Experiencing the future Part 2: How to build futures experiences

December 14, 2011

I made the case in my previous post Experiencing the future Part 1: Getting beyond analysis and changing minds that experiencing the future is vital to good foresight and benefits organizations. I don’t claim to be a practitioner of the most exciting and advanced experiential futures, but I have decades’ experience getting real business execs [...]

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#Consumer4sight No 6: Greening it up by choice or by force

December 8, 2011

More consumers are greening it up – Soon regulatory and social pressures will meet economic pressures to drive greener lifestyles. People are already subject to local recycling laws and often laws relating to their use of energy and water resources. But higher prices are an even surer way to wake up consumers to the need to [...]

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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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