Back to the future 2008
December 27, 2007
Are these strange new products about to win us over? Or is the world of the ‘trendspotter’ a lot of nonsense?
Martin Wroe
It could be the year you come up smelling of roses: in 2008, “aroma-emitting” clothes will arrive. The fabric in the designer Jenny Tillotson’s “multi-sensorial” line will interact with your emotions, releasing scents based on your mood.
If that sounds too risky, try the forthcoming Bubelle dress. Using body sensors, it changes colour instead of smell to match your emotions.
Still not convinced? Well, take 2008’s newest car for a spin – underwater. The sQuba, which has two propellers and dual jet drives, will be marketed as the “world’s first drive and dive car” when it is launched in March.
While with the fishes you could nibble on Mo’s Bacon Bar, the world’s first bacon-flavoured chocolate: “Rub your thumb over the chocolate bar to release the aromas of smoked applewood bacon flirting with deep milk chocolate . . . let the lust of salt and sweet coat your tongue.” So much sci-fi nonsense? No, each of these products is up there among the top tips of commercial star-gazers for next year – and who would have predicted the iPhone frenzy or the global success of the Nintendo Wii?
With a new year hoving into view, predictions from trendspotters and future predictors were never so varied. The crossroads between commerce and clairvoyance is crowded.
If reading the future was once about announcing the end of the world, now it is about anticipating whether people want their new jacket to include a wireless internet connection. Companies in rapidly evolving markets are demanding information on customers’ behaviour in order to stay competitive.
“Because the world is changing so fast,” says Daniel Franklin, who gazes into the crystal ball for The Economist, “if you can spot one little trend that will make a market niche then there will be money in it.”
Jeremy Gutsche at Toronto’s Trend Hunter predicts the rise of a new financial sector with person-to-person – “peer-to-peer” – lending in which borrowers and lenders meet online, strike the best interest deal and bypass the banks. Given the current credit crunch, with banks reluctant to lend even to each other, the odds on this bet are shortening already.
Franklin says that however fast-changing your environment, “if you can just see beyond the end of your nose you have a greater chance of success. Spotting these trends can tell you where the next products or services are going to succeed”.
How do you spot those trends? Reinier Evers started Trendwatching.com in Amsterdam five years ago and now has 8,000 “spotters” worldwide e-mailing daily updates of emerging products or movements. With 2,000 companies paying £350 a time to download his Trend Report, he has found a lucrative present in futures.
It is not about isolated reports from Brazil or Poland, Canada or Portugal but about “analysing all the reports and detecting the movement among consumers,” Evers said.
“As we have so many spotters telling us about new services or products we can very quickly see when a trend is emerging. For example, we knew about peer-to-peer banking almost immediately, which meant that we could tell our banking clients about a potentially significant change in customers’ borrowing habits.”
Among Marian Salzman’s promises for 2008 is the rise of “blue” as the brand of popular environmentalism.
“Watch for ‘green’ to become a subset of ‘blue’, which is coming to denote the much larger emerging spirit of good citizen ethics,” said Salzman, who is director of strategic content at the JWT advertising agency in New York, She says that “cooperative consumption” is also on the up and up through “fractional ownership”. Why buy your own sQuba or Bubelle outfit when you can reduce costs and save resources by co-owning with others?
She also predicts that beauty and medicine will converge as customised workouts based on personal genetic profiling help people to keep fitter.
Ten years ago Salzman foresaw the emergence of the “manny” – the male nanny. This year the manny finally arrived in the United States big time. Salzman was out, but only by 10 years, “which is not so long in a business cycle”.
Are any of the predictions of the trendspotters likely to come true in the near future?
“All trendspotting is lightweight,” said Salzman, “until you turn out to be accurate for your client – and then suddenly you are heavyweight and valuable.”
She is credited with identifying the Sex and the City generation of single professional women in 1989 and claims that she has a “gift for identifying what’s next”. But she is also happy to admit that her industry can get it badly wrong.
At the end of 1993 she forecast the demise of the celebrity endorsement in America but made one exception for the �ber-famous face of Hertz car rental, OJ Simpson. A few months later he was accused of murdering his former wife.
“I can’t tell you what the future holds,” she insisted. “I’m not a fortune teller, but I can tell you what the patterns are, what the likely scenarios might be.”
There was a time when forecasting the future was a less frenetic discipline because change itself seemed to move at a slower pace.
In the 1980s John Naisbitt wrote a bestseller, Megatrends, in which he correctly foresaw the move from an industrial society to an information society and from national economies to the global marketplace. But the era of “mega” global trends is now over, according to Mark J Penn, a pollster and futurologist who responded this year with a book called Microtrends.
Penn argues that the business of reading the future is no longer about seismic cultural shifts but about detecting the emergence of myriad new “identity groups” who have not yet been noticed by companies or policymakers – such as the “soccer mom” swing voters he identified while working for Bill Clinton in the 1996 US presidential election.
While he dismisses “the cottage industry of marketeers and sociologists who will tell you the 10 or 15 Things You Must Know to get through the next five or 10 years”, he does identify 75 groups who are shaping the future – from “vegan children” and “extreme commuters” to “internet marrieds” and “old new dads”.
To whom one might add “sub-prime mortgagees”. When the inability of working-class Americans to keep up the payments on their home loans can put the skids under the worldwide banking system, the possibility that we might have even a vague handle on the future gains appeal.
“Society is now far more volatile and change arrives far more quickly,” says Crawford Hollingworth at the Henley Centre’s consumer research unit HeadlightVision. “It’s vital that we understand the energies that shape our world. The more grounding you have, the more secure you are.”
That means looking back as well as forward: the more data you have about the past, the surer your step as you tread into the future.
And the fact is that, for all the talk of the whirlwind of change that we live in, most of our lives remain pretty constant from one year to the next. The “dive and drive” car may emerge blinking from the Thames in the spring, but the chances of any of us owning one remain about as likely as Clive Sinclair’s C5 electric vehicle making a comeback.
It is only in modern times that we have come to see time as an arrow or a bullet, something dynamically powering its way into an unknown future. Alain de Botton, the philosopher, points out that a few centuries ago time was seen as circular, so that next year would be pretty similar to this year, which was barely distinguishable from last year. It may be a more realistic view.
Most of us, he observes, do not make lists of “our hottest 10 relatives”, or “the five neighbours most likely to succeed” next year. Instead we survive with relatively stable commitments and habits.
“The most obvious prediction about the future is that the future will be mostly like the past,” he said. “Statistically, next year will more than anything else be like this year.”
If a healthy scepticism may be in order as the trendspotters pile up their prophecies, what are we to make of the predictions of Richard Watson, author of Future Files: A History of the Next 50 Years.
He has published an online “extinction timeline” that lists his predictions for when things we are now familiar with will disappear for good.
These include such examples as blogging (2022), petrol-engined vehicles (2036), glaciers (2037) and Google (2049) – when perhaps our grandchildren will revive that vintage aroma-emitting dress.
Futurology’s dismal past – the great minds who got it all horribly wrong
- In 1795 Immanuel Kant, the philosopher, argued that war would become economically impossible – thus setting the tone for mankind’s almost total inability to predict the future correctly over the following 200 tumultuous years.
- “Rail travel at high speeds is not possible because passengers, unable to breathe, would die of asphyxia,” said Dionysius Lardner, an Irish scientist, in 1823.
Lardner also insisted that “men might as well project a voyage to the moon as attempt to employ steam navigation against the stormy north Atlantic Ocean”.
- “That’s an amazing invention, but who would ever want to use one of them?” Rutherford B Hayes, the US president, asked Alexander Graham Bell, inventor of the telephone, in 1876.
- In 1898 Dr Heinrich Dreser, head of the Bayer drug research laboratory, announced that he had developed a nonaddictive substitute for morphine. It was called heroin.
- John Habberton, a popular 19th-century American author with a predilection for (misplaced) futurology, forecast that by the 1990s “all marriages will be happy, for the law will put to death any man or woman who assumes conjugal position without the proper physical, mental and financial qualifications”.
- H G Wells, who also thought he knew a thing or two about the future, said in 1902: “My imagination refuses to see any sort of submarine doing anything but suffocate its crew and floundering at sea.”
- Wells did get it right, however, by predicting the internet. In a 1937 essay, The Idea of a Permanent World Encyclopaedia, Wells foresaw a time when every student would have access to a network that connected the corners of the globe serving as a memory for mankind. Wells said this information would be “summoned to any properly prepared spot” and “thrown upon the screen so that the student may study it in every detail”.
- Robert Andrews Millikan, winner of the 1923 Nobel physics prize, was far off the mark when he said: “There is no likelihood man can ever tap the power of the atom.”
- In 1929 Irving Fisher, professor of economics at Yale, said that share prices were at a “permanently high plateau”, shortly before the Wall Street crash.
- After the tumult of the depression and warfare in the 1930s and 1940s, we were still getting it wrong in the 1950s. “Before man reaches the moon your mail will be delivered within hours from New York to Australia by guided missiles. We stand on the threshold of rocket mail,” said Arthur Summerfield, America’s postmaster general, in 1959.
The 1960s and 1970s brought a crop of misguided predictions.
- “Houses will be able to fly [by 2000] . . . The time may come when whole communities may migrate south in the winter, or move to new lands whenever they feel the need for a change of scenery” – Arthur C Clarke, 1966.
- “It’s a bad joke that won’t last. Not with winter coming” – the fashion designer Coco Chanel on the miniskirt, 1966.
- In 1977 Ken Olsen, founder of the Digital Equipment Corporation, which produced the top mini-computers for the science community in the 1980s, said: “There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home.”
- And perhaps the greatest false scientific prediction of modern times was the great Y2K scare as 1999 gave way to 2000, when computers were predicted to go haywire.
Ed Yourdon, one of America’s top software experts, said: “I expect New York to resemble Beirut if even a subset of the Y2K infrastructure problems actually materialise . . . Y2K is so worrisome, in my opinion, that I’ll make sure my family isn’t there [in New York] when the clock rolls over to January 1, 2000.”
Nothing happened – which perhaps allows us to take in our stride Sir Isaac Newton’s prediction, made in 1704, that the world will end in 2060. He calculated it from the Book of Daniel and the date of the foundation of the Holy Roman Empire.
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