Today is “Back to the Future Day,” the day Marty McFly travels forward to in the 1989 movie, the second in the series. Like all futurist movies, “Back to the Future” wasn’t meant to be a forecast. Many of its future elements — the flying cars, the garbage-powered fusion — were meant more as jokes…
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I’ve been meaning to write this post ever since a trip to the wonderful Aquarium du Québec in Quebec City last summer. There I saw, among many other interesting things, a poster comparing the odds of being attacked by a shark to the odds of experiencing various other traumatic events. Unfortunately I’ve lost my photo…
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Foresight is all about the present. Sounds paradoxical, but I firmly believe it. Let me explain. What started me on this train of thought is a passage in The Screwtape Letters, 20th century scholar C. S. Lewis’ droll version of advice offered to a junior devil by his more experienced uncle Screwtape. In one of…
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Back in April I had a chance to visit MetroCrops, an urban high-density indoor farm started by two of my friends here in Connecticut. Steve and Nancy Domyan and a small staff grow lettuce in 2,200 square feet of converted factory space in Bridgeport. Hydroponics, LED lights, and a controlled climate allow them to produce…
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Occasionally I pitch in as part of the crowd in the crowdsourced mapping site Tomnod. The site has periodic campaigns in which one contributes to a humanitarian task such as looking for hurricane damage in Vanuatu or signs of poachers in Africa. Recently, a new campaign type has appeared: volunteers training the site’s algorithms…
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In the aftermath of the U.S. Supreme Court decision that allowed same-sex marriage, there has been a lot of discussion on the how quickly the issue evolved from a fringe concept to a mainstream idea, and how not many people—including gay people—expected opinion to shift as rapidly as it did. You know who did expect…
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It’s popular to talk of deepening consumers’ relationships with a brand. But most consumers just aren’t that into brands. Marketing guru Martin Weigel argues that savvy marketers will realize they can best boost sales by extending their brand’s reach—making more consumers more aware of the brand—rather than by building loyal fans. What’s driving this forecast……
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In 2030, the retail environment sees ubiquitous same-day delivery of online goods and autonomous-vehicle pickup and delivery of store purchases. Consolidation across e-commerce and retail industries has left only a handful of players that can combine logistical sophistication with a national footprint. Convenience and availability, not impulse, drive consumer purchasing in this future, making branded…
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Consumers in this future use a spectrum of venues and social media to voice their wants and define spaces that need new brands. The fastest and most innovative companies respond to this crowd expression with tailored products. This amplifies a trend that began in the early 2010s, in which companies used social media to test…
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Through 2030, values-based consumption rises among the increasingly prosperous middle classes of emerging markets, and they look to brands for cues. Ethical and ideological concerns carry more weight in brand choice, partially edging out value-for-money and conspicuous consumption as drivers. What’s driving this forecast… Growing middle classes. Global middle classes are adding hundreds of millions…
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