Spotting the latest consumer trends has become a major task in many corporations and more and more companies offer services that help in understand consumers and identify the next big thing that will have an impact on future products and services. I have already written about some websites that offer latest insight in consumer trends and just recently found an article written by Malcolm Gladwell about cool hunting and the search for the latest consumer trends. Even though the article is already 10 years old, the principles are still valid. If you have read his book “The Tipping Point” you will recognize a few of the case studies in this article.

The article still has a few interesting take aways:

This is the first rule of the cool: The quicker the chase, the quicker the flight. The act of discovering what’s cool is what causes cool to move on, which explains the triumphant circularity of coolhunting: because we have coolhunters like DeeDee and Baysie, cool changes more quickly, and because cool changes more quickly, we need coolhunters like DeeDee and Baysie.

The innovators do get their cool ideas from people other than their peers, but the fact is that they are the last people who can be convinced by a marketing campaign that a pair of suède shoes is cool. These are, after all, the people who spent hours sifting through thrift-store bins. And why did they do that? Because their definition of cool is doing something that nobody else is doing. A company can intervene in the cool cycle. It can put its shoes on really cool celebrities and on fashion runways and on MTV. It can accelerate the transition from the innovator to the early adopter and on to the early majority. But it can’t just manufacture cool out of thin air, and that’s the second rule of cool.

The key to coolhunting, then, is to look for cool people first and cool things later, and not the other way around. Since cool things are always changing, you can’t look for them, because the very fact they are cool means you have no idea what to look for. What you would be doing is thinking back on what was cool before and extrapolating, which is about as useful as presuming that because the Dow rose ten points yesterday it will rise another ten points today. Cool people, on the other hand, are a constant. […] Their non-cool coolhunter just didn’t have that certain instinct, that sense that told him when it was O.K. to deviate from the manual. Because he wasn’t cool, he didn’t know cool, and that’s the essence of the third rule of cool: you have to be one to know one.

Read the full article.

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Not just trendwatching.com observed it, also Wired magazine dives fully into this trend with their special report titled “Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business“. While the report at trendwatching.com is full of examples, this article in Wired analyzes a few case studies with more detail.

Thanks to Gillette, the idea that you can make money by giving something away is no longer radical. But until recently, practically everything “free” was really just the result of what economists would call a cross-subsidy: You’d get one thing free if you bought another, or you’d get a product free only if you paid for a service.

Over the past decade, however, a different sort of free has emerged. The new model is based not on cross-subsidies — the shifting of costs from one product to another — but on the fact that the cost of products themselves is falling fast. It’s as if the price of steel had dropped so close to zero that King Gillette could give away both razor and blade, and make his money on something else entirely. (Shaving cream?)

Wired also included an analysis of the countless business models leveraging the priceless economy and came up with six broad categories:

Freemium: What’s free: Web software and services, some content. Free to whom: users of the basic version.

Advertising: What’s free: content, services, software, and more. Free to whom: everyone.

Cross-subsidies: What’s free: any product that entices you to pay for something else. Free to whom: everyone willing to pay eventually, one way or another.

Zero marginal cost: What’s free: things that can be distributed without an appreciable cost to anyone. Free to whom: everyone.

Labor exchange: What’s free: Web sites and services. Free to whom: all users, since the act of using these sites and services actually creates something of value.

Gift economy: What’s free: the whole enchilada, be it open source software or user-generated content. Free to whom: everyone.

Read the full article here.

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Richard Ting writes about the challenges of bringing advertising to mobile phones and what early Web marketing mistakes can teach agencies and clients about mobile efforts in his article “Taking creativity to the streets“.

It’s time to stop experimenting and get serious about mobile. Consumer behavior is shifting rapidly. Consumers now have access to better devices with more intuitive interfaces, faster speeds and more content on the mobile Web. ESPN recently reported that more visitors went to the football section of its mobile site than ESPN.com. Also, a recent Wall Street Journal article reported that in November, 50 percent more Web pages were viewed by consumers using the iPhone browser than the Windows mobile platform. At that time, there were 1.4 million iPhones and countless devices installed with Windows browsers. These examples signal that a fundamental shift is happening in consumer uptake of mobile data services. The time to get serious about mobile is now: Brands need to embrace mobile or get left behind.

Read the full article.

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trendwatching.com, the Amsterdam-based trendwatching agency, has published a new Trendreport titled “Free Love” which is all about the ongoing rise of ‘free stuff’, and the brands already making the most it.

 

FREE LOVE: the ongoing rise of free, valuable stuff that’s available to consumers online and offline. From AirAsia tickets to Wikipedia, and from diapers to music.

FREE LOVE thrives on an all-out war for consumers’ ever-scarcer attention and the resulting new business models and marketing techniques, but also benefits from the ever-decreasing costs of producing physical goods, the post-scarcity dynamics of the online world (and the related avalanche of free content created by attention-hungry members of GENERATION C), the many C2C marketplaces enabling consumers to swap instead of spend, and an emerging recycling culture.

Expect FREE LOVE to become an integral if not essential part of doing business.

Read the full report online or download the report here.

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Avenue A | Razorfish recently published the “2008 digital outlook report“. On 164 pages they present what happened in 2007 and what they think will happen in 2008 in the digital media landscape.

For many consumers, an engaging advertisement still powerfully influences their decisionmaking. But even more powerful, are the opinions they share with each other through trusted blogs and social networks. A mother in Topeka, Kansas, or a teen in a London flat can become trusted authorities, influencing more decisions than the best formulated professional branding campaign that an advertising agency can offer. Consumers are turning to a seemingly endless source of specialized media – so much so that commonly accepted best digital best practices have very short shelf lives. Yesterday’s solutions simply aren’t adequate to solve today’s problems. Is it any wonder that most businesses are coming to the hard realization that they aren’t organized effectively to respond to change?

Avenue A | Razorfish’s 2008 Digital Outlook Report examines where that digital spend is going. We provide direction on how marketers can align their organization to respond to the new digital environment, as well as a framework for effectively managing emerging channels and social media. And we give you some interesting new insights into consumer behavior.

The chapter “ten digital media issues to watch in 2008″ is especially interesting, so watch out for:

1. The move beyond media buying
2. The impact of a recession on online advertising
3. The redefinition of online media measurement
4. A limited increase in average CPMs
5. The fallacy of the “digital upfront”
6. The slowing of ad network acquisitions
7. A breakout year for mobile—but not for mobile advertising
8. Nokia’s emergence as a key player in the digital marketing industry
9. The continuing lack of video ad standards
10. The Internet’s impact on the 2008 presidential election

For me personally issue 8 “Nokia’s emergence as a key player in the digital marketing industry” provided new insights.

Nokia made two important moves in 2007 that will impact digital marketing in the coming year. It acquired both Enpocket, a leading mobile advertising and marketing services firm, and Navteq, a leader in navigation data and systems software. While there have been no formal announcements from Nokia about how its assets will fit together, it is clearly going to be a company to watch in the coming year. Nokia appears to be vying to expand its own business outside of consumer mobile devices and into the software and services that consumers are able to use on those devices.

Nokia now has assets that may accelerate the use of smart devices that use location-based services that know where we are. The potential benefit for marketers is the ability to deliver relevant, geographically contextual advertising opportunities to customers. Accomplishing this feat in the U.S. today, while not impossible, often involves orchestrating a small army of carriers, devices, marketing services providers, and agencies whose interests are not always aligned.

Download the full report.

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