world-changing leaders like Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg attribute at least a part of their success to their ability to pursue “side projects” and note this as a defining quality they seek out in new team members as well.
* * *
What’s the Trend?
As technology, media clutter and an overload of gadgets make life increasingly stressful, people are seeking moments of reflection and pause.
Trend Longevity Rating:A
Inundation with technology continues to drive an increasing need to find tech-free havens in our daily lives, which has kept this trend relevant. There are even apps which help people find connectivity dead zones. Hotels, restaurants and even workplaces now offer an option for guests to “check in” their phones and enjoy some time without technology interruptions.
2017 Marketing & Social Media Trends
What’s the Trend?
A new understanding of loyalty is challenging brands to get smarter about how they can generate brand enthusiasts.
Trend Longevity Rating:
Over the past year, forward looking brands like Macy’s and GNC have redesigned their loyalty programs to overcome the challenge of passive loyalty and focus on delivering consistent experiences and rewards rather than point-based discounts. As brands continue to rethink how to engage consumers and drive loyalty, this trend has remained a huge priority for business.
* * *
What’s the Trend?
A new generation of creators are turning to social media to establish their brands, attract eyeballs and become the next big thing.
Trend Longevity Rating: A
As was clear from several trends in this year’s report, influencers continue to be a force online in using social media to drive extreme fan loyalty and even purchasing. As a result, brands are increasingly reaching out to engage these Authentic Fameseekers and tap into the audiences they have built and their ability to dictate trends and shaping a global culture.
* * *
What’s the Trend?
Today, successful marketing campaigns are putting an increasing focus on using the power of personality, quirkiness, and imperfections to create authentic with customers.
Trend Longevity Rating:A
Over the past year, brands continued to learn that consumers connect with real, unfiltered, honest messaging and campaigns. Sports Illustrated featured unretouched photos, UK-based food brand Higgidy promoted their “hand-finished” imperfect products and many other brands refocused on taking customers behind the scenes and injecting more reality into their story.
2017 Media & Entertainment Trends
What’s the Trend?
Technology is offering new ways to preserve history, changing the way we learn from, experience, and remember the past in the process.
Trend Longevity Rating:A
Preservation focused groups, supported by continually advancing technology, continue their important work by creating “virtual curations” of artifacts, tracking deteriorations, preserving fragile papers, and even creating 3D libraries of the world’s cultural heritage sites before they are damaged or lost to natural disasters, war, or the passing of time.
* * *
What’s the Trend?
While brands compete for our shrinking attention spans with more content than ever, many people prefer to go all in on the topics and experiences that truly capture their interest.
Trend Longevity Rating:A
While attention spans continue to shrink, this counter-trend continues to gain ground, as people are finding enjoyment in content and storytelling that takes them deep into particular topics and cultural issues. Podcasts, investigative journalism, documentary filmmaking and the sometimes-longwinded storytelling of cable news journalists like John Oliver remain as popular as ever.
* * *
What’s the Trend?
Thanks to the digital revolution, people are developing a more meaningful and emotional relationship with physical objects and printed material.
Trend Longevity Rating:A
It is safe to say that as long as the digital revolution continues at its current pace, people will encourage the development of this countertrend. Books, records, and simpler, retro models of cameras, video games and anything that generates nostalgia will strike a chord with people who long for the nostalgia and tangible nature of physical objects and printed materials.
2017 Technology & Design Trends
What’s the Trend?
As technology becomes more sophisticated, it becomes better at predicting and anticipating needs, protecting us, and providing utility while blending seamlessly into our lives.
Trend Longevity Rating: A
In the coming year, artificial intelligence, connected objects, machine learning, virtual and augmented reality, and peer-to-peer networks like Blockchain will multiply the ways that technology can make everyday tasks, transactions, communication and learning easier, cheaper, and more efficient – and it will continue to blend unnoticeably into the background.
* * *
What’s the Trend?
As robots’ utility moves into the home and the workplace, they adopt more human-like interfaces and even adopt micro-personalities.
Trend Longevity Rating:A-
The true impact of this trend is still at the early stages. The big questions robots have always raised for humanity are approaching. How much of our “work” should we cede to technology so we can focus on things that we love? Do we need universal income? Will robots take over? These are “renaissance age” questions, and they will become even more urgent in 2018.
* * *
What’s the Trend?
As technology advances, algorithms and artificial intelligence make real-time analysis so fast that it can move from input to insight to action all on its own.
Trend Longevity Rating:A-
Data and real-time analytics will continue to transform organizations’ abilities to automate analysis, education, and the generation of insight. In contrast to the more alarmist and pessimistic trends of Data Overflow and Data Pollution, this trend continues to offer a more positive future vision of a future where data might create value by analyzing itself.
2017 Economics & Entrepreneurship Trends