Four Trends That Matter to Customers and How Brands Can Resonate

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We’re living in a time of transformation. As is such, it should come as no surprise people are critically evaluating what type of future they want to create and be a part of. While trend reports are a valuable tool for better understanding customers, business success relies on much more than recognizing the trends. It’s about understanding shifts in cultural meaning that permeates trends with relevance.

Our recent research set out to help brands understand what matters most to consumers (or humans if we want to be on brand) and inspire them to create more meaningful futures. Through the research, we uncovered four overarching drivers and twelve trends that highlight what is motivating consumer decisions and behaviors.

Activating on these trends can help position brands to be agents of transition from crisis and disintegration to meaning and regeneration. Let’s dive into a few of these trends and explore how brands can best bring them to life for their customers.

Create stronger connection through social health. What does that mean and why does it matter?

From our choice in friends to how we communicate in relationships, social interaction plays a monumental role in not only our emotional health and mental state but our physical health as well. Social health means examining the concept of ‘well-being’ through a social lens and understanding that, while taking care of the body is important, tending to relationships is an integral component of self-care.

Robert Waldinger, a renowned psychologist at Harvard Medical School, once determined that the level of connection we feel in our 50s directly impacts how healthy we are in our 80s. Because socialization plays such a huge role in overall well-being, people are becoming more intentional about relationships and choosier about what, how, and whom those relationships are developed with. While this may not be as innately intuitive for brands to act on, building meaningful community, friendship, and support can provide consumers with safe spaces to explore dimensions of personal growth.

Understand deeper narratives and dig into how brands embrace consumers’ ever-evolving scripts.

Through the pandemic, and now in a post-pandemic era, more people are spending time looking introspectively and developing a deeper understanding of what they want out of life. For example, if/or when people marry has changed, not having children by choice is becoming more mainstream, and even choosing to live a nomad lifestyle over buying a home.

The concept of an ever-evolving script is playing out in multiple sectors. An excellent example can be found in Silver Nest, an app geared toward making home-sharing a common practice. It helps people find roommates with similar lifestyles and often pairs different generations together, so you’ll see college students with seniors seeking a lot of the same lifestyle activities and wanting to save money and resources simultaneously. Consumers are bending age-old traditions and paving new ways for themselves, so it’s important to keep connected to ensure brands remain relevant and inclusive.

Supportive systems drive the desire for adaptive essentials, how can brands provide them to consumers?

From a consumer perspective, many are in search of pragmatic solutions to support them in their growing need to become more self-sustaining. After the volatility in the last few years, many are looking not only for ways to survive but also trying to be more conscious of what they consume. With unprecedented events becoming the norm, there is an underlying desire to be ready for any surprise or change – and with that, consumers need brands to help them prepare for the ‘expected unexpected’ of life.

A good example can be found in VISA’s future card. It was created to make sustainable decisions and purchases more accessible and affordable for everyone; it works differently than a revolving card by linking directly to a bank account and rewards users with 6% cashback for climate-smart spending and 1% for everything else. In turn, giving customers meaningful cash-oriented rewards while altruistically rewarding them for making eco-conscious purchases.

Across other sectors, brands have an opportunity to build systems that fulfilling on consumers underlying need while also providing avenues to give back both personally and globally.

Integrate wonder, how can brands help consumers live life rewilded?

In line with the desire to do and live better, our research uncovered that many humans want more physical life experiences and have the curiosity to offset digital overload. Many are looking for opportunities to ‘rewild’ their lives – through travel, transportation, home décor, or even entertainment.

The US National Parks are full of wonders, but most people don’t get the chance to visit in person. While nothing beats the real thing, the National Parks Service (NPS) is taking this trend to heart and bringing the beauty of national parks to everyone, regardless of accessibility. Harnessing Google’s technology, the NPS created a 360-degree virtual tour through some of the most remote and breathtaking places in five different National Parks.

The big picture

Consumer trends are important at face value, and they hold even more value when positioned as guidelines and trajectories of cultural meaning. When brands can tap into the human drivers that are motivating their decisions, they are able to connect with consumers beyond the final transaction which leads to long-standing loyalty.

Patricia Salamone
A career strategist having worked across the financial services, CPG, media and telecom sectors, Patricia seeks resonance with every problem she is hired to solve. She sees innovation through the lens of human need, framing what is to be solved not through the problem at hand, but rather the mystery to be unraveled. Innovation work, she believes, does not simply exist across a spectrum of incremental to disruptive, rather it occurs in the form of equity to be stretched, product lines to be extended, and positioning strategies to be reimagined.

1 COMMENT

  1. Thank you for sharing your insights on the four trends that resonate with consumers and how brands can activate them.

    I completely agree that understanding cultural shifts and values that permeate trends is crucial for brands to establish meaningful connections with their customers and foster brand loyalty. How can brands stay relevant and adaptive to changing consumer behaviour in the long run? Are there any notable examples of brands that have maintained their relevance and resonance by responding to broader social and cultural shifts?

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