A painful dichotomy is opening up. On one hand, every startup or product that delivers a positive impact drives customers’ aspirations for sustainable and ethical consumerism ever higher. At the same time, traditional governmental and bureaucratic institutions are increasingly either unwilling or unable to meet many of people’s basic expectations. This has left people clamoring for strong institutions to resolve this tension and deliver positive outcomes.

Here isn’t the place to comment on the political populism that has swept the world over the past few years (although we still firmly believe everything we wrote two years ago in TRUTHFUL CONSUMERISM, that the only possible route to long-term success is an economy and society that promotes transparency, aspiration, positive impact, tolerance and empowerment).

Instead, let’s dive into a much less well-known but just as powerful emerging consumer trend:

In 2019, frustrated consumers will welcome LEGISLATIVE BRANDS: corporate interests using their significant power to call for, promote, and even impose laws that drive constructive change and make the world a better place.

This is an undeniably huge shift. A generation ago, brand lobbying was synonymous with bad outcomes (think big tobacco and big oil). Now, thanks to countless positive examples of brand activism, 86% of consumers want brands to take a stand on social issues (Shelton Group, June 2018).

But LEGISLATIVE BRANDS is more than ‘just’ brand activism. Yes if you get brand activism right, it’s still a powerful marketing strategy. Nike’s provocative Colin Kaepernick campaign earned the brand more media attention than almost any other campaign during 2018.

But, as the examples below show, the most progressive brands are looking to do more than just raise awareness. They are looking to influence – and even change – the rules of the game for the better. And where they lead, customer expectations will follow.

YOUR RESPONSE?

This is a trend that will likely make you, or many in your organization, uncomfortable. It should! Actively designing, lobbying for, or imposing laws and regulations is very different to creating a marketing campaign. It means authentic commitment to the common good. It incurs costs. It opens you up to criticism. It requires ongoing monitoring to ensure regulations are being adhered to. That’s the whole point.

Many consumers are cynical of businesses’ cause marketing efforts. Even those that aren’t seen as ‘purpose washing’ risk being challenged on the actual impact of their campaigns. Just one example from the frontlines of the US culture war: recent years have seen many brands featuring transgender models in their marketing. But these campaigns will ring hollow if the Trump administration succeeds in its reported plans to legally define gender as fixed at birth.

If however you are committed enough to embrace the LEGISLATIVE BRANDS trend, then here are a few thoughts to kickstart your discussion:

First, if you want to apply this trend then know that it’s 99% about listening. Listen to a diversity of voices – inside and outside your organization – and hear what they’re saying about what needs to change. Then act. If you try to decide What’s Best for Everyone in a unilateral way, you’ll rightly face criticism.

Are there any laws that are simply antithetical to your brand values and positioning? Are you bold enough to ‘break’ them? Or at least find a loophole as Ceramiracle did with its innovative China distribution strategy.

In an era of GLASS BOX BRANDS, your internal culture is your most powerful external marketing asset. Could you empower your staff to lobby for new –and better!– laws, as BeautyCounter did? Or, could you impose new ‘laws’ on your staff? WeWork recently banned its employees from expensing meat. You could think even bigger: Microsoft’s initiative reaches beyond its own employees, to its suppliers.

Still need to convince people in your team that is where things are headed? Use Patagonia’s involvement to win them over! After all, Patagonia is the poster child of brand activism. It has followed up its famous ‘Don’t Buy This Jacket’ 2011 Black Friday campaign with all manner of tangible activist environmental initiatives. Its move into more formal legal and political action is a powerful signal that will redefine what customers expect of all brands in this space in 2019.

Silicon Valley took a beating in 2018. But there’s one area where its influence continues to grow, and indeed will be positively welcomed. Among wellness-seekers (and yes, that’s almost all of us), a new mindset, is taking hold when it comes to one’s health, wellness and lifestyle.

In 2019, LAB RATS will see human wellness and lifestyle as an engineering problem to be solved. This outlook, with its origins in the Valley, will see rising numbers enthusiastically apply a test and fix approach to optimizing their health and lifestyle outcomes.

This trend has been building for a while. A host of apps and devices – think Fitbit, Strava, MyFitnessPal, Apple Health and more – have made millions increasingly aware of their health metrics and stoked the desire to be in control. But here are two reasons why 2019 will be the tipping point for LAB RATS.

First, the explosion in direct-to-consumer startups that leverage ‘evidence-meets-marketing’ social content means that in 2019 curious consumers can find – and easily purchase! – even the most niche and experimental solutions for any micro-health need.

Second, continual and dramatic falls in the cost of ‘hard’ science (DNA sequencing today; Crispr tomorrow) means that science fiction-level technologies are now within reach of boundary-pushing consumers. Yes, most consumers won’t personally have regular DNA-based wellness experiences in 2019. But as with the Quantified Self movement a decade ago, awareness of – and demand for – convenient and affordable hyper-personalized wellness is growing, fast.

Here’s how brands across multiple sectors are catering to LAB RATS.

YOUR RESPONSE

If you work in the wellness, beauty or food and beverage sectors then your head is probably already buzzing with opportunities.

Of course, there are many ways to approach this. Kolibri ripped up the rule book on packaged beverages and developed a bottle format that gives customers greater control. Pax’s ‘session control’ feature brings data-driven precision to a traditionally ad hoc habit. Nestlé’s Wellness Ambassador program brings DNA science to everyday diet and lifestyle.

But you can still tap into this trend even if you’re not in those sectors, or if you don’t sell consumable products. Think expansively about the personalized wellness-related lifestyle services you could offer? We can easily imagine travelers welcoming an airline or hotel chain offering them Timeshifter’s jetlag-beating app.

Indeed, no sector is off-limits when it comes to expectations around constant optimization, driven by the mainstreaming of the engineering mindset. Take insurance. Trov, an on-demand insurance startup that expanded to the US in July 2018. It offers customers item-by-item coverage (more control!), while its Smart Premium automatically responds to changes in items’ value (measure and optimize!). Or furniture. Tom Dixon’s IKEA collaboration encourages a test and fix approach via user ‘hacks’ and customization.

Whichever sector you’re in, focus on empowering your customers to understand, control, test and fix every aspect of their experience and you’ll speak to the new expectations at the heart of the LAB RATS trend.

You’re undoubtedly working to tick the positive impact box. Perhaps you have a related KPI or two. But are you really making a difference? A lasting, meaningful difference that will be felt by future generations? Cynical consumers don’t think so either.

That’s why in 2019, the boldest and most inspiring organizations will embrace OPEN SOURCE SOLUTIONS: sharing and even giving away their innovative solutions to our toughest shared problems.    

What’s bringing this trend to the top of the sustainable and ethical business agenda?

First, it’s now simply assumed your organization is working to reduce its impact. For example, the Ellen MacArthur Foundation announced in October 2018 that over 250 organizations, including PepsiCo, Coca-Cola, Unilever and H&M, had signed its pledge to eliminate single-use non-recycled plastics by 2025. This is good news, of course. But these important and ambitious efforts have become background noise to many consumers. Fair? No, but it’s the truth. Organizations that wish to differentiate themselves – to set expectations – must do even more.

Combine this with the fact that while mega-brands keep getting bigger, they are often still tiny players in the epic arena that is modern consumerism. One telling example: McDonald’s and Starbucks with their global footprints still only distribute 4% of the estimated 600 billion cups the world uses each year. The takeaway here? Even global mega-brands can’t solve our toughest shared problems alone. But one way they can make a transformative difference? Leverage their resources to create powerful new solutions – and then share those solutions with the world.

With that in mind, let’s take a look at the most exciting frontier in sustainability, where pioneering brands are creating – and then sharing – OPEN SOURCE SOLUTIONS:

YOUR RESPONSE?

This is one of the biggest and most impactful trends we’ve ever published! It should challenge and excite you in equal measure. But let’s take a moment to note that while the innovations above might be new,  the underlying thinking isn’t. In 1959, Volvo invented the three-point seat belt. Next, they famously made the patent available to everyone in the interests of public safety. It’s estimated that since then the invention has saved over 1 million lives. The brand still (rightly!) celebrates this decision. What could you do in 2019 that you can still talk about in 60 years time?!

Feeling inspired by OPEN SOURCE SOLUTIONS? Here are a couple of thoughts to get you started:

Don’t wait until you’ve got a solution before you start collaborating and sharing. After all, it’s unlikely you’ll be able to solve huge industry-wide issues on your own. NextWave is a collaboration of ten companies from different sectors, all focused on the issue of ocean-bound plastics. Fierce ride-hailing competitors Uber and Lyft are working together (!) with Ford and SharedStreets, a data platform to solve urban congestion. AllBirds tapped petrochemical company Braskem for its SweetFoam soles. Who’s your perfect partner?

Yes, sustainability is an obvious target. But don’t limit yourself to eco-issues. Starbucks’ open sourcing of its racial bias training shows there are other socio-cultural issues where you can help contribute to a better future (even if this wasn’t exactly a planned move).

But the first questions to ask are radically simple ones: where are we making a positive impact? Could we have an exponentially bigger impact if we shared what we’re doing? What’s stopping us?

On that final question: don’t hide behind outdated notions of ‘competitive advantage’. The long-term benefits you’ll get from being seen as a leader will far outweigh any short-term benefits from a specific material or process. Leave a legacy!

The previously mentioned techlash of 2018 has many parts. Some have been outraged at where their data ends up. Others resent the negative social impacts that the tech giants have fueled. Others still are frustrated at the mismatch between what tech promises and what it delivers.

Here we’ll look at one key pain point which, like most pain points, also contains an epic opportunity for those organizations that are able to resolve it.

In 2019, rising numbers of consumers will demand SUPERHUMAN RESOURCES: ethical AI and algorithms that deliver fair and unbiased decisions.

Why is this the key technology challenge for 2019? Recent years have seen rising awareness of both how much of our lives are shaped by decisions made by AI and algorithms, but also just how fallible and biased decisions made by those algorithms can be. The news keeps coming, and it isn’t pretty: take evidence of facial recognition systems being significantly more reliable on white male faces (what a surprise ?), or worse disproportionately flagging black politicians as criminals. Or Amazon discontinuing its algorithmically-fueled hiring tool, which turned out to be biased against women.

The result? A deep shift in attitudes to technology. In a survey of 27,000 consumers in eight markets, 97% of consumers now expect brands to use technology ethically. Hardly surprising. More interestingly, 94% now say if not then governments should step in. That’s a profound change from the era when tech companies could do no wrong…

Let’s take a look at organizations at the leading edge of this trend:

YOUR RESPONSE?

Step one when it comes to applying this trend? Ensure your existing AIs and algorithms are ethical and unbiased. When consumers see tech giants such as Facebook and IBM making changes to do just that, what changes will they start to expect from you?

But if you’re not a tech giant, don’t think this trend is out of reach. Perhaps you could partner with an AI startup to use data to shine a powerful light on an important issue, as Forbes Brasil did? Or even better, perhaps you have a unique dataset that can help others deliver better outcomes. Nonprofit Crisis Text Line tapped its own unique dataset to create a new chatbot that helps managers learn to have difficult conversations.

But wherever you start to apply SUPERHUMAN RESOURCES, there’s one challenging truth at the heart of this trend. You know that customers expect the people inside your organization – your human resources – to be fair and ethical. But when a human staff member makes a bad decision, most customers will be willing to view this as an isolated mistake. They won’t be so forgiving if they discover that your algorithms and AIs are structurally biased or unethical.

In 2019 you have a choice: make your digital outputs truly superhuman (i.e. flawless); or make them a little more transparent, a little slower, indeed a little more human.

Humans have always sought out escapism. From telling stories around the campfire, to cheering on a sports team, to booking last minute getaways. Increasingly societal polarization, inequality and political turbulence are prompting many to seek out a break from the ‘real world’ with greater urgency. See the near-tripling of Google searches related to ‘anxiety‘ in the last ten years.

Alongside a growing desire to get away from it all, consumers have more channels with which to escape than ever before. Media consumption continues to grow to almost insane levels: American adults spend more than 11 hours per day (!) interacting with media. At the same time, media itself is becoming ever-richer and more immersive: 80 million Americans use augmented reality every day.

Yes, 24/7 connectivity and digital experiences that blur the boundaries of the real and virtual are not ‘new’ trends, but in 2019 their convergence will reach deeper than ever before into culture. Your customer is now a veritable escape artist, able to plug into a universe of their choosing – from the battle royales of Fortnite, to their fantasy sports league – at any moment. At home, stuck in traffic, bored in a meeting…the scope to imagine, escape, explore, create and connect is unlimited.

In 2019, fanciful worlds will permeate the real world as never before. As consumers seek out FANTASY IRL and play on the blurring boundaries between real and imagined, smart brands will join in the fun!