Trendwatching.com (@trendwatching) has identified 11 key consumer trends that will have a global impact on marketers this year:
- Random acts of kindness: From brands randomly picking up a consumer’s tab to sending a surprise gift.
- Urbanization: Urban consumers tend to be more daring, more liberal, more tolerant, more experienced, more prone to trying out new products and services.
- Pricing Pandemonium: Brands should target consumers with offers and features such as instant mobile coupons and discounts, online group discounts, flash sales, and dynamic pricing based on real-time supply and demand.
- Made for China/Emerging Economies: Growth in consumer spending in emerging markets far outpaces consumer spending in developed markets, and Western brands are favored more than local brands in emerging markets.
- Online Status Symbols: Brands should supply consumers with any kind of symbol, virtual or ‘real world,’ that helps them display to peers their online contributions, interestingness, creations, or popularity.
- ‘Wellthy:’ Consumers are expecting health products and services to prevent misery if not improve their quality of life, rather than merely treating illnesses and ailments.
- ‘Twin-sumers’ and ‘Social-lites:’ Key to WOM recommendations. Twin-sumers are consumers with similar consumer patterns, likes and dislikes. Social-lites are consumers who consistently broadcast information to a wide range of associates online.
- Emerging Generosity: Brands and wealthy individuals from emerging markets (especially China) who will increasingly be expected to give, donate, care and sympathize, as opposed to just sell and take.
- Planned Spontaneity: Fragmented lifestyles, dense urban environments with multiple options, and cell/smartphones have created a generation who have little experience in making (or sticking to) rigid plans.
- Eco-Superior: Products that are not only eco-friendly, but superior to polluting incumbents in every possible way.
- Owner-less: For many consumers, access is better than ownership.
Read these observations in full.
Leave your comments below as to which one resonates with your brand and how you will take advantage of it.