November 2009 | As the future is uncertain, and the past is, well, the past, instant-gratification seeking consumers are embracing the ‘now’ with more passion than ever before. And despite this trend’s seemingly ephemeral character, it is rich in solid, applicable trend examples.
P.S. For those of you who need to know ALL the trends that will excite consumers over the next 12 months, don't miss out on our new, exclusive 2010 Trend Report. More info here >>>
In our June 2009 Trend Briefing, we covered FOREVERISM. But even then, we pointed out that the need for everything that is (right) now/current/real-time, is being satisfied in numerous novel ways, with (wait for it) the online world showing the way forward.
Dubbed 'NOWISM', this mega trend has, and will continue to have, a big impact on everything from your corporate culture to customer relationships to product innovation to tactical campaigns. And yet you probably only have a few minutes to spare on it so we’ve done our best to keep this Trend Briefing digestible.
Let’s start with a definition:
NOWISM | “Consumers’ ingrained* lust for instant gratification is being satisfied by a host of novel, important (offline and online) real-time products, services and experiences. Consumers are also feverishly contributing to the real-time content avalanche that’s building as we speak. As a result, expect your brand and company to have no choice but to finally mirror and join the ‘now’, in all its splendid chaos, realness and excitement.”
*In the end, just like all our other trends, NOWISM represents a case of consumers jumping on something the moment they actually can. So, the need is never new, the new ways to fulfil it are.
The power of all things ‘NOW’ can be traced back to the eternal lure of instant gratification and our current consumer societies handily accommodating and encouraging this relentless pursuit of instant information, communications, pleasure, if not indulgences. En passant reducing the ‘now’ to mere minutes, if not seconds.
It’s been a steady build-up:
In an age of abundance, with a reduced need for non-stop securing of the basics, and physical goods so plentiful (and/or ecologically harmful) that the status derived from them is sometimes close to nil, only consumption of the experience* and thus the now, the thrill, remains.
In fact, many ‘fixed’ items run the risk of becoming synonymous with boredom, hassle (Maintenance! Theft! Going out of style! Repairs!), eco-unfriendliness, and sinking a large part of one’s budget into one object (which impedes spending on multiple experiences).
* Trends are never ‘or’, they're always ‘and’. There is, of course, always a need for roots, for non-transient relationships, for shelter. People, consumers, still need a base, and still need to be sure the basics are at least available at all times . Owning does imply a certain level of security, something that others can’t just take away from you.
This focus on experiences, this living in the now, instead of in the future, this lust to collect as many experiences and stories as soon as possible, is addictive. Take travel: these days, it's more of a basic consumer need than a luxury. It’s about detachment, fractional ownership or no ownership at all, trying out new things, escaping commitment and obligations, dropping formality, and of course collecting endless new experiences. No wonder tourism is and will remain one of the biggest industries in the world. For more on transient lifestyles, see our TRANSUMERS briefing.
In the still rapidly expanding online world, instant gratification is even easier to obtain: 'digital' has become synonymous with 'instant'. Furthermore, if something digital/online is too slow, too cumbersome, too poorly written, or too boring, a substitute is only a search term and a click away. And yes, this is indirectly setting consumers' expectations for the 'real' world, too.
P.S. For a broader view on NOWISM, please (re-)read Zygmunt Bauman's (a Polish sociologist) musings on what he has dubbed Liquid Modernity. Here are some snippets to get you going:
"Liquid Modernity" is Bauman's term for the present condition of the world as contrasted with the "solid" modernity that preceded it. According to Bauman, the passage from "solid" to "liquid" modernity has created a new and unprecedented setting for individual life pursuits, confronting individuals with a series of challenges never before encountered. Social forms and institutions no longer have enough time to solidify and cannot serve as frames of reference for human actions and long-term life plans, so individuals have to find other ways to organize their lives.
Individuals have to splice together an unending series of short-term projects and episodes that don't add up to the kind of sequence to which concepts like "career" and "progress" could be meaningfully applied.
Such fragmented lives require individuals to be flexible and adaptable — to be constantly ready and willing to change tactics at short notice, to abandon commitments and loyalties without regret and to pursue opportunities according to their current availability. In liquid modernity the individual must act, plan actions and calculate the likely gains and losses of acting (or failing to act) under conditions of endemic uncertainty."
Caffeinated soap, anyone?
In the past, both in our free Trend Briefings and our paid Annual Trend Reports, we’ve spoken about phenomena like ‘FSTR', 'HYPERTASKING', 'BOOST' and ‘SNACKONOMY'. These trends illustrate how more activities are being crammed into ever diminishing timeframes, how convenience is king, how products and services are literally becoming smaller or more fragmented so budget conscious and/or time-poor consumers can collect as many different experiences as possible, how caffeinated drinks, shampoos and chewing gum provide consumers with energy to prolong the 'now', and so on.
For your amusement (or perhaps it’s ammunition for your next innovation session?), a handful of stats and signs of the times all paying tribute to a world in which currency truly is the new currency:
A Datamonitor consumer survey in April/May 2009 established that less than half of consumers across 17 countries are satisfied with their work-life balance. Various commitments and demands from work and personal/family life have contributed to the feeling of time-deprivation. People are looking for speed and convenience and anything that allows them to feel more in control of time. (Source: Datamonitor, August 2009.)
With everything from drinks to shampoo now coming with a caffeine boost to help consumers make even more of the now, its no surprise anti-energy drinks are popping up, too:
Enough theory and signs of the times: let's get organized. Here are (just) three distinct NOWISM developments ready for you to run with: the emergence of the real-time web, the growing value of events and performances that are 'live', and the many ways commerce is going truly 'instant'.
A visualization of (gigantic) global online traffic from The Internet Mapping Project
For NOWISM on steroids, look no further than the burgeoning ‘real-time web’. As netizens are insatiably lusting after (and contributing to) up-to-date info on other people, products, events, news and so on, they are thus obsessed with real-time publishing, real-time search, real-time reviews and price-comparison, real-time news, real-time conversations and more.
And yes, Twitter is the current, deserved poster child for this phenomenon. It's no wonder that even Google founder Larry Page stated that "Twitter has done a great job of real-time search. I think we’ve done a relatively poor job of... things that work on a per-second basis. I’ve been telling our search teams for some time, you need results for every second. They laugh at me. I don’t think they understand this. I think we will do a better job of some of these things now". (Source: Wired, August 2009.)
Total number of tweets, in real-time
The Twitters of this world of course offer a truly real-time snapshot of what the world is thinking, doing, protesting (if not fighting) for and against, loving, reviewing, buying, feeling, attending, traveling to, donating to, gossiping about, asking for, hating, wearing, watching, eating, reading, drinking, listening to... need we go on?
Brands obviously can and have to tap into this GLOBAL BRAIN and its ONLINE PULSE of unheard scale and scope (never before has business intelligence been so in your face), but they then also have to become part of it, engaging in (and initiating) conversations*. And not only are these conversations visible in real-time, they’re visible to everyone. To all one's existing customers, potential customers, employees, competitor's employees, journalists, and so on.
For dynamic brands, living in sync with NOWISM, this will mean a world of real-time customer service, real time (price) offers, real-time product and advertising testing, real-time Q&A, real-time feedback, real-time co-creation. For static brands, NOWISM will mean a painful, lifeless future.
* For more about ongoing customer conversations, co-creation and beta-mindsets, (re-)read our FOREVERISM briefing.
Until recently, 'mobile' was NOWISM's missing link: everyone is now online when at home, in the office, or near a hotspot, it's hard to check or contribute to real-time information if individuals are offline while truly on-the-go. No longer. Count on consumers' INFOLUST (including lusting after knowing what friends, family, celebs, colleagues, foes and so on, are doing/saying/thinking right now) to go completely mobile. Some numbers:
Expect all the usual NOWISM suspects, from Twitter to Facebook to Google, to intensify the battle for dominating screen space on the iPhone, BlackBerry, Android, Booklet 3G, Palm Pre, Apple Tablet and every portable device that is online 24/7. We ain't seen nothing yet ;-)
Don’t have a finger on the online pulse yet? Take your pick from the following random list of real-time search engines, content aggregators, alerting services, friend finders and so on:
Sure, there are dozens more: a good list to continue your real-time explorations is ReadWriteWeb's Top 50 Real-Time Companies. And by the time you're done checking those out, plenty of new real-time start-ups will have popped up, no doubt reported on by other real-time firms.
For more insights on the Real Time Web, make sure you read JWT's 'The Now Web', and ReadWriteWeb's 'Primer' on the topic.
On our end, we're already working on a NOWISM-meets-ONLINE PULSE update that will include (among others) more examples about NOWISM and GPS / location-based services (as well as the interplay between NOWISM and LOCALITY at large), and the possibilities to form real-time, one-off communities for anything, which in some ways is the ultimate in ephemeral in NOWISM. So, yes, we're asking for your patience here ;-)
Here's an easy prediction: all things ‘live’, anything that even has a hint of 'performance', will continue to rise in value in a NOWISM world. We've dubbed this LIVING THE LIVE; a NOWISM sub-trend that thrives on:
A (pleasant?) side effect of LIVING THE LIVE is that ‘live’ cannot be edited, controlled or censored and therefore offers the possibility of boredom-beating surprises. And surprises, excitement, controversy, scandal, realness, and rawness is exactly what many consumers are openly or secretly craving. Top ratings and top traffic for anything 'raw' that slips through in a sanitized, traditional corporate and media environs are easy proof.
So, in the next 12 months, anything that is live (Concerts! Election nights! Parties! Tastings! Football Games! Musicals! Festivals! So You Think You Can Dance!), tied to a specific place and time will be a brand booster, or a direct revenue source, or both. If you execute these well of course ;-)
Some easy-to-digest LIVING THE LIVE examples, mostly from the entertainment business:
There's a market for semi-live performances, too:
P.S. Check out this recent LIVING THE LIVE advertising example from American Airlines. Remember, when applying trends, one of the easiest ways to get going is to use your trend insights to speak a particular audience's language. In this case, linking flying to live experiences, as opposed to downloading them, is at least trying to incorporate an element of digital lifestyles. However, as those living a digital lifestyle are unconditionally passionate about doing so, we would always opt for avoiding even the slightest negative undertone when squaring off the real world to the online one. But that's just us.
NOWISM is responsible for a spate of instant (e)commerce concepts: who ever said retail was dying? Learn from NOWISM initiatives that revolve around alerts, pop-ups, vending machines, and linking instant info to instant buying. And that's just the beginning.
An effective old-school URGE ALERT: Krispy Kreme’s neon Hot Light sign
Alerting is the new searching. No wonder that real-time alerts aimed at stimulating impulse buys (if not urges) are taking off:
SEE/HEAR/BUY thrives on (mobile) NOWISM technologies that allow consumers to quickly find out more about an item, a song, or anything else they hear/see, and then buy it. This short overview of experience-and-buy services should get you going:
So... Who's going to build similar SEE-HEAR-BUY services in 2010 for looking up movies, television shows and even commercials by just saying a few lines? And how will these instant gratification services further shape expectations among infolusty shoppers?
Leave it to NOWISM-loving marketers to come up with vending machines that sell more than snacks and beverages. Some random examples of how anything can be made instantly available 24/7:
The Icecreamist pop-up store in Selfridges until November 2009
What can we add to a ‘trend’ that, ever since we coined* it in late 2003 (“If new products can come and go, why can't the stores that display them do the same?"), has gone from a temporary example of temporariness to a NOWISM fixture on every marketing-strategy-to-do list? POPUPPING aka pop-up stores, pop-up shops, and pop-up retail, now encompasses all temporary brand manifestations that add an element of surprise, urgency, and must-have/must-see to shopping, dining, entertaining, lodging, exhibiting and so on.
Three developments within this sub-trend to watch:
As the number of recent POPUPPING examples is endless, and rapidly available, we’ve highlighted just one (but it’s a tasty one!):
* We’re not sure whether this is something to be proud of, or deeply ashamed
Remember Walter Mischel's marshmallow experiment?
(Photo courtesy of Steve0041)
The rise of NOWISM will no doubt be accompanied by endless fretting about how civilization will succumb to the lack of delayed gratification. Expect NOWISM for many to become synonymous with (and blamed for) shallowness, short attention spans, exploding credit card debts, excessive focus on instantly satisfying urges, an unwillingness to face (and build) a better and sustainable future, indifference to the past (and all its lessons).
While all of this warrants serious attention, the pro-NOWISM camp will point to the dissemination of crucial information, the leveling of the playing field for individuals and organizations, the potentially beneficial effects on the environment of a consumer society shifting towards 'now' experiences (including virtual ones) versus consuming resource-heavy physical goods, and so on.
NOWISM enthusiasts will also point out that traditional, much praised preparing-for-the-future attitudes are often obsessed with avoiding any risk in (bourgeois) life: the sole focus is on securing financial wealth (bigger houses, bigger bank accounts, bigger cars) at a forever-postponed later point in time. In many cases, the virtue of waiting is nothing but an effective way to kill any kind of creativity, joy, daringness and spontaneity. Which is not to say that NOWISTS don't care about the future, but future priorities may differ.
As always, as a brand and as a professional, the best thing to do is to look for what works (NOWISM can offer transparency, communications, joyful experiences, convenience, while NON-NOWISM can offer self-restraint, peace of mind, care and reflection). Dismiss the excesses, instead of opting for a black-and-white approach to what is an inevitable societal shift (never forget: one generation's indulgence always becomes the next generation's necessity.)
Embrace the now, and learn how to make it work for you, too!
The NOWISM trend is as big as they come, and we had serious challenges not letting this briefing balloon into dozens and dozens of pages.
The bottom line: while the appeal and influence of ‘now’ has been building for years, societal attitudes, sky-high consumer expectations and new technologies are currently converging in such a powerful way that brands truly have no choice but to go ‘real-time’: in their business intelligence processes, in their customer conversations, in their innovation labs, in their distribution, sales, marketing and branding departments...
The many examples above (from new ways to monitor the arena to how to engage customers to clever new products and services catering to infolusty, instant-gratification loving consumers), should provide you with enough ammunition.
Time to (finally) get real & go with the zeitgeist ;-)
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