Trends Identified
Don’t get stuck in the middle
Brands must strategically commit to either a high-end or low-fidelity value proposition. We are seeing a new polarity in brands: companies offer either a low-cost, low-fidelity value or a high-end experience. Consumers will pay a premium for brands that provide a unique über-experience but they also want brands that provide what they want at a low cost. Even mainstream brands need to offer unique experiences in order to influence engagement and commitment and to drive repeat purchase. In 2019, brands that operate in the middle, offering utilitarian value without a distinct point of difference, will die.
2019
The top trends for brands to watch in 2019
Landor
Divisive Values
Brands are no longer shying away from polarising political and social issues, and they’re increasing their fame and fortune in the process.
2018
Most contagious report 2018
Contagious
Marketing and HR: unlikely allies
Brand marketers and HR join forces to drive greater value from the inside out, from employee to customer.As demand for more connectivity increases across all touchpoints in our lives, the push for end-to-end experience design will require closer relationships between people and product. Employee engagement, employee satisfaction, and employee retention are key to those relationships. Marketing and HR departments that partner together and blur traditional functional siloes are better positioned to attract, engage, and outperform their competition.With the rise in demand for innovative, creative, and branded employee experiences, leaders from HR and marketing will be 2019’s most critical power team. This new emphasis on the integration between customer experience and employee experience will require diversifying and attracting new types of talent to those roles.
2019
The top trends for brands to watch in 2019
Landor
Modern masculinity
Brand feminism has been one of the most discussed themes in our industry recently and forward- thinking companies are working hard to improve the way women are portrayed in ads. But some brands are now adopting the same approach to challenge male stereotypes. From husbands doing housework to guys in heels, last year brands began to embrace more diverse representations of men. Since then, the cultural conversation around ‘toxic masculinity’ has gained momentum, pressuring marketers to adapt to the shift or risk irrelevance.
2018
Most contagious
Contagious
Optogenetics
Brains—even relatively simple ones like those in mice— are daunting in their complexity. Neuroscientists and psychologists can observe how brains respond to various kinds of stimuli, and they have even mapped how genes are expressed throughout the brain. But with no way to control when individual neurons and other kinds of brain cells turn on and off, researchers found it very difficult to explain how brains do what they do, at least not in the detail needed to thoroughly understand—and eventually cure—conditions such as Parkinson’s disease and major depression. Scientists tried using electrodes to record neuronal activity, and that works to some extent. But it is a crude and imprecise method because electrodes stimulate every neuron nearby and cannot distinguish among different kinds of brain cells. A breakthrough came in 2005, when neurogeneticists demonstrated a way to use genetic engineering to make neurons respond to particular colors of light. The technique, known as optogenetics, built on research done in the 1970s on pigment proteins, known collectively as rhodopsins and encoded by the opsin gene family. These proteins work like light-activated ion pumps. Microbes, lacking eyes, use rhodopsins to help extract energy and information from incoming light. By inserting one or more opsin genes into particular neurons in mice, biologists are now able to use visible light to turn specific neurons on or off at will. Over the years, scientists have tailored versions of these proteins that respond to distinct colors, ranging from deep red to green to yellow to blue. By putting different genes into different cells, they use pulses of light of various colors to activate one neuron and then several of its neighbours in a precisely timed sequence. That is a crucial advance because in living brains, timing is everything. A signal issued at one moment may have the complete opposite effect from the same signal sent out a few milliseconds later. The invention of optogenetics greatly accelerated the pace of progress in brain science. But experimenters were limited by the difficulty of delivering light deep into brain tissue. Now ultrathin, flexible microchips, each one hardly bigger than a neuron, are being tested as injectable devices to put nerves under wireless control. They can be inserted deep into a brain with minimal damage to overlying tissue. Optogenetics has already opened new doors to brain disorders, including tremors in Parkinson’s disease, chronic pain, vision damage and depression. The neurochemistry of the brain is clearly important for some brain conditions, which is why drugs can help improve symptoms—up to a point. But where the high-speed electrical circuitry of the brain is also disturbed, optogenetic research, especially when enhanced by emerging wireless microchip technology, could offer new routes to treatment. Recent research suggests, for example, that in some cases non-invasive light therapy that shuts down specific neurons can treat chronic pain, providing a welcome alternative to opoids. With mental disorders affecting one in four people globally and psychiatric diseases a leading source of disability, the better understanding of the brain that advanced optogenetics will provide cannot come soon enough.
2016
Top 10 Emerging Technologies of 2016
World Economic Forum (WEF)
Brain-machine Interface
Brain-machine interface enables control over machines with brainwaves. The technology is primarily used on neuroprosthetics applications that aim to improve the quality of life for those with disabilities by analyzing and processing information on neural activities.
2009
KISTEP 10 Emerging Technologies 2009
South Korea, Korea Institute of S&T Evaluation and Planning (KISTEP)
New customer strategies
Boundaries between companies and consumers are fading as people, informed and enabled by the internet, become more aware and demanding. They want personalized offerings and will collaborate with companies to help develop the products and services they desire.
2017
Twelve Forces That Will Radically Change How Organizations Work
Boston Consulting Group (BCG)
Energy
Both total demand for energy and energy prices will rise up to 2030. Oil will remain the most important resource, but will lose some significance to renewables. At current rates of production, the remaining lifetime of the various energy sources will be longest for coal (119 years), followed by gas (63 years) and oil (46 years). Conflicts over energy supplies are likely to rise, since these resources are highly concentrated in a small number of countries
2011
Trend compendium 2030
Roland Berger Strategy Consultants
Technological dependencies
Both society, and defence and security, have increasingly depended on certain technologies which have become essential in everyday lives
2017
Strategic foresight analysis
NATO
The cow-free burger
Both lab-grown and plant-based alternatives approximate the taste and nutritional value of real meat without the environmental devastation. The UN expects the world to have 9.8 billion people by 2050. And those people are getting richer. Neither trend bodes well for climate change—especially because as people escape poverty, they tend to eat more meat. By that date, according to the predictions, humans will consume 70% more meat than they did in 2005. And it turns out that raising animals for human consumption is among the worst things we do to the environment. Depending on the animal, producing a pound of meat protein with Western industrialized methods requires 4 to 25 times more water, 6 to 17 times more land, and 6 to 20 times more fossil fuels than producing a pound of plant protein.The problem is that people aren’t likely to stop eating meat anytime soon. Which means lab-grown and plant-based alternatives might be the best way to limit the destruction. Making lab-grown meat involves extracting muscle tissue from animals and growing it in bioreactors. The end product looks much like what you’d get from an animal, although researchers are still working on the taste. Researchers at Maastricht University in the Netherlands, who are working to produce lab-grown meat at scale, believe they'll have a lab-grown burger available by next year. One drawback of lab-grown meat is that the environmental benefits are still sketchy at best—a recent World Economic Forum report says the emissions from lab-grown meat would be only around 7% less than emissions from beef production. The better environmental case can be made for plant-based meats from companies like Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods (Bill Gates is an investor in both companies), which use pea proteins, soy, wheat, potatoes, and plant oils to mimic the texture and taste of animal meat. Beyond Meat has a new 26,000-square-foot (2,400-square-meter) plant in California and has already sold upwards of 25 million burgers from 30,000 stores and restaurants. According to an analysis by the Center for Sustainable Systems at the University of Michigan, a Beyond Meat patty would probably generate 90% less in greenhouse-gas emissions than a conventional burger made from a cow. —Markkus Rovito
2019
10 Breakthrough Technologies 2019 - How we’ll invent the future, by Bill Gates
MIT Technology Review