Business Update – November 2017

Welcome to the November edition of Update

We start with The Future of Mobility, a new paper investigating global consumer attitudes towards the prospect of fully automated cars. As well as outlining some of the specific technological advances, the paper investigates attitudes by region and age group, including concerns around issues such as data protection and privacy.

Turning the spotlight onto food, and the world’s growing obesity crisis, Sugar: What Next? looks at public and legislator views towards sugar. At a time when 30% of the global population is obese (a figure that rises to close to 60% in the developed world), this report questions where the responsibility for healthy eating lies.

Meanwhile, in the omni-channel world that technology has created, bringing together physical and digital shopping experiences, Are you leveraging your Path to Purchase as a path to growth? defines a clear framework of the path to purchase and sets out how marketers and retailers can develop a successful strategy.

Moving onto gender, Breaking the Stereotype highlights how some of the old stereotypes in advertising in developing markets are giving way to new approaches. Drawing on different ad campaigns, the thought piece explores what works, what doesn’t, and how advertisers can shape the way people traditionally think about women.

Virtual Reality remains a hot topic in our industry. Despite being around for at least a decade, it has not yet hit mass adoption; has something gone wrong? This new white paper explores the current landscape, and what the future holds.

Turning our attention to global concerns, the majority of people think that their country is on the “wrong track”, with South Africa, Italy, Brazil and Mexico being the most worried, according to the latest What Worries the World survey.

Focusing specifically on Canada, Public Perspectives - Canada Next explores Canadian attitudes towards technology, the economy, governments, businesses, their communities and their lives. The report finds that 70% think that the world is changing too fast in relation to technology, and 60% believe that law and government policies are not keeping pace with the changes.

Still on the subject of technology, there is no doubt that allowing respondents to take surveys on their smartphones represents a critical tipping point for our industry. With device agnostic the new research reality, these two new device agnostic white papers set out how marketers can adapt to stay connected to consumers.

Meanwhile, high profile attacks have brought cyber-crime to the forefront of corporate minds recently. This paper investigates the scale of the threat, the potential damage to corporate reputation, and what businesses are doing – and in many cases no doing – to address the problem.

Finally, we finish with Smartificial Intelligence, a thought piece that weighs up the potential and limitations of artificial intelligence to establish whether technology still needs a human touch.