Five trends of our world

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

Ford publishes a report annually that provides an analysis of key trends in consumer sentiment and behavior. The report is based on data from surveys conducted by the company among thousands of residents of different countries.

Trend 1: New format of the good life

In the modern world, "more" now does not always mean "better", and wealth is no longer synonymous with happiness. Consumers have learned to enjoy not the very fact of owning something, but how this or that item affects their lives. Those who continue to flaunt their wealth are only irritating.

The number of people surveyed around the world who agreed with the statement “Wealth is no longer synonymous with happiness”:

• India - 82%
• Germany - 78%
• China - 77%
• Australia - 71%
• Canada - 71%
• USA - 70%
• Spain - 69%
• Brazil - 67%
• UK - 64%

The number of people surveyed around the world who agreed with the statement "I am annoyed by people who flaunt their wealth":

• 77% - of respondents aged 18-29
• 80% - of respondents aged 30-44
• 84% - of respondents aged 45+

Real life examples confirming the growing popularity of this trend:

1. Benefit from labor results is more important than profit

Example 1:

Rustam Sengupta for a significant part of his life went to success in the traditional way. He earned an MBA from a leading business school and took a high-paying job in consulting. And so, once returning to his native village in India, he realized that the locals lack the most basic things, suffering from problems with electricity and a lack of clean drinking water.

Seeking to help people, he founded Boond, a non-profit company dedicated to the development of alternative energy sources in northern India.

Example 2:

When New York lawyer Zen Kaufman began working part-time at her brother’s burger shop on weekends, seeking to diversify the monotony of office work, she could not imagine that this case could change her life so much. After moving to London a year later, instead of sending resumes to law firms, she bought herself a street food truck and started her own company, Bleecker Street Burger.

2. Free time is the best medicine

Millennials (ages 18–34) are increasingly looking to escape the hustle and bustle of the city and addiction to social media, choosing a vacation that is more unusual and interesting than lying on the beach at an All Inclusive hotel. Instead, they want to make the most of their vacation, favoring yoga clubs and culinary tours in Italy.

The total volume of the world industry of such extraordinary travels today is estimated at 563 billion dollars. In 2015 alone, more than 690 million wellness tours were organized worldwide.

Trend 2: the value of time is now measured differently

Time is no longer a valuable resource: in the modern world, punctuality loses its attractiveness, and the tendency to postpone everything for later is considered absolutely normal.

72% of those surveyed around the world agreed with the statement "Activities that I used to consider a waste of time now do not seem useless to me."

Over time, the emphasis shifted and people began to recognize the need for the simplest things. For example, to the question "What do you think is the most productive pastime?" the answers were as follows:

• sleep - 57%,
• surfing the Internet - 54%,
• reading - 43%,
• watching TV - 36%,
• communication in social networks - 24%
• dreams - 19%

British students have a long tradition of taking a gap year after leaving school and before entering university in order to better understand which path to take in their future life. A similar phenomenon is gaining more and more popularity among American students. According to the American Gap Association, over the past few years, the number of students who decided to take a one-year break has grown by 22%.

According to a Ford survey, 98% of young people who decided to take a year off after school said the break helped them choose their path in life

Instead of "now" or "later" people now prefer to use the word "someday", which does not reflect a specific time frame for a particular task. In psychology, there is a term "procrastination" - a person's tendency to constantly transfer important matters to later.

The number of people surveyed around the world who agreed with the statement "Procrastination helps me develop my creativity":

• India - 63%
• Spain - 48%
• UK - 38%
• Brazil - 35%
• Australia - 34%
• USA - 34%
• Germany - 31%
• Canada - 31%
• China - 26%

Real life examples confirming the growing popularity of the trend:

1. We do not know how not to be distracted by trifles

Have you ever faced a situation when after a few hours of searching for the necessary information on the Internet, you find yourself reading completely useless but extremely exciting articles? We have all experienced something similar.

In this regard, the success of the Pocket application is interesting, which postpones the study of fascinating publications found in the search process for later and helps to focus on what is really important right now, but without the risk of losing sight of something interesting.

At the moment, 22 million users have already used the service, and the amount of postponed publications is equal to two billion.

2. Meditation instead of punishment

Guilty Baltimore Elementary Students should no longer stay after school. Instead, the school has developed a special program, Holistic Me, which invites students to do yoga or meditation to learn how to manage their emotions. Since the program launched in 2014, the school has not had to expel a single student.

3. If you want employees to work efficiently - prohibit overtime

The working day of the advertising agency Heldergroen in the suburbs of Amsterdam always ends at exactly 18:00 and not a second later. At the end of the day, steel cables forcibly lift all desktops with computers and laptops into the air, and employees can use the vacant floor space for dancing and yoga to work less and enjoy life more.

“It has become a kind of ritual for us, dividing the line between work and personal life,” explains Sander Veenendaal, the company's creative director.

Trend 3: the problem of choice has never been more urgent

Modern stores offer consumers an incredibly wide range of choices, which complicates the final decision-making process, and as a result, shoppers simply refuse to buy. This diversity leads to the fact that people now prefer to try many different options without buying anything.

The number of people surveyed around the world who agreed with the statement "The Internet offers many more options than I really need":

• China - 99%
• India - 90%
• Brazil - 74%
• Australia - 70%
• Canada - 68%
• Germany - 68%
• Spain - 67%
• UK - 66%
• USA - 57%

With the emergence of new sales channels, the selection process becomes unclear. The sheer number of special offers misleads buyers.

The number of respondents who agreed with the statement “After I buy something, I start to doubt whether I made the right choice?”:

• 60% of respondents aged 18-29
• 51% of respondents aged 30-44
• 34% of respondents aged 45+

With the statement “Last month, I was unable to choose one single thing from many options. In the end, I decided not to buy anything at all”agreed:

• 49% of respondents aged 18-29
• 39% aged 30-44
• 27% aged 45+

This can be explained by the fact that with age, purchases occur more consciously and more rationally, so this kind of question arises much less often.

Real life examples confirming the growing popularity of the trend:

1. Consumers want to try everything

Consumers' desire to try a product before buying has an impact on the electronics market. An example is the short-term rental service for gadgets Lumoid.

For as little as $ 60 a week, you can take an AppleWatch test to see if you need this $ 550 gadget.

For $ 5 a day, you can also rent a quadcopter to determine which model you need.

2. The burden of credit kills the joy of using the gadget

Expensive equipment, borrowed on a loan, more and more often ceases to please millennials, even before the loan is repaid.

In this case, the Flip startup comes to the rescue, created so that people can transfer the annoying purchase to other owners along with the obligations to further repay the loan. According to statistics, popular products find new owners within 30 days from the date of the announcement.

And the Roam service began to work on the real estate market, which allows you to conclude just one long-term rental agreement, and then at least every week to choose a new place of residence for yourself on any of the three continents covered by the service. All residential properties Roam works with are equipped with high-speed Wi-Fi and state-of-the-art kitchen facilities.

Trend 4: the downside of technical progress

Does technology improve our daily lives, or only complicate it? Technology has truly made people's lives more convenient and efficient. However, consumers are beginning to feel that there is a negative side to technological progress.

77% of people surveyed around the world agree with the statement "The technology craze has led to an increase in obesity among people."

67% of respondents aged 18-29 confirmed that they know a person who broke up with their other half via SMS

The use of technology leads not only to sleep disturbance, noted by 78% of women and 69% of men, but also makes us stupider, according to 47% of respondents, and less polite (63%)

Real life examples confirming the growing popularity of the trend:

1. There is a dependence on technology

The recent successes of Netflix projects have shown that people become addicted to watching new TV shows in the shortest possible time. According to a global survey, 2015 series such as House of Cards and Orange Is the New Black kept viewers eagerly awaiting each episode in the first three to five episodes.

At the same time, new series, such as Stranger Things and Annealing, managed to hook viewers after watching just the first two episodes.

2. Smartphone is more important than homework

Modern smartphones have become an important part of the life of children, who can no longer do without them for a day. American researchers have shown that the time spent on smartphones negatively affects the performance of schoolchildren. Children who daily “sit” on mobile devices for 2-4 hours after school are 23% more likely to fail to complete their homework than their peers who are not so dependent on gadgets.

3. Cars save pedestrians

According to the US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, the country is hit by a pedestrian every eight minutes. Most often, such accidents occur due to the fact that pedestrians send messages on the go and do not follow the road.

To improve the safety of all road users, Ford is developing innovative technology that can predict human behavior, thereby reducing the severity of road traffic accidents and, in some cases, preventing them.

Twelve experimental Ford vehicles traveled more than 800 thousand kilometers on the roads of Europe, China and the United States, having accumulated an array of data, with a total volume of more than a year - 473 days.

Trend 5: Change of leaders, now it's not they who decide everything, but we

Who today has the most significant influence on our life, the ecological situation in the world, the social sphere and health care? For decades, cash flows have predominantly moved between individuals and organizations, be they government agencies or businesses.

Today, we are increasingly beginning to feel responsible for the correctness of decisions that society as a whole takes.

To the question "What is the main driving force that can change society for the better?" the respondents answered as follows:

• 47% - Consumers
• 28% - State
• 17% - Companies
• 8% - refrained from answering

Real life examples confirming the growing popularity of the trend:

1. Business must be honest with consumers

The American online store Everlane, specializing in the sale of clothing, builds its business on the principles of maximum transparency in relations with suppliers and customers. The creators of Everlane have abandoned the exorbitant markups that the fashion industry is famous for and openly show on their website what the final price of each item is based on - the website displays the cost of material, labor and transportation.

2. Prices must be affordable for consumers

The international humanitarian organization Médecins Sans Frontières is actively fighting the high cost of vaccines. She recently refused to accept a donation of one million doses of pneumonia vaccine, as the formulation was protected by a patent, which negatively affects the price of the final product and makes it inaccessible to residents in many parts of the world. With this move, the organization wants to emphasize the importance of addressing drug availability in the long term.

3. More and more services should appear for the convenience of users

To raise awareness of the UberPool service and reduce the number of cars on the road, Uber launched drones with advertising posters into the sky in Mexico City. Signs on the posters urged drivers stuck in traffic to think about using their own car for commuting.

One of the posters read: “Are you driving alone in the car? That is why you can never admire the mountains around. " Thus, the company wanted to draw the attention of drivers to the problem of dense smog over the city. The inscription on another poster: "The city was built for you, not for 5, 5 million cars."

What does it mean?

These trends are already part of our life. They show what is going on in the minds of consumers: what they think about, how they make decisions about the purchase of a particular product. Businesses need to be careful about their customer behavior and be very responsive to change.

Additional on the topic: film 10 major deceptions of Humanity