Inbound marketing experts HubSpot put together a compelling list of statistics that show why the future customer will require new techniques and technologies, especially social media.
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Wednesday, 24 August 2011 17:08
One of the reasons Competitive Futures is launching its multi-client research project on this is subject is that forecasts show that many executives are unclear about how to go about social media for CRM, and even intend to keep marketing through one-way, context-free media, despite the incredible growth in online social activity.
It is our forecast that this tension between social-savvy customers and social-hesitant businesses will mean that the first companies to evolve their practices will achieve competitive advantages in the years to come.
Check out our white paper, and download our prospectus to see how your company can sponsor this unique foresight project.
Monday, 22 August 2011 11:56
Our friend Doug Stephens, the world’s top retail futurist, reminds us that one of the issues in bad customer service is due to the social tension between those working behind the counter and those buying in front of it. As economic inequality grows, social tension will likely grow with it.
Over the past 30 years , the economic distance between the lowest paid Americans (many of whom are front line retail workers) and the highest paid, has been widening at an alarming rate. The likelihood that retail workers are serving someone outside their economic bracket is escalating. A mere 20 percent of all consumers now account for at least 40 percent of total retail consumption — a figure expected to increase to 50 percent of consumption by 2015.
At the same time, roughly half of the nation’s front line retail workers earn less than $10 per hour — which raises the question, how can a retail sales associate relate to the consumer who may be spending more on pair of pants than the sales associate themselves will gross that day? The simple truth is that the front line retail worker of today is less like their customer than they have been in more than 100 years.
Henry Ford believed that the future of the United States economy was tied into the ability of his workers to be able to afford his products. Broad income equality, to Ford, was the only way society could function and companies could profit in the long-term. Since U.S. policymakers decided long ago that America would be a mercantile nation rather than a manufacturer, how strange that fewer and fewer people will be able to participate in that retail which makes the lifeblood of the economy.
Thursday, 18 August 2011 12:35
This episode of the CompFutures Podcast features Australian futurist Paul Higgins, founder of Emergent Futures. Paul has a fascinating background, a veterinary surgeon who turned toward foresight after a simple ad for a futures studies grad program. In this episode, he describes when executives should think about the future versus tending to execution, how the future of trust will be key to our social institutions, and why Australia is a fascinating vantage point from which to think about global business.
Wednesday, 17 August 2011 11:23
More than ten years ago, we were involved with a study on the Future of the Kitchen 2010 – 2020, in which we forecast appliances using the Internet.
Crazy, am I right? It’ll “never happen.”
This is the fun part of having been in the business of trend analysis, forecasting and scenarios for over a decade. You are around long enough to see what works out and what doesn’t.
Tuesday, 16 August 2011 15:16
The postmodernization of global economics started in earnest forty years ago when Richard Nixon announced the end of the gold standard, nominally to protect American economic interests. It behooves us to go back and listen to the man’s statements regarding the decision. Note the dark tone delivered toward “international financial speculators,” a group that is held in disrepute compared with the “working man” and “savers” who are presented as the drivers of real prosperity.
How interesting in retrospect that Nixon’s chief rationalization for creating a fiat currency is that if you are in the market for foreign cars or exotic trips, you may feel the pinch of devaluation, but for all you Americans who want to buy AMERICAN goods, your dollar will be worth just as much.
First, let us compare the long-term suspension of the convertability of the U.S. Dollar directly into gold:
It would seem that the value of gold has done quiet well against the U.S. Dollar since this decision. Or is it that the U.S. Dollar has lost its value? Eye of the holder, we suppose.
Nixon pointed out that as long as you only bought American goods, this would not be a big deal at all – your purchasing power would stay exactly the same.
I guess somewhere between Honda, Toyota, Hyundai, and Volkswagen cars, Samsung televisions, LG appliances, textiles, home goods, and chopsticks, Americans have been buying billions in foreign goods, leaving the United States with a trade balance that has never been equalized. Nixon loses some futurist points right there.
The economic prosperity of the United States has been more than enough to equal the loss of purchasing power of the dollar, correct?
Actually, it seems more that household debt, both as credit cards and student loan debt, have been making up the losses since the unshackling of the U.S. dollar from the Bretton Woods agreement.
Whether you take these trends to be correlation or causation, the last forty years of economics have been an experiment with a new international financial regime. Almost every currency on Earth is run by diktat, which means “it’s worth what we say it’s worth.” The world’s economic system becomes ever more complex as new countries trade in earnest, but there is no longer a limiting factor, i.e. the limited availability of reserve goal, to which to tether the system. The world system now requires a group of like-minded global financial engineers to keep fiscal infrastructure running through policies that beg and pray for status quo stability, rather than a group of reasonably unbiased referees who set a few rules and let the game play out as it may. This is where the intellectual work of Nassim Nicholas Taleb comes into play, posing the question, “Who could possibly possess the wisdom to manage a system of limitless complexity?” Answer: nobody we see in the public sphere today.
Returning to Nixon, he wanted to hamstring the “international financial speculators.” Today, megabanks, hedge funders, traders and George Soros-type financiers enjoy limitless access to Washington policy makers and even get made Treasury Secretary with significant frequency. Nixon wanted to end the crises that enriched financial engineers at the expense of real wealth creators. Hello double digit unemployment and simultaneous record-breaking financier bonus pools. He wanted to protect American purchasing power and promote American-made goods within her borders. We instead see never-ending trade deficits.
Where does monetary policy go from here? If you ask gold bugs, it is right back to some form of gold standard. If you ask central banks, they will tell you we just need one more bailout of some sunburned nation that lost control of its finances, but then we’ll be back to “normal.” If you ask the average working person or job-creating entrepreneur, they will likely look at you blankly, uninterested in the machinations of ultra-high level policymaking.
In any event, the trend lines suggest the end of an era. Step back hundreds of years, and there are no global systems of fiat currency to give us an instructive analogy. We will be creating our future anew.
What do you think? Is it back to precious metals with us? Will the system shatter into competing local currencies? Facebook credits? Giant stone wheels of the Yapman? Leave us your view in the comments section.
Monday, 25 July 2011 09:23
This is part two of our dialogue with Aurora WDC on how executives should be approaching scenarios, wargames and other sophisticated tools to decode the rapidly changing market.
An important facet covered here is the dynamic between using facilitators from within the organization versus working with trusted outsiders to provide intelligence and analysis.
Sunday, 10 July 2011 13:11
This dialogue with Arik Johnson, Derek Johnson, and Dr. Craig Fleisher details how executives can improve their foresight through more sophisticated analytical techniques than have been demanded in recent years.
Wednesday, 06 July 2011 17:26
We are on the cusp of a wave of strategic change unlike anything we have managed in the past several decades – are organizations prepared to collect and analyze information about those changes? That is the question I pose to you in this Benchmarking Study about the state of strategic intelligence.
If you would like to participate, this simple, anonymous survey will cover a few multiple choice questions about what kinds of strategic information you see in your career, how often it comes by, who uses it, and the culture around it.
Please feel free to share this link, and when we have a significant enough sample size, I look forward to reporting the findings publicly. I look forward to your participation and to what will no doubt be fascinating results.
Create your free online surveys with SurveyMonkey, the world’s leading questionnaire tool.
Thursday, 30 June 2011 11:48
America’s two reigning experts in competitive strategy, Clayton Christensen and Michael Porter have both come on record to state their worry about the lack of competitive position in the United States.
In this thoughtful video, Christensen talks about the connection between overly-strict immigration policies and the future of innovation in America. The United States, in its zeal to restrict foreign access to America for national security, is also repelling the entrepreneurs who would create new jobs.