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.
5. CIVIL MEDIA
Why the future of social is meaningful connections.
Legacy social media has been a car crash for our collective and individual social relations. And the only thing the Big Platforms care about is keeping us addicted.
There, we said it. And sure, there are legitimate arguments about the shades of grey here. No one has a problem with a great no context Twitter account. But the benefits of social are being overwhelmed by bad actors and toxicity.
In 2020 consumers will seek an antidote to vast and toxic online communities and social media platforms. They’ll embrace smaller and more intimate digital spaces that facilitate respectful and meaningful connections, let them interact with like-minded peers and allow them to truly be themselves.
What’s driving this? In brief:
As 2019 comes to a close, the zeitgeist is now more attuned than ever to the failure of the big platforms to to step up to their responsibilities (go Sacha!).
And evidence that mainstream social media is often a toxic morass of bullying and harassment is now impossible to ignore. See this recent Cornell University study which found that female Instagram influencers are criticized for being too real and, you guessed it, criticized for not being real enough. Or the linking of social media to a sharp rise in teen suicide rates.
Put it all together, and 2020 is the year that the search for a new kind of social achieves lift off. The only question is: will you be involved?
YOUR RESPONSE?
Connection and self-expression are fundamental human needs. Consumers will continue to seek to meet those needs online – in 2020, and forever. But creating new CIVIL MEDIA platforms in 2020 will depend on your ability to do something that legacy social media currently won’t. That is to look beyond the race for short-term profits, eyeballs at all costs, and massive scale.
Instead commit to a long-term mission, a constructive social space, and the right scale. How can you create new communities and foster new connections that are truly relevant, meaningful, life-enhancing and supportive?
Think about the interest groups, tribes and collectives that look to you, and could see you as a credible meeting place. Think about real-time, pop-up communities: see how The Night Feed is seeking to serve new mothers who are awake breastfeeding in the small hours.
And crucially, think most about those for whom legacy social media is often most toxic: traditionally marginalized and overlooked groups, including women (yes all women, still marginalized and overlooked in 2019!). See how Stream Queens is reaching out beyond the often white, male world of gaming to gamers who fall outside that category.
If you can create a truly CIVIL space for consumers to come together online in 2020, then ultimately the rewards will be huge. But your desire to serve your community must be authentic, sincere and properly executed. Millions have been burned once; they won’t let it happen again. Get to it!
Publication Courtesy – trendwatching.com
