Last month we covered half of the consumer trends for 2010, and this month we expose the other half. A month in marketing can be a long time so if you need to refresh your memory, hop onto our website and go to the e-Sight archives to re-read.
To conclude we’ve included the Air New Zealand TVC mentioned in this e-Sight. We've also added a link to a new viral website that parodies the latest Tourism Australia website. The site asks travellers to submit their own holiday pics of Australia and they will develop a new advertising campaign using the best ones. The guys at 'Nothing Like Australia' just jumped the gun a bit and have come up with a few already... it's always fun when we Aussies can have a good laugh at ourselves. Enjoy!
6. Eco-Easy
While the current good intentions of corporations and consumers are helpful, serious eco-results will depend on making products and processes more sustainable without consumers even noticing it, and, if necessary, not leaving much room for consumers and companies to opt for less sustainable alternatives to begin with.
Which will often mean forceful, if not painful, government intervention, or some serious corporate guts, or brilliantly smart design and thinking, if not all of those combined.
Think anything from thoroughly green buildings, to a complete ban on plastic bags and bottles, to super-strict blue fin tuna quota — anything that by default leaves no choice, no room for complacency, and thus makes it 'easy' for consumers (and corporations) to do the right and necessary thing.
Some recent, random and hands-on ECO-EASY examples, from governments to B2C brands, to get you going (or better, to copy or build on):
• The small town of Bundanoon in Australia's New South Wales has banned the sale of bottled water for environmental reasons. The community voted to replace branded water bottles with empty bottles labeled "Bundy on tap" that can be filled and refilled with water from taps and fountains on the main street.
• In September 2009, French President Nicolas Sarkozy announced plans to introduce a carbon tax to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in France. Polluters will have to pay EUR 17 per ton of carbon emitted, which includes not only businesses but individual households as well. The tax will cover 70% of the country's carbon emissions and bring in about EUR 4.3 billion of revenue annually.
• The government of Mexico City recently passed a law restricting businesses from giving out plastic bags that are not biodegradable. Mexico City becomes the second large metropolitan area in the Western Hemisphere to outlaw the bags. San Francisco enacted an ordinance in March 2007 that gave supermarkets six months and large chain pharmacies about a year to phase out the bags.
• UK sandwich chain Pret a Manger decided to stop selling tuna sandwiches after the Earth Day 2009 release of End of the Line, a documentary exposing over-fishing of the world's oceans.
7. Tracking & Alerting
If INFOLUST (consumers lusting after relevant information) is the enduring mega trend, then TRACKING and ALERTING are its du jour sub-trends.
First of all, TRACKING & ALERTING is the new searching, as it saves consumers time, makes it impossible to forget or miss out, and thus ultimately gives them yet another level of control. Count on everything being tracked and alerted on (there's more than FedEx packages!): from friends (MASS MINGLING!) to enemies to fuel prices to flights to authors to pizzas to any mentions of oneself.
Oh, and ALERTING, when done well, is of course the ultimate in INFOLUST: relevant information finding consumers, based on (voluntarily revealed) preferences.
The real opportunity this year? TRACKING and ALERTING is something that consumers actually need and want, that delights them, that they crave. They are quite literally asking for relevant information, even giving you permission to provide them with more. What’s not to like?
Learn from examples below, then start adding to the current information overload in meaningful ways:
• A Box Life is an initiative by the Columbia sportswear company to promote the reuse of boxes used to ship purchases made from their online store. The program allows consumers to track the path and life of their boxes through Columbia's A Box Life website. Customers can enter a box's unique tracking number or QR code and see where it's been, how far it has travelled and find out about the other people who have passed the box on. In just over one month after A Box Life's launch in 2009, over 66% of all Columbia's orders were being shipped in reused boxes.
• Fitbit is a small device the user can wear around the clock for continuous, automatic and comprehensive fitness reporting. With a 3D motion sensor the Fitbit tracks the user's activity in three dimensions and converts that data into useful information. Once this is uploaded onto the Fitbit website, users can view detailed data about their fitness-related activities; they can also enter data about what they've eaten and participate in collaborative fitness goals.
• In an effort to be more transparent, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg has introduced an online tracking program which allows New Yorkers to view city agency performance and the expenditure of the USD 5 billion in federal stimulus money that New York received.
• Launched in San Francisco in early August 2009, Curtis Kimball's mobile Crème Brûlée Cart has attracted more than 8,000 Twitter followers, who rely on his tweets to find out exactly where he'll be, and what flavours are on the menu.
• The Warm Cookie Radar from Specialty's Cafe & Bakery sends customers email alerts when batches of just-baked cookies have rolled out of the oven.
• Kogi Korean BBQ sells its Korean/Mexican fusion food primarily through two trucks that are always on the move to new locations in the Los Angeles area. To know where to find them, customers must follow Kogi on Twitter.
• In 2009, the Brazilian transit authority starting using Twitter to update São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro's motorists and pedestrians of any traffic incidents or transport news. The feed broadcasts tweets from the authority itself, as well as allowing users to share their own experiences of the city's traffic and transport.
• MediClim is a free service in the US and UK for people suffering from arthritis, asthma and cardiovascular disease. Subscribers sign-up on the website and complete a brief medical questionnaire. On days with weather conditions that are expected to trigger health problems, subscribers receive an email, or an alert through MediClim's Facebook application, with notification of the conditions and their possible impact.
• Launched in October 2009, Lufthansa's MySkyStatus lets passengers keep their friends and loved-ones up-to-date on their travel progress. The online service sends automatic status updates on location, altitude, departure and arrival to passengers' Twitter and Facebook pages.
• The NetHaggler browser plugin allows consumers to capture the details of any product from participating online retailers and then choose whether to Tag, Nag or Haggle. Tagging simply allows users to set an alert when the product reaches a certain price. If the user chooses to Nag, then their preferred price will be sent to the retailer who will respond with a yes, no, or counter offer. Haggling is similar, but allows NetHaggler to aggregate demand and negotiate a bulk discount.
And yes, ‘Augmented Reality’ (A field of computer research which deals with the combination of real-world and computer-generated data, where computer graphics objects are blended into real footage in real time. Source: Wikipedia) adds yet another layer of convenience to existing TRACKING and ALERTING services. It never ends.
8. Embedded Generosity
It incorporates all giving initiatives that make giving and donating painless, if not automatic. On top of that, with collaboration being such an integral part of the zeitgeist, expect lots of innovative corporate giving schemes that involve customers by letting them co-donate and/or co-decide.
So check out these innovative, corporate EMBEDDED GENEROSITY examples that are worth copying or improving:
• Australian Baby Teresa manufactures and sells a variety of 100% cotton 'Onesies' for babies, and, for each one purchased, donates another to a baby in need somewhere in the world.
• IKEA’s SUNNAN LED desk lamp is powered by solar cells. The product retails for USD 19.99, and for every unit sold in IKEA stores worldwide, another one will be donated to UNICEF to give to children without electricity in refugee camps and villages in remote areas.
• Still going strong, Procter & Gamble and UNICEF have joined forces for the fourth year running, in an effort to raise money for tetanus vaccines. Each time a pack of the Pampers or Fairy brands bearing a '1 Pack = 1 Life-Saving Vaccine' logo is purchased, P&G will donate the cost of one vaccine to UNICEF.
• TOMS Shoes donates a pair of shoes to a child in need for every pair they sell online. As of August 2009, TOMS has given over 150,000 pairs of shoes to children in need. TOMS shoes plans to give 1 million shoes by 2012.
• Sage Hospitality is encouraging consumers to complete 8 hours of volunteer service in exchange for 50% - 100% off published room rates in their 52 hotels. To take advantage of the 'Give a Day, Get a Night' scheme, customers must present a letter from the organization they worked for.
• 'Give a Day, Get a Disney Day' aims to celebrate and inspire volunteerism. Disney is working with HandsOn Network to highlight a variety of volunteer opportunities with participating organizations across the United States, Puerto Rico and Canada. Starting January 2010, those who contribute their time can have it verified by HandsOn and they'll receive a voucher from Disney for one day admission to a Walt Disney World or Disneyland theme park.
• Servus, a Canadian credit union, began handing out CDN 200,000 in ten-dollar bills, giving 20,000 people the opportunity to create a 'Feel Good Ripple' by spending the money on someone else. By pledging CDN 200,000 to the effort, the company hopes to start a ' kindness movement' that will positively affect at least 20,000 people. Servus is distributing the bills through its branches throughout Alberta, and asking participants to write up stories of their kindness online.
• Campbell's 'Help Grow Your Soup' campaign aimed to raise money to maintain farm buildings in need of refurbishment. The campaign asked consumers to vote for one of ten barns in need of work, and for every vote until January 2010, Campbell donated 1 USD to restore the five barns which receive the most votes.
• In October 2009, Twitter’s owners announced that they will begin selling wine through their label, called Fledgling Wine. The wine will be bottled from August 2010 and USD 5 of every bottle sold will go to Room to Read, a charity that organizes literacy programs for children around the world.
• Chicago's Hotel Burnham launched the charity based initiative 'Casual Blue' in 2009. A USD 10 room credit is given to patrons who leave a pair of (old) jeans, which are then donated to local charities.
9. Profile Myning
What insights can we possibly add to the avalanche of intelligence available on where social media is going? Here’s one modest attempt: the importance of owning and making the most (financially) of personal profiles.
And no, we’re not referring to companies/advertisers making money from personal profiles, even though they’re dying to ‘mine’ personal data to serve up 'relevant' ads; we're putting our money on data and profile mining by its rightful owners, i.e. consumers. Hence the MYNING, not MINING.
Opportunities:
• Now that hundreds of millions of consumers maintain some kind of online profile/presence, who's going to set up an intermediary representing consumers who are willing to disclose (parts of) their purchasing intentions, and then invite companies to put in bids?
• With personal profiles (which are the nucleus of one's personal brand) representing an ever-greater emotional and financial value, expect a burgeoning market for services that protect, store, and, in case of emergencies/death, arrange handing over of one's digital estate to trusted others.
Examples:
• For guarding personal brands, check ReputationDefender and ClaimID.
• For storing, protecting and handing-over individual data, check out Swiss DNA Bank, which launched in August 2009, offers ultra-secure DNA storage that meets Swiss banking regulations. For a one-time fee of USD 399, customers can store both their self-swabbed DNA and up to 1 GB of digital data, forever. The DNA and the web servers are held in a former Swiss military underground nuclear shelter in Gstaad.
Customer's heirs can buy access to their relatives' shared data for USD 69. For consumers eager to keep confidential info out of the wrong hands, the digital data storage can also be purchased individually for USD 299.
Similar digital afterlife services worth checking out: LegacyLocker, Death Switch and Slightly Morbid.
10. Maturialism
Let’s face it: this year will be rawer, more opinionated, more risqué, more in your face than ever before. Your audiences (who are by now thoroughly exposed to, well, anything, for which you can thank first and foremost the anything-goes online universe) can handle much more quirkiness, more daring innovations, more risqué communications and conversations, more exotic flavours and so on than traditional marketers could have ever dreamed of. In short; audiences in mature consumer societies no longer tolerate being treated like yesteryear’s uninformed, easily shocked, inexperienced, middle-of-the-road consumer.
We've dubbed this MATURIALISM (mature materialism), and, to go full circle, it is closely linked to BUSINESS AS UNUSUAL, to URBANY, to PROFILE MYNING, if not all trends in this Consumer Trends e-Sight.
So, this year, the question is how far you can/should go as a brand, when mirroring societal beliefs that are about anything but being meek. And no, we’re not saying you have to be rude or nasty or inconsiderate; this is about being a tad more daring and diverse if you want to move with the culture.
• Designed by Moscow-based creative agency Firma, "BDSM", "Fetish" and "Toys" are concept lollipops created for Chupa Chups with a decidedly adult feel.
• In a high-profile stance against Proposition 8 (which prohibits gay marriage in California) American Apparel released their Legalize Gay t-shirt in November 2008, which was originally printed to give to protesters at rallies and marches. However, popularity and support of the shirt was so overwhelming that the brand released the shirt for general sale.
• The Icecreamists is a UK ice cream brand that has positioned itself using premium, X-rated flavours. Its most recent flavour, The Sex Pistol, was available exclusively at The Icecreamists' pop-up shop in London's Selfridges department store from September to November 2009.
• Philips recently unveiled the latest addition to its ‘relationship care’ line of adult toys. The Dual Sensual Massager includes devices for both partners in a relationship.
• Wine Cellar Sorbets sells a range of unique sorbets with varietal wines as the main ingredient. The range features traditional vineyard flavours including Sangria Rojo, Cabernet Sauvignon, Pinot Noir, Rosé, Riesling and Champagne.
• Parisian designer, Nicole Locher, has launched a collection of women's tops with embroidered messages including "I Ain't Your Fucking Sweetheart", "Little Slut", "Don't You Fucking Look At Me.
• Mid 2009, Air New Zealand launched an ad campaign designed to highlight the airline's transparent prices, which include checked baggage and refreshments. The ad features a range of airline employees going about their business dressed in nothing but body paint.
While the ‘risqué’ part of MATURIALISM makes for fun material, the trend will equally become about more mature, real conversations with customers, it will be about educating consumers about the products and services you sell, how to make the most of them, or about displaying the same transparency and openness about your processes and actions as individual consumers now display about their own lives, for all to see.
Afraid to offend and even lose some customers when jumping on the MATURALISM wagon this year? Just think of those future, less-uptight generations you’ll definitely lose if you don’t.
Source: www.trendwatching.com. One of the world's leading trend firms, trendwatching.com sends out its free, monthly Trend Briefings to more than 160,000 subscribers worldwide.
Air New Zealand - Nothing To HideTVC
'Nothing Like Australia' viral website
We recently came across this little gem of a website... poking fun at advertising of all things!!! We loved it, hope you do to! You may even think of one to add yourself.
You can see all the ad parodies here.
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