Thoughts on Faith Popcorn's Trends for 2007

Somehow I managed to miss Faith Popcorn's prognostications for 2007. Maybe they were too clever clever for the mass media. A shame because this is good stuff.

I've added my comments after each of Faith's trends in italics below ...

1. Identity Flux: Technology has enabled us to experiment with different personalities, leading to a much more fluid sense of who we are. Having tasted the nectar of virtual liberation, we're beginning to reject the singularly defined roles we're expected to play in society.

The Future: Gender-neutrality goes mainstream. People list skills on their business cards rather than title, and dress up in various costumes depending on who they feel like being that day.

My thoughts: I doubt this will go mainstream in 2007. Whilst a lot of people will be aware of the tools they can use for experimentation with virtual identities online (blogging, myspace, youtube etc.), far fewer will have actually experimented with them. Thinking beyond the implications of online identities I can see how the trend towards portfolio working is already putting pressure on the value of basing your identity on your industry, employer or job title. We all know that there is far fewer exformation provided when you tell someone what you do these days than there used to be.

Verdict: We're not there yet.

2. Liquid Brands: Today's consumers are capricious and non-committal. Brands will have to become more liquid to keep up with their constantly moving targets.

The Future: Chameleon-like brands focus less on communicating a static message and more on being the right thing for the right persona at the right time. Constantly morphing retailers carry products until they sell out and never restock.

My thoughts: Yep. Brands need to be dynamic and continuously deliver new ideas to remain fresh and interesting. They can't stand still whilst the world moves around them and still expect people to care about them. Relentless brand innovation is the best way to maintain the value of a brand and avoid becoming a commodity.

Verdict: Starting to kick-in.

3. Virtual Immortality: Consumers globally are creating fully fleshed out existences in the virtual world-dressing up their avatars, making friends, having affairs and buying property for their pixilated alter-egos.  And now that people have multiple lives, who says you can't live forever?

The Future: While some let their avatars drift away to online purgatory, many more leave behind specific instructions on how their virtual selves should proceed. Services offering avatar surrogates flourish, and we bequeath avatars to friends and family in our wills.

My Thoughts: Faith takes a tangent off the first trend. This reminds me of Vannevar Bush's Memex concept. The concept of digital immortality will be far more interesting when it refers to us and not our avatars. If we realise the memex idea then our knowledge will live on beyond us. The  wonderful Ray Kurzweil famously thinks that soon we will be physically immortal as well.

Verdict: A pipedream

4. EnvironMENTAL Movement: Like the movement to combat environmental pollution, the next consumer-led reaction will be against the mental pollution caused by marketers. With every corner of the world both real and virtual becoming plastered with marketing messages, bombarded consumers are starting to say they've had enough. The current attack against marketing to kids is just the beginning.

The Future: Companies are expected to reduce the amount of damage they are doing to our minds. Savvy companies sponsor marketing-free white spaces in lieu of polluting the environment with models and logos.

My Thoughts: The era of intrusive marketing is surely coming to an end as consumers become empowered to work around the ads. Consumers are convinced that ads are getting worse. In situations where ads can't easily be avoided (outdoor, for example) the backlash has already begun (e.g. urban spam). With commercial messages appearing in more and more places, consumers are getting confused about what is and what is not an ad (e.g. product placement). This ambiguity builds animosity towards advertisers in general. As a result, more and more brands are trying to ensure that the utility of their marketing outweighs any annoyance it may cause by giving something back to consumers. Faith's "white space" concept is of course already with us as marketers like Philips pay to give consumers the ability to watch programmes with fewer ads.

Verdict: In full swing.

5. Product PLACEment: In the globally networked age, consumers are much more concerned about the consequences of consumption. Is my garbage poisoning someone in a developing country? How much fuel was burned in order to get these strawberries to my local supermarket?

The Future: Enviro-biographies are attached to just about everything, letting consumers know the entire life story of a product: where the materials were harvested, where it was constructed, how far it traveled, and where it ended up after being thrown away or recycled.

My Thoughts: With An Inconvenient Truth and the The Stern Review behind us and even the Tory party and The Sun's Page 3 Girls going green it seems highly likely that some kind of  labelling scheme will be introduced to enable us to make an informed choice to cut the environmental impact of our consumption. If this happens, it seems likely that our legislators will also use this as an opportunity to ensure that the polluter (aka the consumer) pays by revising VAT to take into account environmental impacts as they already have with motoring taxes. Before this is possible, however, we will have to get the scientists to agree on what constitutes the greatest damage to the environment. And if this proves anything like as complex as deciding what foods are good for us then I fear this may take a while to come about.

Verdict: It's definitely coming but not in 2007.

6. Brand-Aides: The government has let us down when it comes to providing the social services we had once expected from it. Brands are stepping in to take over where the government left off. Companies are already finding there's profit to be made from providing affordable healthcare to the masses.

The Future: Socially responsible brands make a buck while providing desperately needed services. Communities are revived by Target daycare, Starbucks learning centers, and Avis transportation services for the elderly.

My Thoughts: For a for-profit organisation to ask us to pay again for a service that we already pay for through compulsory taxation it will have to offer a considerable improvement in perceived service levels. It will therefore probably need a decent track record in delivering similar services. The brand stretch may be pretty tenuous (as in the Starbucks example) and it will have to make sense to both the potential consumers and the stock market. Nonetheless it is highly probable that our public services will continue to fragment into public-private partnerships and then into wholly owned private sector organisations as the government seeks to keep the cost of maintaining the public services we pay for off the balance sheet.

My verdict: Sadly inevitable. Many companies will get burned when consumers reject them as inappropriate to be delivering a public service.

7. Moral Status Anxiety: In today's increasingly philanthropic climate, expect conspicuous self- indulgence to go straight to the social guillotine. The globally conscious consumer regards altruistic activities as a necessary part of self-improvement.

The Future: A person's net worth is no longer measured by dollars earned, but by improvements made. Families compete with each other on how many people they fed while on vacation, and the most envied house on the block is not the biggest, but the most sustainable.

My Thoughts: Our value system may be shifting but it the behaviour Faith describes is far from altruistic. People will be seeking to be good to look good. Pure altruism is "giving without regard to reward or the benefits of recognition". Is frugality conspicuous enough that families will be able to compete with each other on it? How do you get your neighbours to notice what you didn't buy? Isn't it more likely that this will lead to the conspicuous consumption of ethical brands?

Verdict: It may happen but will we notice?

8. Oldies but Goodies: Our culture is suffering from an experience deficit. With the availability of online knowledge, we're claiming expertise based only on secondary experience. Now that everyone's a web-educated know-it-all, we're secretly longing for authority figures to guide and assure us with indispensable nuggets of wisdom that could only come from having actually accumulated life experience.

The Future: Respect for elders makes a comeback in the form of Ask Your Grandma hotlines and the proliferation of online video clips by seniors showing us how to tie knots and concoct home remedies.

My Thoughts: I am tempted to argue the opposite based on the same evidence. It is increasingly easy to access information but we are having to develop the skills to determine the authority of that information for ourselves: applying a healthy dose of scepticism, cross-referencing, challenging the motives of the author and evaluating whether their claimed authority is earned. Therefore rather than looking to others for the answer we are increasingly arming ourselves with the ability to parse information for errors or malicious intent and becoming self-sustaining.

Verdict:  Age and experience do not necessarily make an expert.

Anyone else?