GET TO KNOW YOUR FUTURE CUSTOMERS
"The future is a profit stream waiting to happen, but it takes careful observation and anticipation to make it flow your way." Martin Raymond
What would you give to see today what your customers will want tomorrow? To discover their needs, desires and chosen brands. Who will they be? How will they behave? And what will they want from your business?
The future of consumer behaviour is a profit margin waiting to happen for those who read it correctly. But tomorrow's consumers want to be seen as people; not numbers, or markets to be segmented and targeted. How will your business and brand fit into their lives?
The Tomorrow People is a snapshot of tomorrow's consumers. The world they will inhabit, the lifestyles and values they will adopt and the ways they will shop. Sooner or later every brand has to interact with tomorrows people, so how do you equip yourself for such a world? As an individual, a brand, a corporation?
By understanding the nature of trends, their dynamics or science, we can learn not only to see them, but also how to map them use them to generate products, brands and services for tomorrow's consumers. It's all about behaviour. It's not about dead data.
In a provocative and insightful view of how emerging lifestyles and cultural changes are likely to impact on tomorrow's consumers, Martin Raymond alerts you to new consumer behaviour patterns and teaches you to read a market and be ready to deliver exactly what your customers want. This book will help you to read trends, interpret the discoveries that you make and plug them back into your business in a way that makes it more future-facing and customer-centric.
Learn to do this and you can interact with your consumers rather than react to them. You can build a truly tactile brand.
In a world where tomorrows answers no longer lie in yesterday's data, learn how to read people rather than reports.
Read this book and get better at
understanding your future customers; what they want and expect
mapping, predicting and responding to market trends before your competitors
connecting your brands with living people not dead data
creating, developing and launching the new products, services and brands that will deliver future profits - sorting profit opportunities from potential profit failures
"What Richard Pascale did in applying nature's living systems to business models, Martin Raymond does for the future of marketing and brand development. This is the closest you will get to finding out who your customers will be tomorrow, what their aspirations and prejudices will be and how your business can provide the products and services that will capture their money."
Director Magazine , Oct 2003
"Martin Raymond is something between scientist and a wizard: He decodes and translates tomorrows consumer attitudes with intelligence and wit. He uses his phenomenal cultural insight to challenge and inspire. This book will become a "must-read" for the brand architects of the future."
Susanne Tide-Frater, Head of Creative Direction, Selfridges
"What [companies] really need to do is understand consumer's lives and fit their brands into them. They need to be trend watchers; they need to be ethnographers; they need to be culturally savvy. But they don't have the skills."
The Financial Times
Product Description
GET TO KNOW YOUR FUTURE CUSTOMERS The future is a profit stream waiting to happen, but it takes careful observation and anticipation to make it flow your way. Martin Raymond
What would you give to see today what your customers will want tomorrow? To discover their needs, desires and chosen brands. Who will they be? How will they behave? And what will they want from your business?
The future of consumer behaviour is a profit margin waiting to happen for those who read it correctly. But tomorrow's consumers want to be seen as people; not numbers, or markets to be segmented and targeted. How will your business and brand fit into their lives?
The Tomorrow People is a snapshot of tomorrow's consumers. The world they will inhabit, the lifestyles and values they will adopt and the ways they will shop. Sooner or later every brand has to interact with tomorrow's people, so how do you equip yourself for such a world? As an individual, a brand, a corporation?
By understanding the nature of trends, their dynamics or science, we can learn not only to see them, but also how to map them use them to generate products, brands and services for tomorrow's consumers. It's all about behaviour. It's not about dead data.
In a provocative and insightful view of how emerging lifestyles and cultural changes are likely to impact on tomorrow's consumers, Martin Raymond alerts you to new consumer behaviour patterns and teaches you to read a market and be ready to deliver exactly what your customers want. This book will help you to read trends, interpret the discoveries that you make and plug them back into your business in a way that makes it more future-facing and customer-centric.
Learn to do this and you can interact with your consumers rather than react to them. You can build a truly tactile brand.
In a world where tomorrow's answers no longer lie in yesterday's data, learn how to read people rather than reports.
Read this book and get better at
understanding your future customers; what they want and expect
mapping, predicting and responding to market trends before your competitors
connecting your brands with living people not dead data
creating, developing and launching the new products, services and brands that will deliver future profits - sorting profit opportunities from potential profit failures
What Richard Pascale did in applying nature's living systems to business models, Martin Raymond does for the future of marketing and brand development. This is the closest you will get to finding out who your customers will be tomorrow, what their aspirations and prejudices will be and how your business can provide the products and services that will capture their money.
Director Magazine , Oct 2003
Martin Raymond is something between scientist and a wizard: He decodes and translates tomorrow's consumer attitudes with intelligence and wit. He uses his phenomenal cultural insight to challenge and inspire. This book will become a must-read for the brand architects of the future.
Susanne Tide-Frater, Head of Creative Direction, Selfridges
What [companies] really need to do is understand consumer's lives and fit their brands into them. They need to be trend watchers; they need to be ethnographers; they need to be culturally savvy. But they don't have the skills.
The Financial Times
Features + Benefits
Everybody is curious about their customers' changing needs and desires
Shorter product and market lifecycles are making fast and accurate innovation a critical competence for every business
A creative and visually stunning book packed with insight, tools and techniques - including 'needs mapping', cultural reconnaissance and the Lifestyle Index.
CONTENTS
CI. The Tomorrow People - Tomorrow Happens So You¹d Better Be Prepared!
A snapshot of tomorrow's consumers; the world they will inhabit; how they will shop and why the future is less about product specifics and more about needs mapping, desire fulfilment, simplification¹ and lifestyle bundling.
Why? Because tomorrow¹s world will be radically different from the one we inhabit today. It will be a world of bio-technologies and geno-medicines; of nanoarchitecture and technology convergence; one where we will no longer talk about the haves and have nots, but of digital economies and those that are still offline. We will also witness the rise of consumanism (shopping as a way of demonstrating one¹s politics); brandocracies; triple bottom line trading, even the Value 500 index, where companies, brands and corporations are rated according to their ethical, social and environmental credentials rather than their abilities to generate profits. A world then radically different from our own and one therefore that will require radically different tools and techniques to work, rest, play and succeed in.
C2. Devices and Desires - Why The Future Started Yesterday!
So how do you equip yourself for such a world? As an individual, a brand, a corporation? With foresight, knowledge, instinct and a technique called cultural reconnaissance or brailling: the deep mining of the future for market intelligence but also for the creation of ideas and knowledge that can be put in place now, or indeed on the shelf for future consumer needs.
To understand how and why cultural reconnaissance or brailling works, it¹s important to understand HOW trends work, WHY they work and more importantly, the mechanics, both internal and external that drive them.
C3. The Blinkered Corporation - Why One Man's Prejudice Is Another Man¹s Profit.
Even if we accept in principle the need to braille or deep mine the culture, it isn¹t always the case that we do it without prejudice, or preconception. Both are anathema to any brand, body or corporation which wants to see the future as it really is. They skewer a company¹s vision, its objectivity and prevent those in it from identifying the future as it is set to become, rather than the future as they believe it is likely to be. What do we mean by this? In essence that companies, brands, people and ideas fail because they refuse to abandon the banks of the familiar for the supposed dangers of the mid stream.
C4. Smoke and Mirrors - When Seeing Isn't Always Believing.
When an idea is ready and how to make it ready will be looked at in later chapters, but to do this we still need to know how to look for ideas, indeed how to profile the future so we know which ideas are likely to flourish there. Removing prejudices and preconceptions as we have seen is core to this process, but it still doesn¹t help us with the how.
In this chapter then we look at the basic tools, methodologies and techniques needed to needs-map the future. These includes cultural scanning techniques, data mining, data management, maven group monitoring, trend logging, field research, and data analysis. We learn how to create maps of the future; visual cartograms of ideas, consumers or services that help us better visualize the future, but also to plot our positions in it, and to chart our paths through it.
C5. Brailing the Culture - Its Not what you know but how you know it.
Here we look how and why knowledge (insight) is sometimes confused with information (data), and how this confusion leads to the building a company, its mission statement and its presence in the future on a series of suppositions and expectations that are in essence flawed because the methods used to collect them (marketing) are in themselves flawed.
C6. The Surveyed World: Knowledge And How To Get It.
In this chapter then we will look at how new ways of surveillencing the culture are attempting to reassess our way of reading and understanding consumers, markets and trends; from real time data gathering, to covert scanning, garbology (the anthropological study of people's rubbish!), guerilla research, to field team analysis and the creation of hothouse communities - houses, shops or streets that live online 24 hours a day so that every member of the community is watched, measured, codified and categorised at every point in the work/play/sleep and consume cycle!
C7. Humanomics - And Its Part In Your Downfall.
It seems the more we count, the less we understand. Measurements have a monstrous life of their own, and the more sophisticated you are, the less you can measure.
In this chapter then we look at why knowledge shouldn't be confused with data (tabulated information), but also how data confuses and clouds the real issues of human activity, endeavour and desire. Here then we discuss the notion of humanomics; what happens when you factor people into the dry world of data, statistics, number crunching and market analysis - and how this completely alters the future and the needs, desires and dreams people are likely to have there.
C8. When Brightness Fails - Even Good Ideas Have Bad Days.
Knowledge will help us gauge the parameters and potentials of the market but good ideas and opportunities can fall by the wayside (GM foods, Betamax, Philips CD-i, Motorola¹s idium, the Sinclair C5) because we fail to use our acquired knowledge to anticipate the market¹s mood, or to factor in current consumer fears against their long term needs and desires.
Indeed research shows that the more an idea is likely to challenge the status quo, the greater the resistance it will encounter at first contact with the market. So even if you know your idea is part of the future (such as biogenetics and genetically modified foodstuffs), it's possible to be the one company that gets its launch date wrong because you haven¹t really tested the true cultural issues likely to impact on that launch.
C9. The Lifesigns Index - Love, Life, Desire, Desperation And How To Chart
With the lessons, observations and knowledge we¹ve garnered so far we assemble The Lifesigns Index, a new way of measuring trends, cultural microrhythms, and future pathways. We also look at ways of creating and maintaining your own personal Lifesigns Index, of rewriting your own, or a company's future in a way that makes it most likely to succeed and flourish in the future as it will be.
C. 10. Geeks and Supertrends - One Hundred And One Supertrends And How They Are Likely To Impact On Your Many Tomorrows. This chapter looks at how the big picture impacts on the little one, how microtrends must be plotted and gauged against Supertrends, or so called Gigatrends; how you, your company, brand or newly established Lifesigns Centre or Brailling Department needs to monitor and read the bigger picture in a way that makes it applicable and most useful to the smaller one.
The top one hundred incoming future trends are assessed - e.g biogenetics, desktop factories, disposable corporations, pharmetics, xenotransplanting, nanocomputing, 3G WAP - and these are measured against the local, or personal future a company needs to live through in order to survive the supertrend onslaught.
C11. Beyond Midnight - never sleeps,
"The future is a profit stream waiting to happen, but it takes careful observation and anticipation to make it flow your way." Martin Raymond
What would you give to see today what your customers will want tomorrow? To discover their needs, desires and chosen brands. Who will they be? How will they behave? And what will they want from your business?
The future of consumer behaviour is a profit margin waiting to happen for those who read it correctly. But tomorrow's consumers want to be seen as people; not numbers, or markets to be segmented and targeted. How will your business and brand fit into their lives?
The Tomorrow People is a snapshot of tomorrow's consumers. The world they will inhabit, the lifestyles and values they will adopt and the ways they will shop. Sooner or later every brand has to interact with tomorrows people, so how do you equip yourself for such a world? As an individual, a brand, a corporation?
By understanding the nature of trends, their dynamics or science, we can learn not only to see them, but also how to map them use them to generate products, brands and services for tomorrow's consumers. It's all about behaviour. It's not about dead data.
In a provocative and insightful view of how emerging lifestyles and cultural changes are likely to impact on tomorrow's consumers, Martin Raymond alerts you to new consumer behaviour patterns and teaches you to read a market and be ready to deliver exactly what your customers want. This book will help you to read trends, interpret the discoveries that you make and plug them back into your business in a way that makes it more future-facing and customer-centric.
Learn to do this and you can interact with your consumers rather than react to them. You can build a truly tactile brand.
In a world where tomorrows answers no longer lie in yesterday's data, learn how to read people rather than reports.
Read this book and get better at
understanding your future customers; what they want and expect
mapping, predicting and responding to market trends before your competitors
connecting your brands with living people not dead data
creating, developing and launching the new products, services and brands that will deliver future profits - sorting profit opportunities from potential profit failures
"What Richard Pascale did in applying nature's living systems to business models, Martin Raymond does for the future of marketing and brand development. This is the closest you will get to finding out who your customers will be tomorrow, what their aspirations and prejudices will be and how your business can provide the products and services that will capture their money."
Director Magazine , Oct 2003
"Martin Raymond is something between scientist and a wizard: He decodes and translates tomorrows consumer attitudes with intelligence and wit. He uses his phenomenal cultural insight to challenge and inspire. This book will become a "must-read" for the brand architects of the future."
Susanne Tide-Frater, Head of Creative Direction, Selfridges
"What [companies] really need to do is understand consumer's lives and fit their brands into them. They need to be trend watchers; they need to be ethnographers; they need to be culturally savvy. But they don't have the skills."
The Financial Times
Product Description
GET TO KNOW YOUR FUTURE CUSTOMERS The future is a profit stream waiting to happen, but it takes careful observation and anticipation to make it flow your way. Martin Raymond
What would you give to see today what your customers will want tomorrow? To discover their needs, desires and chosen brands. Who will they be? How will they behave? And what will they want from your business?
The future of consumer behaviour is a profit margin waiting to happen for those who read it correctly. But tomorrow's consumers want to be seen as people; not numbers, or markets to be segmented and targeted. How will your business and brand fit into their lives?
The Tomorrow People is a snapshot of tomorrow's consumers. The world they will inhabit, the lifestyles and values they will adopt and the ways they will shop. Sooner or later every brand has to interact with tomorrow's people, so how do you equip yourself for such a world? As an individual, a brand, a corporation?
By understanding the nature of trends, their dynamics or science, we can learn not only to see them, but also how to map them use them to generate products, brands and services for tomorrow's consumers. It's all about behaviour. It's not about dead data.
In a provocative and insightful view of how emerging lifestyles and cultural changes are likely to impact on tomorrow's consumers, Martin Raymond alerts you to new consumer behaviour patterns and teaches you to read a market and be ready to deliver exactly what your customers want. This book will help you to read trends, interpret the discoveries that you make and plug them back into your business in a way that makes it more future-facing and customer-centric.
Learn to do this and you can interact with your consumers rather than react to them. You can build a truly tactile brand.
In a world where tomorrow's answers no longer lie in yesterday's data, learn how to read people rather than reports.
Read this book and get better at
understanding your future customers; what they want and expect
mapping, predicting and responding to market trends before your competitors
connecting your brands with living people not dead data
creating, developing and launching the new products, services and brands that will deliver future profits - sorting profit opportunities from potential profit failures
What Richard Pascale did in applying nature's living systems to business models, Martin Raymond does for the future of marketing and brand development. This is the closest you will get to finding out who your customers will be tomorrow, what their aspirations and prejudices will be and how your business can provide the products and services that will capture their money.
Director Magazine , Oct 2003
Martin Raymond is something between scientist and a wizard: He decodes and translates tomorrow's consumer attitudes with intelligence and wit. He uses his phenomenal cultural insight to challenge and inspire. This book will become a must-read for the brand architects of the future.
Susanne Tide-Frater, Head of Creative Direction, Selfridges
What [companies] really need to do is understand consumer's lives and fit their brands into them. They need to be trend watchers; they need to be ethnographers; they need to be culturally savvy. But they don't have the skills.
The Financial Times
Features + Benefits
Everybody is curious about their customers' changing needs and desires
Shorter product and market lifecycles are making fast and accurate innovation a critical competence for every business
A creative and visually stunning book packed with insight, tools and techniques - including 'needs mapping', cultural reconnaissance and the Lifestyle Index.
CONTENTS
CI. The Tomorrow People - Tomorrow Happens So You¹d Better Be Prepared!
A snapshot of tomorrow's consumers; the world they will inhabit; how they will shop and why the future is less about product specifics and more about needs mapping, desire fulfilment, simplification¹ and lifestyle bundling.
Why? Because tomorrow¹s world will be radically different from the one we inhabit today. It will be a world of bio-technologies and geno-medicines; of nanoarchitecture and technology convergence; one where we will no longer talk about the haves and have nots, but of digital economies and those that are still offline. We will also witness the rise of consumanism (shopping as a way of demonstrating one¹s politics); brandocracies; triple bottom line trading, even the Value 500 index, where companies, brands and corporations are rated according to their ethical, social and environmental credentials rather than their abilities to generate profits. A world then radically different from our own and one therefore that will require radically different tools and techniques to work, rest, play and succeed in.
C2. Devices and Desires - Why The Future Started Yesterday!
So how do you equip yourself for such a world? As an individual, a brand, a corporation? With foresight, knowledge, instinct and a technique called cultural reconnaissance or brailling: the deep mining of the future for market intelligence but also for the creation of ideas and knowledge that can be put in place now, or indeed on the shelf for future consumer needs.
To understand how and why cultural reconnaissance or brailling works, it¹s important to understand HOW trends work, WHY they work and more importantly, the mechanics, both internal and external that drive them.
C3. The Blinkered Corporation - Why One Man's Prejudice Is Another Man¹s Profit.
Even if we accept in principle the need to braille or deep mine the culture, it isn¹t always the case that we do it without prejudice, or preconception. Both are anathema to any brand, body or corporation which wants to see the future as it really is. They skewer a company¹s vision, its objectivity and prevent those in it from identifying the future as it is set to become, rather than the future as they believe it is likely to be. What do we mean by this? In essence that companies, brands, people and ideas fail because they refuse to abandon the banks of the familiar for the supposed dangers of the mid stream.
C4. Smoke and Mirrors - When Seeing Isn't Always Believing.
When an idea is ready and how to make it ready will be looked at in later chapters, but to do this we still need to know how to look for ideas, indeed how to profile the future so we know which ideas are likely to flourish there. Removing prejudices and preconceptions as we have seen is core to this process, but it still doesn¹t help us with the how.
In this chapter then we look at the basic tools, methodologies and techniques needed to needs-map the future. These includes cultural scanning techniques, data mining, data management, maven group monitoring, trend logging, field research, and data analysis. We learn how to create maps of the future; visual cartograms of ideas, consumers or services that help us better visualize the future, but also to plot our positions in it, and to chart our paths through it.
C5. Brailing the Culture - Its Not what you know but how you know it.
Here we look how and why knowledge (insight) is sometimes confused with information (data), and how this confusion leads to the building a company, its mission statement and its presence in the future on a series of suppositions and expectations that are in essence flawed because the methods used to collect them (marketing) are in themselves flawed.
C6. The Surveyed World: Knowledge And How To Get It.
In this chapter then we will look at how new ways of surveillencing the culture are attempting to reassess our way of reading and understanding consumers, markets and trends; from real time data gathering, to covert scanning, garbology (the anthropological study of people's rubbish!), guerilla research, to field team analysis and the creation of hothouse communities - houses, shops or streets that live online 24 hours a day so that every member of the community is watched, measured, codified and categorised at every point in the work/play/sleep and consume cycle!
C7. Humanomics - And Its Part In Your Downfall.
It seems the more we count, the less we understand. Measurements have a monstrous life of their own, and the more sophisticated you are, the less you can measure.
In this chapter then we look at why knowledge shouldn't be confused with data (tabulated information), but also how data confuses and clouds the real issues of human activity, endeavour and desire. Here then we discuss the notion of humanomics; what happens when you factor people into the dry world of data, statistics, number crunching and market analysis - and how this completely alters the future and the needs, desires and dreams people are likely to have there.
C8. When Brightness Fails - Even Good Ideas Have Bad Days.
Knowledge will help us gauge the parameters and potentials of the market but good ideas and opportunities can fall by the wayside (GM foods, Betamax, Philips CD-i, Motorola¹s idium, the Sinclair C5) because we fail to use our acquired knowledge to anticipate the market¹s mood, or to factor in current consumer fears against their long term needs and desires.
Indeed research shows that the more an idea is likely to challenge the status quo, the greater the resistance it will encounter at first contact with the market. So even if you know your idea is part of the future (such as biogenetics and genetically modified foodstuffs), it's possible to be the one company that gets its launch date wrong because you haven¹t really tested the true cultural issues likely to impact on that launch.
C9. The Lifesigns Index - Love, Life, Desire, Desperation And How To Chart
With the lessons, observations and knowledge we¹ve garnered so far we assemble The Lifesigns Index, a new way of measuring trends, cultural microrhythms, and future pathways. We also look at ways of creating and maintaining your own personal Lifesigns Index, of rewriting your own, or a company's future in a way that makes it most likely to succeed and flourish in the future as it will be.
C. 10. Geeks and Supertrends - One Hundred And One Supertrends And How They Are Likely To Impact On Your Many Tomorrows. This chapter looks at how the big picture impacts on the little one, how microtrends must be plotted and gauged against Supertrends, or so called Gigatrends; how you, your company, brand or newly established Lifesigns Centre or Brailling Department needs to monitor and read the bigger picture in a way that makes it applicable and most useful to the smaller one.
The top one hundred incoming future trends are assessed - e.g biogenetics, desktop factories, disposable corporations, pharmetics, xenotransplanting, nanocomputing, 3G WAP - and these are measured against the local, or personal future a company needs to live through in order to survive the supertrend onslaught.
C11. Beyond Midnight - never sleeps,