24Mar2020
For the purposes of both business and pleasure, it is essential to know what is going on in this world – not to mention what is going to happen tomorrow and beyond.
While consumer behavior and other such elements that are vital for most businesses’ success change abruptly and become more unexpected by the fiscal year, predicting any kind of development seems these days downright impossible.
To overcome this challenge, we should first take a look at the methods we are using at the moment.
– We are increasingly using Big Data to understand what people are doing and to drive business decision making, says Tim Hall, Group Director at Fjord. – Whilst it can provide great insight into people’s behavior, Big Data only tells part of the story – what people do and when. It’s not so good at explaining why and how people do what they do.
As target groups become more fragmented and disruption is on its way of becoming the new normal, the whys and hows become even more essential to understand. To build a bridge between consumers and decision-makers, various companies and institutions are creating different kind of trends.
Some talk about megatrends. At Fjord – Accenture Interactive’s design and innovation practice – they are Fjord Trends.
– We envision the technological, digital and cultural trends that we believe will be most important for organizations, employees and consumers in the coming year, Tim Hall mentions. – Once we have collected the initial ideas from our 33 studios around the world, a large part of the work in collating, synthesizing and curating the trends goes into finding robust evidence. This avoids “wishful-thinking” syndrome where we believe we’re seeing things we hope for but, in reality, the signals that justify their existence are just not there.
Then, there are metatrends that cut through every trend, providing a common connection. Metatrends help leaders see the forest from the trees and better understand the big picture of overall development.
Fjord’s metatrend for 2020 is “Realigning of the fundamentals.” Affected by the then-emerging coronavirus or not, given the current situation in the world as well as the eventually upcoming aftermath, they were clearly spot on with this.
The Fjord Trends 2020 Report mentions that companies that have the courage to recognize this metatrend will face many opportunities – along with the challenges. All in all, it suggests the leaders would think positive and make the most of it:
“…we think this is a once-in-a-lifetime chance to innovate in business models, services and products around new definitions of value.”
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During this year, Nordic Business Report will take closer looks at Fjord Trends 2020 and how the decision-makers would be able to use them as tools for better results.
