The World in 2008 | Six of the best

November 16, 2007

Our selection of trend-spotters’ tips for 2008

Sleep is the new sex, reckons Marian Salzman, a New York advertising executive and author of “Next Now”. In hectic lives, sleep is at a premium. And sleep sells, whether it’s flat beds on airlines, sleep consultancy, or a nap at MetroNaps in the Empire State Building. In America, growing numbers of couples are installing “sleep chambers” to give them a sleep-alone option as well as a sleep-together option. Why suffer from a partner’s snoring? People are “finding it harder to do the sharing thing,” says Ms Salzman.

Person-to-person lending will flourish in 2008, predicts Jeremy Gutsche, the Toronto-based head of TrendHunter.com. Borrowers and lenders come together directly on the web and cut out the banks. Some of these lending operations use an auction like eBay in which the lender willing to provide the lowest interest rate gets the borrower’s loan; others (like CircleLending, an American firm) are for people who already know one another but who want someone to help formalise the loan arrangement. “Peer-to-peer” lending is working its way into the charitable sector, too: Kiva.org puts potential “social investors” in touch with small businesses in the developing world, which promise to send e-mail updates on how the business is developing.

N11 is Goldman Sachs’s shorthand for the “next 11” countries snapping at the heels of the BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India and China) as investment opportunities. They are Bangladesh, Egypt, Indonesia, Iran, South Korea, Mexico, Nigeria, Pakistan, the Philippines, Turkey and Vietnam. In 2008, watch especially for booming Vietnam.

Vicarious consumption, a term coined a century ago by an economist, Thorstein Veblen, to describe the thrill rich people get when they buy their butler a lovely new uniform, is making a comeback in a new form, according to Amsterdam-based Trendwatching. It involves services for telling consumers “exactly what other consumers are enjoying and valuing most”—websites such as iliketotallyloveit.com and ballofdirt.com are part of the trend.

Newly released ex-cons—one of Mark Penn’s many “microtrends”—will continue to flood out of America’s jails, needing training and jobs. In the 1980s and 1990s, America’s prison population quintupled. Now, their time served, prisoners are being released in record numbers. This is a microtrend, argues Mr Penn, that “government and business need to get going on right away”. And if the credit crunch of 2007 continues to bite, another of Mr Penn’s microtrends will become all too pertinent in 2008:
bourgeois and bankrupt.

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