Trending 2019: real data to predict the future

On Tuesday 13 November 2018 Foresight Factory gathered around marketers and data lovers at its Annual Global Conference where experts presented a selection of new trends and themes for the year ahead, in order to bring new answers to future critical businesses’ challenges.

The day started with Foresight Factory’s director of content, Dominic Harrison, presenting “The Big Reveal”, giving a full picture of the new trends driven by evolving consumer demands that will shape the 2019’s socio-commercial zeitgeist. In particular Dominic focused on two trends: the “Sustainable me” – about the control that people desire for their productivity, finance and health and “Neo-civility” – related to how easily people are offended alongside their worries about expressing their personal opinions.

Up next was, Meabh Quoririn, co-owner and CEO at Foresight Factory, who advised the audience on how to gain more attention from their customers. Meabh, through her talk “Staying Heard in the Attention Economy”, explained how businesses’ real aim should be understanding ‘who’ they want to capture through the noise more than ‘how’ to capture customers’ attention.

Josh McBain, consultancy director at Foresight Factory, followed with his “Are The BATs And FAANGs Biting Yet?”. He transported the audience to 2029, when mastodonic brands rule the customer world, affirming themselves as unique gateways to products and services. Starting from what is driving customers’ loyalty at the moment, as analysed in DMA’s Customer Engagement 2018: How to win trust and loyalty report, Josh explained how businesses could become memorable brands and the different opportunities available to share the customer-mindset-cake with BATs (Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent) And FAANGs (Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Google and Snapchat.)

Following Josh was, Barry Clark and Clodagh Brennan, respectively senior account director and senior trend analyst at Foresight Factory, with their “The Core Consumer Needs Driving Trends In Great CX” which focused on the fundamental needs that drive customer experience and the ones that will need to be addressed by brands in the decade ahead. Indeed, brands will have to fulfil knowledgeable and sociable demands, offering intellectual improvement alongside solutions to the social deficit that is affecting modern society.

Afterwards, KPMG, which also sponsored the event, discussed “Me, my life, my wallet – understanding the drivers of consumer trust” which focused on what is driving the consumers’ decisions and their expectations about data privacy in an ever changing environment.

The afternoon started with Georgina Sapsted, head of data, and Grace Fell, trend analyst at Foresight Factory, with “New Tribes (To Go To War For)” focused on two emerging tribes, Child-free and Homeworker. Both these groups need to be better explored and understood as they represent a potentially important segment of the next decade’s population.

Following, Emily Cullen and Kinvara Hubbard, respectively trends manager and consultant at Foresight Factory, introduced the audience to “The Wellbeing Creep: Why Every Sector Should Take It Seriously Now”. This idea of wellbeing is slowly gaining access to many people’s lives, developing new customer behaviours and consequentially new market opportunities across several new sectors. In this scenario, it will be fundamental for businesses understand what impact their brand is having on customer’s wellbeing.

Then it was time for Marcus John Henry Brown’s unique performance that has been described by Forbes as “like watching a live TED meets ‘Black Mirror’ Live special”. Part performance, part satire, part parable of our times “The Passing” attempted to understand the technologies, society and businesses of the present by imagining them in a near-future that has been designed by a fictitious organisation which put dystopia at the heart of innovation.

Finally, still lost in Marcus’s mind-twisting world, the audience took part into the final panel moderated by Christophe Jouan, co-owner and CEO at Foresight Factory. Within “The age of influence”, Alana and Lisa Macfarlane (The Mac Twins), Sam Brookes, (senior digital brand lead at Very.co.uk) and Sedge Beswick (founder & MD at Seen Connects) discussed the changing attitude of influencers and how brands have to start to look at influencers more humanly.

If this brief overview of the day caught your fancy, don’t miss the Trending 2019 Report which Foresight Factory will publish within the next few weeks, featuring a selection of new trends and themes for 2019.

In the meantime, you can find all the presentations from the event here.