5 TRENDS FOR 2020

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.

3. METAMORPHIC DESIGN

Consumers demand relevance as a service.

Two powerful consumer expectations are converging.

The desire for personalization – ‘give me exactly what I want!’ – has always been a part of the story of consumerism. Meanwhile, a decade of on-demand and ‘everything as a service’ has reshaped the meaning of convenience for millions around the world.

The next chapter? In 2020 consumers primed by constantly evolving digital services and smart physical spaces – and accustomed to the ultra-convenience of ‘everything as a service’ – will increasingly expect relevance as a service, too. That means services and experiences that constantly adapt around the changing needs of the user.

This trend is founded on an eternal human truth: people are always in a state of flux. For that reason, there can never be one perfect product, service or solution for any given person. Rather, a true perfect fit means constant adaptation around the changing individual.

But why now?

Facial recognition, sensors and smart objects are turning the world into a landscape that shifts and changes around consumers. The result is ever-heightening expectations for responsive personalization. No wonder 39% of global businesses say they have started to deliver personalized experiences in real-time (Adobe and Econsultancy, February 2019).

New technologies – think affordable DNA testing, blood testing and more – are making new innovations that shift and change around the changing human body possible for the first time.

Meanwhile, subscriptions, on-demand and sharing have become a part of daily life for millions: a recent survey of US consumers found more than half (54%) of online shoppers pay for at least one subscription box service (Clutch, September 2019). The next step? Expectations for seamless convenience will intersect with heightened expectations for ever-shifting personalization.

Ready to deliver relevance as a service in 2020? First, take a look at how others are riding this trend.

YOUR RESPONSE?

Sure, METAMORPHIC vitamin supplements (see Baze) or skin cream (see Shiseido) almost certainly aren’t on your agenda for 2020.

But as ever, we’re not showing you these innovations so that you can copy them. It’s the underlying expectations that these examples are signalling that’s crucial here.

Convenience and personalization are already on your radar. But in a METAMORPHIC world, consumers will expect the merging of those two imperatives. Not just your offering as a service, but relevance as a service, too.

So the key question for your team: when vitamin supplements iterate around the changing needs of the user, and when skin creams adapt on a daily basis, what form of ultra-convenient, ever-shifting personalization will your customers come to expect from you?

Could you launch an ‘X as a service’ innovation that also delivers relevance as a service? Or will it be more about imbuing your product with new features that allow it to constantly shift and adapt around the needs of the user, as the Tonal workout station does?

What does a METAMORPHIC banking service look like? Or METAMORPHIC retail, media, travel…the list is endless!

Read the next article of the series on THE BURNOUT

Publication Courtesy – trendwatching.com