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Next: A Vision of Our Lives in the Future
Next:
A Vision of Our Lives
in the Future
Ira Matathia, Marian Salzman
Ann O’Reilly, Christy Lane Plummer
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Preface
Introduction: The Times are Changing
1 Big Nexts
2 It’s a Small World Next
3 Globally Speaking, What’s Next?
4 Global Culture Swap
5 Living in the Digital Age
How We Live: Next Style
6 Rites of Purification: Body and Soul
7 Loving and Lusting
8 Family Styles
9 @Home
10 Gimme a Break
11 Sports of all Sorts
How We Work: Next Livelihood
12 The Future of Offices
13 You Call This Work?
14 Business Next
How Commerce and Media Work Us: Next Persuasion
15 Cyberbiz
16 Faux Money
17 You are what Influences You
18 360 Degree Branding
Conclusion
19 America by Americans
Notes
Index
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Copyright
About the Publisher
Preface
People tend not to think about the future. In fact, I would wager that most of us have a pretty limited sense of what we’re likely to be doing any time after next Wednesday. The authors, on the other hand, do very little other than think about the future – in fact, they virtually live there.
But, unlike so many ‘futurists’, this team of authors has a genuine capacity to generate knowledge about trends and social movements that business people can actually use. And, today, that’s one of the most valuable skills around. After all, nowadays just keeping up with life is a defensive proposition.
Technology and information are moving at a breathtaking pace. We’ve created enough gadgets to keep us busy pretty much every waking hour. And that’s getting to be all twenty-four, since we can go online all night long – to check a stock market halfway around the world or buy anything from a paperback to a three-bedroom apartment.
As consumers and corporations alike teeter on the brink of overload, who has time to think ahead? Or to try to understand the impact all this change will have on our world, our attitudes, everything? The present is overwhelming enough.
Of course, there’s a huge opportunity in all this uncertainty. Marketers have always needed to understand consumers’ current concerns and experiences with their brands. But if they are to thrive in the years ahead, they must also anticipate where technology, social trends and a myriad of other change agents are leading, so that their new products and services will have a place in the consumer future.
Ed Vick
Chief Operating Officer, Young & Rubicam Inc.
Introduction: The Times are Changing
We’re living in a fascinating age, for even those people who claim to be immune to millennium fever can’t help but wonder what lies on the other side of the date we’ve long held to represent the future. In these last days of the twentieth century, we’re focused not so much on the triumphs of the last hundred years as on the promise and uncertainty of the next hundred. If this century saw the global adoption of automobiles and electric lights, men walking on the moon and advances in medicine that have extended average life expectancies into one’s seventies or eighties, what might the next century bring? How will those of us who will be alive in 2050 be living? What will our homes be like? How will we get from one place to another? How will we shop – and what will we be shopping for?
While literature abounds with long-term prognostications about life next, our view is more pragmatic. Here’s why. International. Global. Worldwide. We’re living in what we used to call ‘the future’. In 1955 Canadian academic Marshall McLuhan on Take Thirty (CBC Television) explained, ‘There are no remote places. Under instant circuitry, nothing is remote in time or in place. It’s now.’ McLuhan is credited with being the first person who genuinely understood that technology was changing and would change mass media, and that mass media and contemporary life are so interconnected that everything would change, fast and hard. Those of us who spent part of the seventies contemplating his work recognize that we are already living in his ‘global village’ and understand how essential it is to decode our present, rather than live life with an eye on the rearview mirror. In the nineties, the present is an enormously important tool for those in the trendtracking business, and especially for those in global marketing communications.
Why do advertising people care about trends? On a simplistic level, the success of an ad campaign is predicated on whether the marketing message is on trend. It’s often said that advertising is a window on culture. We think that’s true, and that’s why anything that can be used to monitor change and change agents is a fundamental tool for effective marketing communications. So, in our work as advertisers, we appreciate the degree to which accurate trendtracking is critical to the marketing process. Accurately spotting and forecasting trends is of fundamental importance in determining whether an ad is a genuine asset to a brand (ideally by becoming a part of popular culture) or simply a negligible wave over which channel surfers pass.
Think of trends as human: they have a life cycle. That is, they are sown or fertilized, they gestate, they grow, mature, age and eventually die. Some trends are reincarnated a decade or more later, often in slightly different form.
How do we track trends? Like other major trendtrackers, our approach is interdisciplinary. We study and analyse traditional and non-traditional media, in both the specialized and popular categories. Because opportunity is missed by those who view the world only through the eyes of their chosen profession, we are confirmed generalists, tracking scores of themes daily. When we get onto something, we turn to the experts – and then consider critically their points of view. Notice how often the so-called experts disagree and restate the obvious to emphasize their particular take on a situation or scenario. Notice, too, that one’s ‘expertness’ is empowering; sometimes predictions can become self-fulfilling as a result of media hype.
When all is said and done, trendtracking, like communication, is part art, part science. An effective trendtracker must have a talent for the rhetorical, as well as a pragmatic view of the message impact. What will trend X mean for me? For everyone else? As observed by futurist Wendell Bell, ‘The primary goal of futurists is not to predict the future, but to uncover images of possible, probable, and preferable futures that enable people to make informed decisions about their lives.’ Our trendtracking style is about identifying the probable for life and work next – and about proposing conceivable implications if what’s probable happens …
We view the future through contemporary popular culture, a trait that puts us in good stead when trying to connect with readers outside the advertising community. Advertising is, after all, one of the world’s common cultural touchpoints. From the Pillsbury Dough Boy to the dancing California raisins to the hyperactive Energizer bunny, advertising’s icons are a part of popular culture around the globe. These ‘figures of sale’ and taglines tie us together with consumers in other countries, serving as a common reference for conversation in just about any language.
The publication of Next is in part the result of our two-year global odyssey. Our unique take on the world now and next is genuinely shaped by Ira and Marian having had the exposure that comes with being two of the privileged few who have jumped from continent to continent absorbing the cultures, media and lifestyles of trendsetters in many, many countries. We hope our zest for what’s different, as well as our respect for culture, pervades all our observations and the implications we propose.
What to Expect from Next
For the sake of making Next: A Vision of Lives in the Future an easier read, we have created a few devices to highlight the key themes.
Experience Gathering
This book records the changes we’ve noted in Europe, North America, and elsewhere, and it cites the sources that helped us to identify key shifts and corroborate major patterns of life and work next. Our approach is intended to empower readers to begin the process of interpolating for yourselves the information you consume via traditional news channels and on and off the Internet. By harnessing the power of the information you receive each day, rather than being overwhelmed by it, you will become adequately equipped to manage future change.
[1] Big Nexts
As we noted in the introduction this travelogue to the future is not some vision of the ‘brave new world’. Rather, it is a practicum – filled with things that are just on the horizon, trends we are watching move from the periphery to Main Street. Also addressed are the potential commercial implications of those movements. We start with the ‘Big Nexts’: observations about human behaviour and interactions that, in our view, are the overarching factors defining our collective journey to whatever and wherever is next. You will note that many Big Nexts have been expressed as paradoxes. The apparent contradictions suggest that, as part of our future, making things work will require a more expansive world view.
Big Next: The Ever-more-demanding Consumer
Imagine you’re sitting at your desk, waiting for an important contract. You check your fax machine, your email, and even for FedEx and courier deliveries. And then you call the person who drew up the contract and he says, ‘Don’t worry, you’ll get it. I dropped it in the mail slot yesterday.’ Fifteen years ago, that response wouldn’t have raised an eyebrow. But who has time today to wait for snail mail? We want everything yesterday, and we grow increasingly frustrated by people who waste our time with antiquated means of communication.
Well, that’s actually how today’s consumers feel. Having made new technologies a part of our lives, we want everything faster than ever before. Anything that’s not immediate is s-l-o-w. Same-day delivery. Instant news. Nuked meals. DirecTV. PC banking. Increasingly, we have no patience for products and services we can’t access right NOW. And, of great commercial significance, our satisfaction with brands is more and more defined by immediacy rather than quality of service. In North America, in particular, retailers are discovering that customers aren’t willing to wait till the store reopens at 9 a.m. to buy milk. We want it now – and we’ll get it, whether via a competitor that stays open late or at a twenty-four-hour convenience store. The result is a burgeoning number of twenty-four-hour retail establishments, from bookstores and copy shops to doughnut shops.
More than that, consumers around the world are rejecting the notion that ‘one size fits all’. A popular T-shirt one sees today reads, ‘I ask only that you treat me no differently than you would the Queen.’ The T-shirt may be meant as a joke, but the attitude is pure reality. As new technologies have made it easier for companies to target individuals, consumers have grown accustomed to white-gloved treatment. Time magazine comes with a printout showing how the subscriber’s local representatives voted on critical issues. Levi Strauss lets us order computerized-fit jeans. Parents can buy personalized storybooks, videos and dolls for their children. And customer service centres around the world are scrambling to put a touch of 1:1 marketing in their responses. GTE Telesystems in the US, for example, rates each call coming into its customer service centre with three graphic devices (calendar pages to indicate customer longevity, sticks of dynamite to indicate past service problems and money bags to indicate volume). The system allows personnel to respond more appropriately to each caller’s problem.
As consumers, we’re being led to expect products that meet our specific needs. (Why should I sit through world forecasts on the Weather Channel when I can have my particular city’s weather report emailed to me each morning?) We want to access these products via distribution mechanisms that are convenient to us – whether through one-stop shopping, twenty-four-hour superstores, home delivery or some equally agreeable method. And we want an immediate and satisfactory customer service response when problems arise.
Our desire to remain in control in an uncertain world – combined with our insistence on having things when and how we want them – also translates into a demand for personalized marketing campaigns. The reality is that mass marketing is obsolete in high-tech cultures. Complex technology-based products, increased competition and additional channels of communication have a net result of declining advertising effectiveness.
In the near term, one can expect to see many more examples of increased interactivity between advertisers and targets in the form of consumer-data collection and 1:1 marketing campaigns. In addressing the Public Relations Society of America at New York’s Harvard Club, Larry Weber commented: ‘The information economy and the new communications channels are going to require a new kind of marketing communications … Here’s one small example of a new communications channel. Imagine that you’re at your local supermarket, buying a six-pack of Coca-Cola. The scanner that recognized the six-pack of Coke also triggers a software program, which spits out a 50-cents-off coupon for a six-pack of Pepsi. Automatically. Let’s say you ignore the coupon, or you take it home and lose it. The next time you buy Coke, the scanner recognizes the Coke and your debit card. The software looks up your record, knows you didn’t respond to the last coupon, and spits out a one-dollar-off coupon for Pepsi. Next time, it’s a dollar fifty. If you don’t switch in three tries, the software gives up on you for now. That’s an actual system now being tested. Retailing is not about merchandise anymore. It’s a war of information and communication.’
The reality is that developments such as customized products and 1:1 marketing initiatives are creating in consumers an expectation that they will be catered to. In some parts of the world, mail-order goods take weeks to arrive at their destination. In the US today – because we have grown accustomed to top-flight service – many of us get impatient if we can’t have a product delivered overnight or if we’re unable to have our customer service problem solved at 3 a.m. on a Sunday. This isn’t going to go away. As new technologies are developed and as production and distribution methods are improved, consumers will grow ever more demanding, not just in the US, but around the world. Any company that thinks the way it did business in 1970 is going to cut it with today’s consumer is going to be blown away.
Big Next: Seeking Security
Just twenty years ago, most of us worked in offices without PCs, fax machines and voicemail. Our homes were not equipped with VCRs; our phones were not equipped with Caller ID. Many of us would have scoffed at the notion that computer technology would fundamentally alter the way we live and work in just two decades’ time. And now, with the new millennium upon us, we are taking a peek into the future, imagining how our world will change in the next twenty years.
One of the terms that has emerged in the past couple of years is ‘premillennial tension’. In the Western world, the general population’s anticipation of the year 2000 (or 2001, in the case of sticklers for detail) is tempered with concern, even fear. James Baldwin wrote, ‘Most of us are about as eager to be changed as we were to be born, and go through our changes in a similar state of shock.’ We know there will be changes in the coming years, but we don’t know what exactly they’ll be – or how dramatic their impact. The result: an intensified search for security.
Trust No One
A key reason we’ve become so demanding as consumers is that we no longer trust businesses to look out for our best interests. This attitude has been honed by years of being lied to and misled – not just by ‘big business’, but by government leaders, celebrities and just about everyone else in the media spotlight. In our travels across Europe, we spoke with citizens who are no longer willing to tolerate corruption in any form. Whether the offence be tax evasion, money laundering, bribes, undue influence or any other such crime, Europeans are now demanding that justice be served. The result has been the toppling of such high-visibility people as NATO General Secretary Willy Claes, Norwegian Central Bank Governor Torstein Moland and Alcatel Alsthom CEO Pierre Suard. One of the forces contributing to this ‘shakedown’ is increased access to information. Whether from the Internet, cable or satellite television, or independent ’zines, today’s consumers simply have more access to breaking news than in the past, as well as an increased ability to pursue stories of interest.
Fear
One result of having weathered scandal after scandal is that we’ve grown more cynical. We’re wiser to the ploys of politicos, preachers, priests, teachers and, yes, advertisers and marketers. We’re bombarded with infinitely more messages than we were a dozen years ago. We’re worried about our futures, our countries, our jobs, our cities and villages, our schools and violence down the street and overseas. And we’re anxious about what the millennium holds.
Adding to the collective fears of new consumers in Europe is the uncertainty surrounding both the European Union and increased globalization. With regard to the EU, many citizens are disturbed by the realization that belonging to the EU will require their national governing bodies to relinquish a certain amount of control. Denmark, for instance, experienced such a situation first-hand when the EU required that the country adopt France’s less-stringent rules regarding the use of preservatives in baby food. Understandably, many Danes were distraught to see bureaucrats in faraway Brussels dictate what can be put into food for their children. Other small countries are similarly concerned that they will lose their autonomy and simply be swallowed by the big European crowd.
With the future uncertain, we don’t know where to turn to find answers to the big questions in our lives – like where we should bring up our kids – and to smaller questions – like which brand of soup we should choose. We’re looking for things we can hold on to. Things we can trust. We’re looking for relationships with brands, not just products to buy. To assuage these concerns, consumers are seeking long-term product/service ‘partners’ that will help them to survive and thrive both professionally and personally. Whether peddling instant breakfasts or computer software, the obvious challenge for marketers is to earn a place within the consumer’s trusted brand set. What criteria do consumers use to evaluate prospective partners? Most look for three things: managerial vision (Does this company know where the world is heading? How their products/services need to be reinvented?); marketplace integrity (customer support, solid warranties); and an in-depth understanding of ‘my’ needs and desires.
One of the interesting dichotomies we see in the new consumers is their simultaneous embrace of novelty and fear of change that is too rapid. They want everything to be smaller, better, faster – but only if it fits comfortably within the world they’re used to. They place an enormous value on physical and emotional safety, and covet ‘classic’ products they can trust.
Laurence Bernstein, a colleague of Marian’s, described how he believes premillennial tension is affecting people in his part of the world: ‘The most significant trend in Canada right now is a profound change in the Canadian world view, moving people from a society with a therapeutic perspective (“We can do it now because everything can be fixed”) to a society driven by a prophylactic sense of caution (“Whatever we do now, we must be careful because we may not be able to fix it in the future.”)’ Bernstein contends that this shift ‘is evident in almost every aspect of life and can be viewed as the force behind such social phenomena as environmental concern (people actually recycling), the anti-smoking campaign, etc.’
People in many parts of the world are undergoing a similar shift from a therapeutic to a prophylactic perspective. As we attempt to take advantage of the benefits of new technologies and other conveniences, we remain acutely aware of the potential pitfalls. And, in a world travelling at hyperspeed, it’s a brave (or delusional) person who never once has questioned whether he or she is going to be able to keep up.
Big Next: Global vs Hyperlocal
As the world gets smaller and smaller, we aren’t just becoming more globally aware, we’re also becoming increasingly focused on the hyperlocal places and communities in our lives. The authors of this book are decidedly global. In a typical few months Ira holidayed with his family in Italy and visited Berlin with Marian to speak to international business people and journalists. Marian also travelled to Copenhagen, Amsterdam and Kuala Lumpur (Malaysia) in the course of her job.
The two of us are also decidedly hyperlocal. In a representative week Ira raced from a session with a prospective publisher to a school board meeting in the Connecticut town where he lives, and where one of his children attends a public elementary school. He also belongs to a number of committees related to the advertising community that do good works. Meanwhile, Marian had a date with her university alumni club, because that’s the community that has been the most important to her over the last decade. She also attended a Women in New Media breakfast – networking is an eighties buzzword that in the nineties translates into forging hyperlocal ties.