If this is the new reality, how are we going to change?

One big question for businesses and brands that want to take the future seriously

There is a massive opportunity for businesses and brands that take the future seriously.

So leaders need a good way to think about trends.

I think it comes down to one question: If this is becoming the new reality, how are going to change?

This came home to me when I attended the launch of Highsnobiety 's New Luxury report in New York last week.

They shared big new behaviors and attitudes among the world’s cultural pioneers, and five questions for brand owners trying to figure out responses.

Take brand collaboration. 70% of cultural pioneers find the story around a brand collaboration to be as important as the product itself. The question for brand owners: “How does a collaboration future-proof your brand and rise above the noise?”

Or take the meme-ification of fashion. 56% of cultural pioneers think that starter pack memes are an accurate reflection of how people live and dress. Highsnobeity’s advice to brand owners: dedicated as much time to how your product lives online as what the product is. Ask: “How will you be deciphered and spread?”

The percentages matter. They mean that a significant number of consumers are paying attention to, or ascribing value to something different, which makes it worth acting on. Over the past decade, fashion houses have moved from two to as many as six collections a year. Zara drops 10,000 new products a year. But 78% of cultural pioneers say that they enjoy inspiration from outside the trend cycle, while 69% are following curated archives content. That’s a change in interest that is worth acting on.?

(There’s a brilliant piece in the FT about renewed interest in 1990s Armani, and a fine post from Ben Zumsteg about the very different levels of respect that Chloe and McQueen’s new designers show to their maisons’ archives, if you want to go down the sartorial rabbit hole.)

The important tipping point is when a behavior goes beyond emerging and starts to become the new reality.

If a behavior is big enough to be an addressable market, it’s worth addressing. If something is real for most of the people you’re trying to serve, it needs to become your reality too.?

Trends don’t have to be predictions about the horizons of the future. There’s a new world available just by acting on what is taking shape now.

And your reaction to trends doesn’t need to be extreme, like do we fight it or follow it? It’s about how do we factor this in, or how do we bake it in?

This doesn’t mean chasing every TikTok video or thinkpiece. There are fundamentals, like human nature, economics, your foundational truths. And you can build around that. Jeff Bezos famously said he was more interested in what won’t change in the next ten years, because you can build long-term strategy around what is stable in time. But you can use that as an excuse to avoid change.

It’s easy to sound wise by ignoring what’s new.

Eventually the world passes you by. The same is true at the other extreme - reaching exhaustion by chasing every trend, or working on your prophecy until you perfect it can lead to their own form of paralysis.

Even if fundamentals don’t change, contexts change, and what people value can change. We’ve lived through enough structural shifts - hybrid working, climate change, the racial justice reckoning - to know that reality changes. Generative AI’s impact on unit costs for content, the falling cost of renewable energy, and America’s manufacturing boom should be enough to make you reset some assumptions about the underlying economics of the world.

It’s just a good habit to factor a changing world into the way you think and act. What assumptions does your organization run on that might not be true any more?

And while Highsnob focuses on luxury lifestyle brands, staying alert to emerging behaviors that become the emerging majority applies whatever area you work in. Last year I did a project on sports fandom and found that most of today’s fans don’t inherit their sporting loyalties from their families, and most sports watching occasions aren’t focused on the game. That’s an emerging majority right there. And the question is the same for every sector - what would you do differently if this is the new normal?

Thanks to Highsnobiety’s Nichelle Sanders for convening the event, and Edward Campbell for sharing the trends. The report is a banger and you can get a copy here.?