Experiencing the future Part 1: Getting beyond analysis and changing minds

December 6, 2011

It’s not possible to directly experience the future, it hasn’t happened yet, you cannot go there. And it’s also not possible to directly experience the past—we don’t have a way to go back. The situations have a lot in common–our understanding of past and future are challenged in much the same ways. I’ve played with [...]

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#consumer4sight No. 5: We become “free range” shoppers

December 1, 2011

From the series, #Consumer4sight We’ll be doing more “free range” shopping – Anywhere/anytime network access leads to what I like to call “free-range shopping”. You don’t have to be at a shopping place to buy things, you can do that wherever you are, and increasingly, you want to. One key reason: encountering products out in the world [...]

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#Consumer4sight No. 4: Continuous digital access is becoming the core of consumer life

November 29, 2011

From the series, #Consumer4sight Living a digital life means carrying a mobile device that gives people ubiquitous access to the ‘net. Most well-off people have that and far more have basic mobile communications with at least texting (SMS) capability. And with that is the power of social networking, which changes the dynamics of what people [...]

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#Consumer4sight — Ideas about the future consumer

November 16, 2011

Powerful forces are changing how consumers think and act. As we look out over the next 15 years, we can highlight critical shifts that will change the way branding, marketing, producing, advertising, and retailing are done. This is a place where I will share ideas about that future consumer. Each idea gets introduced on Twitter, [...]

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Noun = bad, verb = good

November 10, 2011

Consider the difference between a plan and planning. A plan is a thing—most often a document in some form. It’s a fixed set of ideas about what you are going to do next. Just at the moment a plan is completed, it begins to age into irrelevance or incorrectness, possibly very quickly. Conditions and context [...]

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A 2021 shopper’s path to purchase

November 8, 2011

Technology and social changes are transforming how we shop. The future path to purchase won’t look like the traditional one—in fact, our path to purchase has already changed strikingly as retailing and consumer life have changed. But we’ve only begun to see what will unfold. Retailers, CPGs, packaging developers and others up and down the [...]

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Ask the hard questions

November 3, 2011

The thoughts here continue from my previous post, Question Continuity. Once you have recognized that you cannot assume continuity across the systems, technologies, relationships, etc. you depend on, you should recognize that you have to ask some tough questions: “Do we have a future?” “What makes us think so?” “What could disrupt the systems we [...]

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Question continuity

November 1, 2011

An organization’s routine strategymaking has to include ongoing explorations of the forces, issues, and trends in its internal and external environment. That is environmental scanning, and the process is routine for any well-led organization. But too often our scanning focus is too narrow and is based on assumptions of continuity. Here’s why that happens. When [...]

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A typology of futurists

September 30, 2011

I had the pleasure, recently, of collaborating with five other futurists at a 2-day workshop. We had a superb time and I am sure we delivered a ton of value to our client, who has taken up a significant new strategic exploration. Spending time with my colleagues, some of whom I have known for years, [...]

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Simple triage to keep sane while scanning

September 21, 2011

If you work at anticipating and understanding the future, you are in a permanent, 24/7, 365 day-a-year environmental scan. It's what you do, on the job or off.  But that means endless opportunity to distract yourself, if you are doing a good, broad scan of lots of sources of information. That kind of scan, done [...]

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