Reinier Evers and his team have published their consumer trend report for 2008, summarizing the eight most important consumer trends in the coming year.

The eight trends are:

Status spheres
"Here’s something trend watchers, CMOs and other business professionals should be able to agree on: in the end, when dealing with (and selling to) people, everything always comes back to status. In a traditional consumer society, he or she who consumes the most, the best, the coolest, the most expensive, the scarcest or the most popular goods, will typically also gain the most status."

Premiumization
Basically, with more wealth burning holes in (saturated and experienced) consumers’ pockets than ever before, quick status fixes derived from premium products and premium experiences will continue in full force next year.

Snack Culture
SNACK CULTURE thus embodies the phenomenon of products, services and experiences becoming more temporary and transient; products that are being deconstructed in easier to digest, easier to afford bits, making it possible to collect even more experiences, as often as possible, in an even shorter timeframe.

Online Oxygen
Ah, the Online Revolution, the mega-trend that keeps on giving, one that single-handedly dominates the ‘connecting sphere’. While Web 2.0 has already single-handledly created young brands that are now bigger and more valuable (at least on paper) than many an old economy stalwart, Web 3.0 and 4.0 and 5.0 guarantee enough motion for this innovation-orgasm to continue uninterrupted for years to come. Five years ago, we introduced ONLINE OXYGEN as the engine behind all this excitement: control-craving consumers needing online access as much as they need oxygen

Eco-Iconic
Over the past few years, the ECO trend has moved from ECO-UGLY (ugly, over-priced, low performance alternatives to shiny ‘traditional sphere’ products and services) to ECO-CHIC (eco-friendly stuff that actually looks as nice and cool as the less responsible version) to ECO-ICONIC in 2008: "Eco-friendly goods and services sporting bold, iconic design and markers, that help their eco-conscious owners to visibly tout their eco-credentials to peers."

Brand Butlers
Consider this for 2008: if consumers value the authentic, the practical, the exclusive, and they’re also forever looking to make life more convenient, even save some time, then why persist in bombarding them with your mega-million dollar/euro/pound, one-way advertising campaigns? Instead of stalking potential and existing customers (which is not very 2008), why not assist them in smart, relevant ways, making the most of your products and whatever it is your brand stands for? Remember, giving is the new taking

MIY - Make it Yourself
Let’s have a more in-depth look at the ‘participation sphere’. For years, we’ve been going on about GENERATION C, with the C mainly representing ‘content’. In other words, digital creation. Pictures. Movies. Blogs. Music. So what’s next for GENERATION C? With (in particular younger) consumers having come to expect to be able to create anything they want as long as it is digital, and to customize and personalize many physical goods, the next frontier will be digitally designing products from scratch, then having them turned into real physical goods as well. In fact, expect MIY | MAKE IT YOURSELF (and then SIY | SELL IT YOURSELF) ventures to become increasingly sophisticated in the next 12 months.

Crowd Mining
When co-creating, co-funding, co-buying, co-designing, co-managing *anything* with ‘crowds’, the emphasis in 2008 will move from just getting the masses in, to mining those crowds for the rough and polished diamonds. How to do that? Shower them with love, respect and heaps of money, of course. Two examples, from Netflix and Google, setting the standards for CROWD MINING in 2008.

Read the full report online or download the PDF.

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Another highlight at lift08 was the talk from Pierre Bellanger, founder and CEO of Skyrock.fm. Skyrock.fm is the leading social network in France with approximately 20 million users. From his perspective the biggest opportunity for growth is by bringing social networking and instant messaging to the mobile phone. Simply transferring concepts from the desktop to the mobile phone won’t do the job - the context when using your computer as well as technology and interface are completely different from mobile phones. You can see his speech here:

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Carmaker BMW has published a study how customer feel and behave in their cars. It is a fascinating study which is a wonderful example of customer experience management and helps to understand the relationship customers can build with a product.

Among other intersting facetes of car-driver and car-passenger relationship my favourite article is about the cup-holder. It shows that you can make everything right but to really make a difference you need to have an eye for the details. Here are some statements regarding the importance of a cup-holder in the car:

“Outside of the satnav, the cupholder is the most
important thing in the car. That and the iPod holder –
because I spend so much time in the car, I’d go as far as
to say it was one reason for choosing the car. The BMW
cupholder is the best on the market for sturdiness – they
also have one on the passenger side, whereas mine is on
the central console.”
Male driver, 40, York

“I hate my cupholder – it’s not wide enough. It has been
such a disappointment. You buy a coffee, and the cup
will be wider than my cupholder, so the cup perches
on it and spills coffee down the audio console on to the
volume control. Parts of the volume control knob cycles
are very stiff or very loose. It’s probably not the greatest
piece of ergonomic design.”
Male driver, 35, South London (non-BMW driver)

“…what was the key element of safety when you were
a child? It was that your mother fed you, and there was
warm liquid. That’s why cupholders are absolutely crucial
for safety. If there is a car that has no cupholder, it is not
safe. If I can put my coffee there, if I can have my food, if
everything is round, if it’s soft, and if I’m high, then I feel
safe. It’s amazing that intelligent, educated women will
look at a car and the first thing they will look at is how
many cupholders it has.”

“I remember her getting it. It had full-spec top-of-the-range
everything, full leather interior, turbo, telephone all plumbed
in, the lot, but what she was really excited about was the
cupholder, because her old car hadn’t had one, and this
one comes out just right. It makes a lovely noise. We went
out and got a coffee and an almond croissant just to try it.”

The full report can be download from dezeen.

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FORA, the Danish Authority for Enterprise and Construction’s Division for Research and Analysis, has published the study “Concept Design – How to solve complex challenges of our time” which focuses on how design can be utilised together with other disciplines to create new solutions to the global challenges faced by public and private sectors.

Companies are shifting from asking themselves how products should be designed, how they should be produced and how they should be marketed to asking more fundamental questions such as what should the company focus on or what problems should the company’s innovations solve. Concept design is the discipline of creating concepts that provide answers to these questions and solutions for the identified problems.

The study provides an analysis of Danish companies offering concept design services as well as an overview of other international concept design firms. Dinesh Godburdhun, Senior Team Lead at Gravity Tank shares his view about this new industry:

“I think that what this new industry has in common is that there are complex problems out there. And clients don’t know who they should call to get them solved. Normally they would call their advertising agency, market researcher, design house or what have you, and today a lot of these people are handed complex problems by clients because it’s not quite clear who should be doing them.”

All in all an interesting study, and if you ever wanted to catch a glimpse into the offices of concept designers, check out the pictures included in the study.

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Once again a great talk at the TED conference by John Maeda, Associate Director of Research at MIT’s Media Lab, spreading his philosophy of elegant simplicity.

“The MIT Media Lab’s John Maeda lives at the intersection of technology and art — a place that can get very complicated. Here, he talks about paring down to basics, and how he creates clean, elegant art, websites and web tools. In his book Laws of Simplicity, he offers 10 rules and 3 keys for simple living and working — but in this talk, he boils it down to one simply delightful way to be.”

I especially like this statement from his talk when he defines what simplicity really means:

“Simplicity is about living life with more enjoyment and less pain”

This could be also applied to designing customer experiences since most people think of customer experiences as about “big-bang-fancy-firework” interactions when it is actually about “more enjoyment and less pain” for your customers.

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