MACROTREND: Taste Science

As recommendation engines increase in sophistication, what will be the leading M.O.?

One transition is from preference to genome:

Pandora/Art.sy

 

Art.sy is powered by The Art Genome Project, an ongoing study of the characteristics that distinguish and connect works of art. Art.sy evaluates artworks along 200+ characteristics—such as art-historical movements, subject matter, and formal qualities—to create a powerful search experience that reflects the multifaceted aspects of works of art.

MACROTREND: Being Alive

For mature, materially well-off consumers that have satisfied their basic needs, consumption becomes as much a path to self-esteem and self-actualization as a necessity. With the growing realization that the ‘good life’ can’t be measured in purely material terms, consumers are increasingly looking to be healthy, wealthy and wise. 

- Trendwatching

Deepak Chopra Kinect

How do you make an Xbox 360 game out of Deepak Chopra’s spiritual beliefs and practices? You don’t, not exactly. You make Leela which is half a collection of motion-controlled mini-games associated with different chakras—points of spiritual energy located in a person’s body—and half a training tool to meditate better.

“Being alive used to be about health and fitness; now it’s about longevity.” - Faith Popcorn

Wellness is a commodity / status-symbol to be consumed like anything else, both created and enhanced by technology. Look no further than the phrase “healthy business” for a business perspective: nap pods for AOL employees, everything about Google’s office culture, David Lynch teaching transcendental meditation at the Bridgewater hedge fund

MACROTREND: ROI Anxiety

How much is all of my social media activity/data worth? Companies have made and are still making huge expenditures with no particular clear rubric for interpretation

Here, we can look at the question “what is a meaningful online interaction?” on a business level, with meaningful having sharp financial overtones.

MACROTREND: Young Cashless

It’s the death of cash: mobile payments are the future of transactions. 

Infographic from Mashable

MACROTREND: Useful Marketing

Coolness alone doesn’t hack it. Rather than using technology/big budget marketing for novelty impact, companies are installing useful campaigns with elements that make consumers’ lives easier or more convenient.

EXAMPLES

 • Homeplus • Stop & Shop ScanIT Shoppers in U.S supermarket chain Stop & Shop can use their iPhones to scan and pay for their groceries. A new app from Modiv, called Scan It!, uses the customer’s loyalty card and camera to do the work historically done by underpaid humans. • Vitaminwater bus stop charging stations 

DRIVERS

• Crowded, me-too digital space – every-company-needs-an-app-mentality. Too many useless games. “Waste jamboree.”• Novelty fatigue  • See Seth Godin permission marketing. This is the next level or a different version – consumers here are not info volunteers or even samplers, just participants in something sponsored by the brand that makes their lives easier, which results in an equity spike

MACROTREND: Quantify Me

Personal analytics go mainstream.

EXAMPLES

• Fitbit, an activity tracker that tracks your calories burned, steps taken, distance traveled and sleep quality and uploads data to their site, where you can check it • “The Klout Score is the measurement of your overall online influence. The scores range from 1 to 100 with higher scores representing a wider and stronger sphere of influence. Klout uses over 35 variables on Facebook and Twitter to measure True Reach, Amplification Probability, and Network Score. Plus perks.” • PeerIndex, another site that uses particular metrics to generate social capital scores and rankings • Empire Avenue, a social network modeled after a stock market, where you invest in others’ social capital, buy and sell shares • Huffington Post/AOL distributes pedometers to its employees and hosts contests for most steps taken • Anecdotal: what used to be casual competitive chat about triathalons is now a numbers game; my friend whose job is to syndicate Forbes.com content to foreign partners and drive traffic says that her numbers-game job has bled over to her approach to physical fitness

DRIVERS

• Lifehacking • Data porn • How much is all of my social media activity/data worth? On a personal level. What is a meaningful online interaction? • Self-improvement industry: Data analysis is the most certain road to self improvement; calorie counting on a macro level • Anxiety about the significance of digital social lives - Page views, google analytics, retweets – how to aggregate?

IMPLICATIONS

• Gaming shift: game with yourself primarily, others a little • Be “addicted” to keeping your checkbook balanced like you’re addicted to angry birds (addiction leveraging) • “Empower” consumers to do the hard data mining for you

MACROTREND: Gamify Loyalty

The future of social games / location-based check-in platforms is loyalty, not social competition or status.

EXAMPLES

• Foursquare/American Express deal: at select merchants, you can now check-in with foursquare, pay with your American Express card, and see savings automatically credited to your account. There’s no cutting out coupons or showing your phone to the cashier. • Google acquired Punchd, an app that replaces loyalty punchcards. Integrates with Google Wallet, see #cashless • Cardmobili is an app that collects and manages all of your loyalty programs so you don’t need to carry cards • Loopt is a GPS-based social network similar to Foursquare. Loopt Star encourages users to compete for rewards from retailers

DRIVERS

• Crowded deals space – what will grease the transition from one-off deals to sustained loyalty? • Question of what will keep people engaged in gaming, as industry explodes • Complicated loyalty programs whose benefits are difficult to redeem • “Discounts are the most compelling incentives for winning a challenge, followed by ‘Social Action’ and ‘Points Towards Loyalty Program’. Only 1-in-4 said that ‘Status in the Community’ was a very compelling incentive” Saatchi Gamification Study • #GPSeverything, widespread love of badges. • “Latin Americans spend circa USD 10 billion a year on gaming and gambling. Experts estimate than in 10 years the whole region’s external debt could be paid with the money generated from the gaming and gambling industry.” Source: Gaming Industry Wire, July 2010 • “58.6 million Americans have played a game on a social network in the last three months.” Source: Newsweek, September 2010 • “67% of US households play computer or video games. 40% of all game players are women. The average gamer is 34 years old and has been playing for 12 years. In 2010, 26% of Americans over the age of 50 play video games.” ESA 2010

IMPLICATIONS

• Deals get so good and so concentrated within gaming that huge numbers are compelled to join, play, and share their personal locations and information purely not to miss out. Major behavioral shift, replaces coupon clipping entirely. See #IdentityPatrol • Massive data source that needs to be mined • Amex/Foursquare as solution to ROI problem? See #ROIAnxiety

MACROTREND: Identity Patrol

The privacy market is heating up! Two anxieties: Fear of identity theft; fear of bad reputation.  One major issue: who gets paid?

In The Googlization of Everything (and Why We Should Worry), a book that can be read as a sober and admonitory companion, Siva Vaidhyanathan, a media scholar at the University of Virginia, puts it this way: “We are not Google’s customers: we are its product. We—our fancies, fetishes, predilections, and preferences—are what Google sells to advertisers.” How Google Dominates Us, NY Review of Books Aug 2011

EXAMPLES

Reputation.com

Intelliprotect

Personal.com

DRIVERS

•Manage people’s reputations like corporate reputations •“Infomediary” •2nd paycheck #DigitalLabor •Transparency paradoxes •Fraud fear •Advertising: online tracking, targeted ads “loss of control”, #InfoOverload •“Privacy Score” #QuantifyMe •Call for privacy regulations

IMPLICATIONS

Will you have to pay for privacy in the future? – you will have to give up deals (currently). Or: you can get paid for giving up your privacy, become empowered to give it away yourself

SUPERMACROTREND: Internet of Things

THE SOURCE OF INFO IS CHANGING: FROM PEOPLE TO OBJECTS

50 billion things on the internet by 2020

-Cisco

Bruce Sterling sci-fi writer’s idea - a form of ubiquitous computing that gives smarts and ‘searchability’ to even the most mundane of physical products – is now

“it may have happened already that there are more things on the internet than there are people” IBM Social Media

SUPERMACROTREND: Urbanomics

“The extreme push towards hyper-urbanization, and with it the formation of a global consumer arena, inhabited by billions of experienced and newly-minted urbanites.” – Trendwatching

This means new strains on resources, but also new consumer bases. What will local mean?

“Delhi, Shanghai, São Paulo and Moscow are each expected to reach a GDPby 2025—more  in excess of USD 500 billion than the GDP of entire nations such as Indonesia or Belgium today.”

McKinsey December 2010

Between 2000 and 2030 the global urban footprint will double, mostly due to growth in developing nation cities.

- Sustainable cities collective

IMPLICATIONS

- Smart cities

More people + more technology = more data

More data + more analysis + more organization

= urban operating systems

Instead of Internet cafés, imagine an outdoor LED screen and hacked Kinect box allowing literally anyone to access the Net using only gestures.

- Shifts in the future of mobility