Tomorrow People
Future Consumers and How to Read Them
Published on 28. May 2003
Book
Paperback/Softback
304 pages
978-0-273-65957-0 (ISBN)
Description
GET TO KNOW YOUR FUTURE CUSTOMERS "The future is a profit stream waiting to happen, but it takes careful observation and anticipation to make it flow your way." Martin Raymond
What would you give to see today what your customers will want tomorrow? To discover their needs, desires and chosen brands. Who will they be? How will they behave? And what will they want from your business?
The future of consumer behaviour is a profit margin waiting to happen for those who read it correctly. But tomorrow's consumers want to be seen as people; not numbers, or markets to be segmented and targeted. How will your business and brand fit into their lives?
The Tomorrow People is a snapshot of tomorrow's consumers. The world they will inhabit, the lifestyles and values they will adopt and the ways they will shop. Sooner or later every brand has to interact with tomorrow's people, so how do you equip yourself for such a world? As an individual, a brand, a corporation?
By understanding the nature of trends, their dynamics or science, we can learn not only to see them, but also how to map them use them to generate products, brands and services for tomorrow's consumers. It's all about behaviour. It's not about dead data.
In a provocative and insightful view of how emerging lifestyles and cultural changes are likely to impact on tomorrow's consumers, Martin Raymond alerts you to new consumer behaviour patterns and teaches you to read a market and be ready to deliver exactly what your customers want. This book will help you to read trends, interpret the discoveries that you make and plug them back into your business in a way that makes it more future-facing and customer-centric.
Learn to do this and you can interact with your consumers rather than react to them. You can build a truly tactile brand.
In a world where tomorrow's answers no longer lie in yesterday's data, learn how to read people rather than reports.
Read this book and get better at
understanding your future customers; what they want and expect
mapping, predicting and responding to market trends before your competitors
connecting your brands with living people not dead data
creating, developing and launching the new products, services and brands that will deliver future profits - sorting profit opportunities from potential profit failures
"What Richard Pascale did in applying nature's living systems to business models, Martin Raymond does for the future of marketing and brand development. This is the closest you will get to finding out who your customers will be tomorrow, what their aspirations and prejudices will be and how your business can provide the products and services that will capture their money."
Director Magazine, Oct 2003
"Martin Raymond is something between scientist and a wizard: He decodes and translates tomorrow's consumer attitudes with intelligence and wit. He uses his phenomenal cultural insight to challenge and inspire. This book will become a "must-read" for the brand architects of the future."
Susanne Tide-Frat
What would you give to see today what your customers will want tomorrow? To discover their needs, desires and chosen brands. Who will they be? How will they behave? And what will they want from your business?
The future of consumer behaviour is a profit margin waiting to happen for those who read it correctly. But tomorrow's consumers want to be seen as people; not numbers, or markets to be segmented and targeted. How will your business and brand fit into their lives?
The Tomorrow People is a snapshot of tomorrow's consumers. The world they will inhabit, the lifestyles and values they will adopt and the ways they will shop. Sooner or later every brand has to interact with tomorrow's people, so how do you equip yourself for such a world? As an individual, a brand, a corporation?
By understanding the nature of trends, their dynamics or science, we can learn not only to see them, but also how to map them use them to generate products, brands and services for tomorrow's consumers. It's all about behaviour. It's not about dead data.
In a provocative and insightful view of how emerging lifestyles and cultural changes are likely to impact on tomorrow's consumers, Martin Raymond alerts you to new consumer behaviour patterns and teaches you to read a market and be ready to deliver exactly what your customers want. This book will help you to read trends, interpret the discoveries that you make and plug them back into your business in a way that makes it more future-facing and customer-centric.
Learn to do this and you can interact with your consumers rather than react to them. You can build a truly tactile brand.
In a world where tomorrow's answers no longer lie in yesterday's data, learn how to read people rather than reports.
Read this book and get better at
understanding your future customers; what they want and expect
mapping, predicting and responding to market trends before your competitors
connecting your brands with living people not dead data
creating, developing and launching the new products, services and brands that will deliver future profits - sorting profit opportunities from potential profit failures
"What Richard Pascale did in applying nature's living systems to business models, Martin Raymond does for the future of marketing and brand development. This is the closest you will get to finding out who your customers will be tomorrow, what their aspirations and prejudices will be and how your business can provide the products and services that will capture their money."
Director Magazine, Oct 2003
"Martin Raymond is something between scientist and a wizard: He decodes and translates tomorrow's consumer attitudes with intelligence and wit. He uses his phenomenal cultural insight to challenge and inspire. This book will become a "must-read" for the brand architects of the future."
Susanne Tide-Frat
Reviews / Votes
"What Richard Pascale did in applying nature's living systems to business models, Martin Raymond does for the future of marketing and brand development. This is the closest you will get to finding out who your customers will be tomorrow, what their aspirations and prejudices will be and how your business can provide the products and services that will capture their money."Director Magazine, Oct 2003
"Martin Raymond is something between scientist and wizard: He decodes and translates tomorrow's consumer attitudes with intelligence and wit. He uses his phenomenal cultural insight to challenge and inspire. This book will become a "must-read" for the brand architects of the future."
Susanne Tide-Frater, Head of Creative Direction, Selfridges
"The Tomorrow People is a vital and engaging look at how you can gather knowledge today to ensure that, your brand, your product, your service, is relevant and attractive to the customer of tomorrow."
Mark Delaney, Samsung Design Europe
Martin has produced such a practical account of contemporary research and trend techniques that, if he is not careful, he'll be doing himself out of a job - essential reading for anyone wishing to update their thinking"
Jeremy Brown - Sense Worldwide
"The Tomorrow People is for those who want to acquire the ability to read and mine the future to deliver success today. The book is perceptive and practical. It demystifies what good forecasting and trend analysis is about and more importantly, empower the readers to do it themselves. Raymond has done the formidable job of laying bare the paths to future on plain paper."
John Williamson, Board Director, Wolff Olins
"What [companies] really need to do is understand consumer's lives and fit their brands into them. They need to be trend watchers; they need to be ethnographers; they need to be culturally savvy. But they don't have the skills."
The Financial Times
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
Harlow
United Kingdom
Publishing group
Pearson Education Limited
Target group
Professional and scholarly
Dimensions
Height: 243 mm
Width: 162 mm
Thickness: 26 mm
Weight
740 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-273-65957-0 (9780273659570)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Person
Martin Raymond is Editor of Viewpoint magazine (trend bible for the design and advertising industry) and co-founder of the The Future Laboratory, a leading futures consultancy. When not working with the Futures Lab or editing Viewpoint, Martin lectures at London College of Fashion and Central Saint Martin's College of Art. He also briefs advertising agencies on the next big cultural trends they should be plugging into, and writes for Bare, the Independent on Sunday and Blueprint. He is a regular conference speaker, and also contributes frequently to Radio 4 and Front Row, Radio 4's flagship arts programme.
Content
CONTENTS CI. The Tomorrow People - Tomorrow Happens So You (1)d Better Be Prepared! A snapshot of tomorrow's consumers; the world they will inhabit; how they will shop and why the future is less about product specifics and more about needs mapping, desire fulfilment, simplification (1) and lifestyle bundling. Why? Because tomorrow (1)s world will be radically different from the one we inhabit today. It will be a world of bio-technologies and geno-medicines; of nanoarchitecture and technology convergence; one where we will no longer talk about the "haves" and "have nots", but of digital economies and those that are still offline. We will also witness the rise of consumanism (shopping as a way of demonstrating one (1)s politics); brandocracies; triple bottom line trading, even the Value 500 index, where companies, brands and corporations are rated according to their ethical, social and environmental credentials rather than their abilities to generate profits. A world then radically different from our own and one therefore that will require radically different tools and techniques to work, rest, play and succeed in. C2. Devices and Desires - Why The Future Started Yesterday! So how do you equip yourself for such a world? As an individual, a brand, a corporation? With foresight, knowledge, instinct and a technique called cultural reconnaissance or brailling: the deep mining of the future for market intelligence but also for the creation of ideas and knowledge that can be put in place now, or indeed on the shelf for future consumer needs. To understand how and why cultural reconnaissance or brailling works, it (1)s important to understand HOW trends work, WHY they work and more importantly, the mechanics, both internal and external that drive them. C3. The Blinkered Corporation - Why One Man's Prejudice Is Another Man (1)s Profit. Even if we accept in principle the need to braille or deep mine the culture, it isn (1)t always the case that we do it without prejudice, or preconception. Both are anathema to any brand, body or corporation which wants to see the future as it really is. They skewer a company (1)s vision, its objectivity and prevent those in it from identifying the future as it is set to become, rather than the future as they believe it is likely to be. What do we mean by this? In essence that companies, brands, people and ideas fail because they refuse to abandon the banks of the familiar for the supposed dangers of the mid stream. C4. Smoke and Mirrors - When Seeing Isn't Always Believing. When an idea is ready and how to make it ready will be looked at in later chapters, but to do this we still need to know how to look for ideas, indeed how to profile the future so we know which ideas are likely to flourish there. Removing prejudices and preconceptions as we have seen is core to this process, but it still doesn (1)t help us with the how. In this chapter then we look at the basic tools, methodologies and techniques needed to needs-map the future. These includes cultural scanning techniques, data mining, data management, maven group monitoring, trend logging, field research, and data analysis. We learn how to create maps of the future; visual cartograms of ideas, consumers or services that help us better visualize the future, but also to plot our positions in it, and to chart our paths through it. C5. Brailing the Culture - Its Not what you know but how you know it. Here we look how and why knowledge (insight) is sometimes confused with information (data), and how this confusion leads to the building a company, its mission statement and its presence in the future o