THE FLUX CAPACITOR MARCH 002010 / ISSUE 004
Progress in Progress...
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3D at Home Airline Subscriptions Alternative Measures of Prosperity Alternative Metals in Jewelry Asia's Widening Income Gap Augmented Reality Bacon Everywhere! Bio-Based Airplane Fuel Boeing 787 Dreamliner Bogotรก Brighter Colors Buycotting Carey Mulligan Coconut Water Composting Contemporary Indian Art Cordless Power Customized Pharmaceuticals Deficit Neutral Donald Glover Dry Shampoo East Africa Wired Electric Car Networks Electric Cars Electronic Libraries Ellen on Idol Energy Dieting Ethical Fashion European Free Speech Exotic Berry Flavors Fermentation Fernando To r r e s F o u r s q u a r e Gambling in Singapore Gamin Software Green Retrofits Greening the Palate Hand-Me-Ups Handwriting Harry Potter in Orlando Haute Fashion on eBay H y b r i d Boats Impact of U.K. G e n e r a l Election Ironic Sports Japan on Sidelines Japan's First Lady Jay Chou Kindle Rivals LED Bulbs Li N i n g Lifestreaming Lionel Messi Little Boots Local, Nonprofit, Online Newspapers Lost Series Finale Luxury Goes East Marina Silva Mia Wasikowska Michael Jackson Tr i b u t e C o n c e r t Mobile Money Mobile Ticketing More Virtual Currencies New Portrait of Hispanic America Nutrition W a s h i n g O b e s o g e n s Organic Fast Food Pandemic Fatalism Paying for Online Content The Pirate Party Playstation 3 Motion Controller Post-Lula Brazil Pro Modding Public Bicycles Recycling Gray Water Retail as Third Space Return of The Water Fountain Runaway Democracy Silent Dance Parties Ski Cross at Winter Olympics Slow Beverages Slow Communication Spanish E-Books Spider-Man on Broadway Spotify Stephen Strasburg Stevia Tactile/Visual Design Trop Bundling TV for Tween Boys TV/Web Integration Urban Fruit Gleaning US-Cuba Ties Video Virtual House Calls Volunteer Rewards Water Footprint Tracking The Waterless Washing Machine The Wine-Tail The Wonder Girls Zach Galifianakis
100 trends for 2010
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10 Golden Digital Opportunities in 2010 THE FLUX CAPACITOR
By Drew Neisser CEO, Renegade 1. Social Media: A Marathon, Not a Sprint Hoping to become fast friends with their targets, a lot of brands rushed into Facebook and Twitter in the last 24 months without investing sufficient time or resources. In 2010, savvy marketers will increase their commitment to social media by first listening and then offering up a steady stream of engaging content that their fans actually want. This will be particularly true for B2B brands, only 38% of whom included social media in their 2008 marketing plans (vs. 71% for B2C brands). With one comScore study indicating that branded social media activities can have a multiplier effect on search results, there is even a quantifiable rationale for brands to up the social media ante in 2010. 2. Mash-Ups: Taking Inspiration from Biathlons A few innovative marketers took a shot at mash-ups in 2009. E.P. Carrillo, a new cigar manufacturer, created a mesmerizing Twitter and Google Maps mash-up for its "coming soon" site that tracks cigar tweets from around the world. In 2010, these kinds of mash-ups will become smoking hot as marketers look to extend the value of their social media activities. Recognizing that tech-savvy consumers glide seamlessly between personal and business, online and offline, mobile and desktop, farsighted marketers will bring together formerly disparate elements into a cohesive and self-perpetuating social media experience. 3. App Happy: On Your Mark, Get Set, Go Crazy Given the success a handful of marketers enjoyed with www.Futures-studies.org
their "apps" in 2009, expect a blaze of new entries in 2010. iPhone apps that provide demonstrable utility like Kraft's iFood Assistant recipe finder and Benjamin Moore's color matcher will continue to gain traction. Expect more app's that integrate with other social media like the Gap StyleMixer that allows you to mix and match clothes and share them with friends on Facebook. And don't forget the non-iPhone universe. The steakhouse Maloney and Porcelli cooked up a humorous and somewhat deviant web-based app at Expense A Steak that extrudes faux expense reports with stunning verisimilitude. 4. Measure Up: Track Every Second With more dollars earmarked for social media, marketers will undoubtedly use new tools to monitor the conversations that are happening with or without them. Radian6 and Scout Labs emerged in 2009 as two of the leading social media monitoring tools. And while these tools are great, each requires a sizeable commitment by the marketer in time of staff, a commitment that can and does pay off. Just ask JetBlue who manages to enhance customer loyalty daily by responding to any and every customer Tweet within minutes, following 117,000 on Twitter, and in the process generating over 1.3 million followers. 5. POV Power: Don't Just Talk the Talk While lots of brands raced into social media in 2009, few established true connections with their targets. The reality is that consumers engage with brands that they like on a
visceral level and that provide a distinct perspective on the world. Aflac's Duck quacks up a gaggle of quirky content, including charitable requests that appeal to over 161,000 fans on Facebook and 3,000+ followers on Twitter. Meanwhile, Geico's Gecko has been left in the social media dust due to its surprisingly dry and unresponsive online voice. Ironically, a brand by definition is a point-of-view that once clearly defined should guide all communications, social or otherwise. 6. Expose Yourself: Win the Crowd With Honesty The emergence of several "tell all" consumer-created sites signals the arrival of a new era of honesty and transparency especially for brands targeting those under 35. Sites like fmylife.com, textsfromlastnight.com and MyParentsJoinedFacebook.co m reflect a generation willing to bare and share all without the least trepidation. Even the emergence of "Untag Mondays" speaks to the socially acceptable norm of posting embarrassing content that one might not want a parent or employer to see. Marketers that share this sense of honesty, that admit mistakes and address shortcomings in real-time will find a youthful army of comrades willing to do their bidding. As Comcast discovered, this kind of honesty can even transform a PR nightmare into an industryleading customer service. 7. Hold the Presses: Major Comebacks are Possible Though a 50% decline in ad pages certifies 2009 as the worst year in its history, don't write off print as a viable media channel just yet. Over
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80% of US consumers still subscribe to at least one magazine and 83% believe newspapers are still relevant. Experimenting with video in print pubs like Entertainment Weekly is but one of the ways certain magazine segments will hold onto their targets and satisfy their advertisers. Fashion magazines and enthusiast pubs continue to offer a visual showcase that is far superior to what most epubs can serve up. Models, both human and auto, simply look prettier in print. And while P&G shut down its 72-year-old TV soap opera Guiding Light in 2009, they are cranking up the presses with the custom published glossy, Rouge, which expects to reach a whopping 11 million North American households in 2010. 8. Go to the Video: Separate from the Pack The emergence of viral video rankings in 2009 reflected the mainstreaming of this approach to audience engagement. While everyone and their branded brother aspired to cut through with a
Featured Click
viral hit, surprisingly few found an audience. In 2010, marketers will undoubtedly crank out more of the same while a savvy few will worry less about mass reach and focus more on grass roots appeal, providing content that their core target really wants. B2B marketers in particular will find that using informative videos that transform the complicated into the comprehensible, like Commoncraft's Plain English videos, will generate quality leads from grateful prospects. 9. Mobile Media: Catching Up at Last Despite all the hype by this author and others, less than a third of marketers had a budget for mobile in 2009. In 2010, smart phone penetration should rise to at least 25% (from 17% in Q2 '09) making it a lot easier to deliver a rich mobile experience worthy of consumer attention. The blending of mobile and social apps like Facebook, Loop'd and Twitter has also created a new openness towards this
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medium. Given the desirable demographics (18-34, HH income $75k+) of smartphone owners, at minimum, marketers should give strong consideration to creating a mobile friendly website, thus allowing prospects to engage whenever and wherever they happen to be. 10. Be Positive: Attitude is Everything While honesty is a worthy friend to marketers, don't forget that almost no one wants to date a Debbie Downer. A recent poll by Adweek/Harris found "relative little enthusiasm and lots of indifference for ads that refer to the downturn." Even if the economy is slow to recover in 2010, find the silver lining for your customers and prospects with both words and actions. Like the athletes whose positive outlooks and superior skills propel them to victory, so, too, can marketers find success with an upbeat message and an unimpeachable value proposition.
Featured Tool
PESTEL
Prediction markets is an old idea, that due to new technologies is gaining vast popularity. Essentially you give a group of people the tools to buy and sell ideas, predictions or alike on a closed market, thereby enabling them to react to outside input (such as news), gut feeling (intuition), tendencies (trends and alike) and professional forecasts and horizon scans (such as PESTEL modeling).
The PESTEL (also known as PEST) is a common and widely used model for horizon scanning and event predictions.
Why is that clever? Because you give everybody the opportunity to tap into the collective wisdom of the entire organization, company, school or government. (If you are more interested in The Wisdom of The Crowds, read the book by same name, featured in The Flux Capacitor: 003)
Political Factors Economic Factors Social Factors Technological Factors Environmental Factors Legislative Factors
Nosco, a Danish company, specializes in exactly that. And is doing so beautifully! Go visit the site that offers inspiration and ideas on how to implement a prediction market.
The exercise is of course to predict important events, trends and milestones within each theme, thereby preparing for a - yet - unknown future.
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By analyzing the individual factors, a unity - or whole - will eventually emerge, thereby creating on of many scenarios of your project. The PESTEL model is build on the six forces of
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PESTEL
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The New Way to Work: 5 Trends THE FLUX CAPACITOR
By Dominic Basulto, Digital Strategist, ElectricArts.com Looking back at pivotal events that took place within the business world in 2009, it is becoming increasingly clear that there are five macro trends that will be shaping a New Way to Work in 2010 and beyond. Together, these five trends point to a New Way To Work in which creativity and innovation are more valued by employers than ever before and the traditional notion of work as merely an economic activity is being supplemented by ideas about happiness and well-being. Here are the five trends that I feel are creating The New Way To Work and what they mean to me: 1: Organizations will embrace Design Thinking. In 2009, Tim Brown, the CEO of IDEO (arguably one of the most important design consultancies in the world), published Change By Design, which suggested that organizations must go even further in their embrace of right-brain, creative thinking. Design must become more than an aesthetic -- it must become an integral part of the overall process of how companies think about products, services and customers. By extension, "design thinking" must now become part of any worker's toolkit. As Daniel Pink first suggested five years ago in his bestselling A Whole New Mind, right-brain thinking -- in the form of creativity, innovation and big picture contextual thinking -- is an increasingly important way for workers to demonstrate their value to their employers. Design thinking is, if anything, a stronger form of creativity and innovation that is focused around achieving specific
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business goals and objectives. As a result, design thinking will continue to play a key role in any organization's business strategy as it attempts to differentiate itself vis-a-vis competitors. The most obvious examples are companies like Apple and Target, which have made breathtakingly-beautiful design part of their core value proposition. 2: Women will play a more important role in redefining traditional notions of work. In 2009, Maria Shriver and the Center for American Progress published The Shriver Report, which attempted to catalogue the many ways that women are changing the U.S. workplace. In 2009, for the first time ever, women now account for more than 50% of all jobs in America. At the same time, women account for 57% of all bachelor's degrees and 60% of all master's degrees, making them the most important part in any company's talent pipeline. Quite simply, with women now a majority in the U.S. workforce, organizations will need to reassess how well they are responding to the needs of women in the workplace. This ranges from new thinking about customized careers and flexible work arrangements to fundamentally important notions of how to encourage managerial traits such as empathy and compassion. The most successful organizations will be companies like Pepsi, which has made the recruiting, retaining and promoting of women a company-wide priority. At Pepsi, not only is the CEO a woman (Indra Nooyi), but nearly one-third of
all executives are women. There's an economic payoff, too, from ensuring that women are members of your Board of Directors and members of your senior management team. Business school researchers at Pepperdine and Maryland have found that companies with women in these roles actually outperform their rivals. 3: Small business owners will become the new stars of economic growth. The "credit crunch" of the past 12 months, in which financial institutions systematically withdrew liquidity from the banking system in the hopes of stemming the tides of bad loans and foreclosures, appears to be coming to an end. As liquidity slowly makes its way back into the banking system, the first beneficiaries will be small business owners -- some of whom had their access to funding turned off seemingly overnight. In recognition of this fact, the Obama Administration has made small business the linchpin of many of its economic policies. At the same time, companies like Goldman Sachs -- which recently created a $500 million fund to foster and launch 10,000 small businesses -and American Express through its OPEN Forum for small business owners -- are jumping into the fray, in the hopes of galvanizing economic activity at the grassroots. Small business owners have often been overshadowed as the traditional media focuses on the empire builders (yes, Donald Trump, that's you) and the titans of industry rather than unheralded small business owners. Heading into 2010, though, this trend appears to be reversing. THE FLUX CAPACITOR
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Monocle, for example, published a Small Business Guide for 2010 that is chockfull of examples of how resilient small business owners around the globe are re-inventing their industries. From equity research companies in Stockholm to interior design firms in Tokyo to graphic designers in Munich, these small businesses are inspiring examples of how creative, nimble and risk-taking ventures can bring real economic change to any industry. The women and men who dare to dream big now will be the first to reap the rewards once economic growth returns. 4:"Happiness" will become a way to measure economic prosperity. In September, Nicolas Sarkozy, the (often controversial) president of France, announced that his country was seriously considering a "happiness index" that would transform factors like "quality of life" and "vacation time" into a broader measure of overall economic well-being. In short, the traditional way to measure national economic activity Gross National Product (GNP) - would be supplanted by something called Gross National Happiness (GNH). This, of course, is a fundamentally new way to think about work that surely has economists scrambling to find a way to quantify something so unquantifiable as "happiness." Other than France, only the tiny Himalayan nation of Bhutan has had the pluck and audacity to adopt the concept of Gross National Happiness. In 1972, Bhutan adopted GNH as a way to symbolize its dedication to spiritualist, Buddhist ideals rather than purely materialistic, Capitalistic ideals.
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In many ways, this thinking about "happiness" is part of an overall paradigm shift in the world of economics that takes us further away from the purely "rational thinking" paradigm. Behavioral economists, led by Princeton's Daniel Kahneman (who won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2002), Yale's Robert Shiller (who famously coined the term "irrational exuberance") and Harvard's Daniel Gilbert (who is typically credited as the founder of the "science of happiness"), are helping us understand that purely rational considerations are not all that matter when it comes to making decisions. (Shiller, in fact, specifically asked prominent New Yorker cartoonist Edward Koren to illustrate the book cover of Animal Spirits with his irrational wild things). Within the Obama Administration, ideas from the emergent field of behavioral economics are informing everything from solving for health insurance plans to helping workers save more in their 401(k) plans. 5: Personal branding will become the buzzword of talented workers around the world. 2009 was the year that Gary Vaynerchuk and Dan Schawbel burst onto the scene with ideas about ways to use the leverage the Web for personal branding. Using everything from blogs to YouTube to Twitter, it's now possible for everyday people to create a personal brand online -- and then use it to launch new businesses based around their personal passions. Gary Vaynerchuk (known to his adoring fans as simply "Gary Vee") showed what's possible when you combine a passion for wine, a deep knowledge of social media, and a YouTube-ready personality. He turned a small family wine business into a national industry leader,
becoming a national celebrity in the process. Gary Vee has tapped into the current economic zeitgeist. Idealistic notions about lifetime employment with a single company are long gone. The only real job security is to create your own personal brand. With U.S. unemployment pushing above 10% in November, starting a new venture has become a very attractive option to millions of workers. Take the self-employment route and do what you love. Do it well, and you might just Crush It. This last trend is perhaps the most important of all five mentioned above. The Internet as a distribution channel for a personal brand is unmatched. For freelance workers, the Internet has made it possible to showcase their best work to anyone in the world, at any time. Take photography, for example. Using the photosharing service Flickr, professional photographers have had a way to showcase and highlight their work. Starting in mid-2008, Flickr made it possible for anyone to buy royalty-free and rightsmanaged photos through a unique partnership with Getty Images. If your photography skills and talent are strong enough, you no longer need to give them away for free (the photo accompanying this blog entry was actually purchased via the Flickr collection of Getty Images). Heading into 2010, I'm looking forward to watching how these five macro trends about The New Way To Work continue to evolve. Sometime in the future, no doubt, today's world of work will look as wonderfully anachronistic as the world of Matthew Weiner's Mad Men appears to us now.
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Featured Reader When Lene Pia Madsen was a senior ranking project manager at SandrewMetronome Film Distribution, Daniel was working with her on distribution of SOLO, an award winning documentary by Kasper Torsting. From there it went to the Croisette in Cannes, Park Avenue in New York and Villa Vino in Copenhagen. Though Lene Pia is employed by, what many consider a heavy, oldschool institution, The Danish Film Institute [among other tasks; distribution of subsidies and funding] Lene is far from it. Business is business and business is hardcore! Calculated risks are parts of the game, and while many good ideas have suffered from not being profitable, many more have been turned viable, profitable and eventually into more than just ideas because of insights, foresights and hindsights. Get ready for an iron lady with an attitude as bubbly as champagne and a heart as warm as apple pie: Lene Pia is the featured reader of February 2010!
Lene Pia Madsen
What are your greatest expectations for 2010? That all the talk of different formats subside. I'm sick of large corporations fighting for own formats to ensure cash flow year after year. Try thinking BIG for a change, and commit to formats which will stick a decade. It would free the mind of creative people who might get resources and time to come up with real cool content for the public. How do you apply the “future” to your work? By getting rid of "used to". I hate these constraints. We might live in an environment of rules and regulations, but try to break them sometimes and real creativity will emerge. I guarantee. Have you ever had an experience where you foresaw something and it turned out exactly that way? Yes, and I plan all my PR and Marketing efforts accordingly! What technology, toy, trend or gadget of the future are you looking especially forward to? The iAll - that one sleek, cool, design-yummy toy that would let me do all my work and play in one great gadget. That would be eternal bliss.
Head of Public Events, The Danish Film Institute Hometown Copenhagen, Denmark Email lpm@dfi.dk Link www.DFI.dk Known Karpantschof since May 2007 Mutual Friends on facebook 11
What’s up Karpantschof? Daniel Karpantschof lives in Washington, DC from where he writes articles, gives speeches and talks and contemplate world domination. Daniel Karpantschof sits on the board of directors of the Copenhagen Institute for Futures Studies as well as the Academy of Futures Studies in Denmark, chairs the Advisory Board and the board of TalentTuning, a DanishNorwegian consulting house. Recently Karpantschof was asked to sit on the Advisory Board of DABGO/Danes Abroad Business Group Online! Homepage
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The Flux Capacitor is the free newsletter from Daniel Karpantschof, covering innovation, strategic planning, foresight and scenario building within the spheres of international markets and politics, fast moving consumer goods, education, entertainment and tech.
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