Caution! 2020 trends approaching

It is a peculiarity of the human cultural calendar that even though most businesses go through their planning process in the early Autumn in preparation for annual budgeting, most futurologists, agencies and strategists launch their trend reports into the heart of the January post-turkey comedown.

It’s a vibrant marketplace of ideas, in which genuine insight, soothsaying and clickbait are riotously blended together in a distracting carnival of cherry-picked data, wishful thinking and bold, arbitrary predictions. And of course, I will be doing my own, so look out eagerly for that in the New Year.

The end result is that January can be a time when people (including me) get very excited about new concepts and new opportunities – particularly if they’ve been to CES or bought themselves an Audible subscription for Christmas. Which is fantastic – marketing is a game of concepts and in a rapidly changing marketplace everyone needs fresh ideas of how to do things. But it comes with two major dangers:

The Under 5s Football Phenomenon

Even very good marketing professionals have a fatal combination of virtues – they are generally very sociable and have very well attuned radar for new things. The result is that frequently everyone falls in love with the same ideas at the same time.

In a discipline which is all about creating distinctiveness, the second most flawed strategy after doing totally the wrong thing is doing the same broadly right thing as everyone else. Don’t be one of the kids swarming to the football – find a bit of space and take your chance when it comes.

Bye Bye Strategy

Hopefully your business has a clear sense of where it is going, where you want to grow, who your current and desired customers are, how your brand is positioned, what your distinctive equity and provenance is, how you want to tell your story and deploy your resources, how you want to develop your organisation etc etc. (If not, I can help.)

All that’s left to do is to finalised and deploy your tactics…”but if some of those tactics look really enticing, perhaps we can tweak the strategy? In fact, what if we rethink the whole way we do marketing…on the fly…between 13th January and mid-February…” (And with that, the strategy was gone...)

With that in mind, please, please do open your minds to new thinking in a new year, there are for sure some big changes to be alert to. But here are 4 kinds of trends I would approach with extreme caution:

1.     ‘Something-or-other 2.0’

If at first you don’t succeed, try and try again. The ‘2.0’-type trend is generally a code for something that hasn’t worked or is on the way down, but that people have a lot of emotional or financial investment in and want to revive.

My tip for someone to look out for this year will be ‘Mass Personalisation 2.0’, in which a complex set of micro-targeting infrastructure based on someone’s unique demographic and behavioural identifiers is replaced by another complex set of micro-targeting infrastructure based on context signals or cultural signals or something.

If 1.0 didn’t work for you, approach 2.0 with extreme caution.

2.     ‘The Death of Shopping/TV/Hope’ 

This type of trend is there to indicate that all the effort you put into chasing last year’s trend was na?ve and foolish and it’s time to pretend you never thought it was important in the first place.

Lots of people are going to be gunning for ‘Purpose’ in this year’s trends, and whilst it’s difficult to see anyone going for anything as bleak as the ‘Death of Purpose’ the knives are definitely out for cause-led advertising. Which is in some respects fair – the rush by some to create superficial cause-related brand advertising has led to a lot of patronising dreck, and there is certainly a lot more in production. But the pivot of business towards purpose has been motivating for employees and consumers, and it seems to be well on the way to making business more trusted that our elected political leaders.

I’d say purpose in particular is an area to double down, become more authentic and more sophisticated…not to walk away from.

3.     ‘The year of widget number 10’

I’m sure there are some very impressive new technologies around the corner, but if you haven’t yet worked out a role in your business for data, mobile, AI, AR, VR or Blockchain I wouldn’t be in any hurry to add any more new tech to the list.

The likelihood is that your business has some massive unsolved issues in its core, that have become so familiar to you that you don’t even notice them any longer. Things that make people really unhappy, or that cost you a lot of money and don’t generate any, or that everyone hates doing or even thinking about. If it’s not already in your plan, definitely initiate a project to explore whether any new processes of technologies could make those things better. It might not be sexy, but it could be very useful, which is better.

But the solutions to your problems are 99% likely to be through a technology you already have heard of, and may even have some competence in already.

4.     ‘Generation ZZZ’

It’s hardly original or enlightening to say that entire generations cannot be described as one homogeneous group, nor described as fundamentally different in every way to every generation that came before them. Though people quite regularly do say this! But of course it is just as dangers to swing to the opposite pole, and to assume that nothing really needs to change…because the chances are it really does.

This is a trend that I would simply encourage you to take in a different direction. The ‘Generation ZZZ’ approach generally encourages brands to pressure-test their positioning and experience against an imagined group of people who don’t care about their brands, have lower attention spans and higher ethical standards. It’s definitely a good idea to do this. I would also test your brand against other outliers and atypical customers – the very elderly, the category critic, the super-using expert.

It’s great to think of the people who don’t care about you as well as the people who do. But don’t assume they are all under 18 or living their lives only through tech platforms that you don’t use.

That's it - let me know if you see any of these as the Trends decks start rolling in - and look out for my exciting forthcoming piece: The Death of Generation Blockchain 2.0.