Five powerful consumer trends. Five opportunities. Are you ready?
It’s here! For what feels like forever, 2020 has been every trend watcher’s near-mythical time horizon. Now, we’re about to live it.
New challenges – and huge new opportunities! – are ahead. So here are five key emerging consumer trends to supercharge your planning. Each one is a powerful opportunity to build new products, services, campaigns, brands and more that people will love in 2020 and beyond.
1. GREEN PRESSURE
In 2020, consumers move from eco-status to eco-shame.
2. BRAND AVATARS
Human brands take powerful new form.
3. METAMORPHIC DESIGN
Consumers demand relevance as a service.
4. THE BURNOUT
Smart brands rush to help those burned by the pressures of modern life.
5. CIVIL MEDIA
Why the future of social is meaningful connections.
Remember, trends mean nothing if you don’t use them to make what you do – and the world – better. So absorb these trends, take them to your team, share, discuss, argue and conspire. But most of all, act.
4. THE BURNOUT
Smart brands rush to help those burned by the pressures of modern life.
Three glimpses of an urgent opportunity for you to help:
- 86% of British people say they have experienced anxiety due to work pressure in the last year. 87% have difficulties switching off from work, and 79% cite feelings of failure as a result (Microsoft, September 2019).
- Two thirds of working parents in Australia struggle to care for their health due to the tension between work and caring. One in four are thinking about quitting their job (National Working Families Report, October 2019).
- 71% of women and 66% of men in Singapore feel they work in an ‘always-on’ environment, with a constant need to access work emails, answer calls or check phones (Cigna, March 2019).
No wonder that in May 2019 the World Health Organization recognized burnout as an occupational health phenomenon.
Constant pressure to be on fire all the time – personally and professionally – is causing many to burn through their mental and physical reserves. Amid a growing focus on wellbeing, individuals are confronting the impact of always-on lifestyles. In 2020, those consumers will look to brands to help them battle THE BURNOUT.
That’s where an on-demand culture, in which self-appointed gurus sell the #hustle as a lifestyle and corporate icons champion a 966 work schedule, has brought us.
Taking action is the right thing to do, and a huge opportunity for innovation. An opportunity to serve consumers. And to change yourself from the inside out. Get ready for a future in which the mental wellbeing of your employees is just as important as your supply chain. As your environmental footprint. As your mission. Put simply: the best organizations will recognize this new reality, and reorientate their internal culture around it.
YOUR RESPONSE?
If you’re a wellbeing brand, the path ahead is clear: address burnout in 2020.
Even if you’re not, are there new offerings, support, or advice you can offer that can help? See how IKEA India focused on sleep.
One way to apply this trend? Simply make the task of engaging with your brand easier, faster and more efficient, so that you kill much or all of the hassle/stress associated with it. Couple that with a campaign that tells consumers: ‘we get it, you’re stretched. That’s why we’ve made things easier,’ and you have the makings of a great 2020 campaign around this trend.
But perhaps the most powerful application of this trend, and one that any brand can look to? Make meaningful changes to your internal culture that alleviate stress and potential burnout among your own people.
First, it’s the right thing to do. Second, it makes business sense Third, in a transparent GLASS BOX world in which your internal culture is an increasingly important part of your brand, it will send a powerful signal to the world – and to potential customers – about who you are and what your brand stands for.
In a world in which pretty much every form of brand messaging has become so much white noise, it’s hard to think of any play more powerful in 2020.
Read the next article of the series on CIVIL MEDIA
Publication Courtesy – trendwatching.com
