We live in an age where the impossible is nothing! Society goads us into believing that we can achieve the impossible (Adidas ad). And we are left with the notion that if we think it, we can make it real.
A recent phenomenon in the growth of the consultants industry has been the mushrooming of futurology or futurologists as they like to be known. In the old days, these would have been the back-room boys, slightly off-key, quirky figures with nicotine-stained fingers and ill-fitting suits who whimpered occasionally while talking about morphogenetic resonance or palliative psycho-somatics or similar. Never wheeled out to face the big wheels, but happily left in some broom cupboard at the dark end of the corridor. These are the people who cracked the Enigma code and saved Britain from defeat.
So let’s take a step into the future and see what some of the leading future sayers have got in store for us. Futurologists have given us a peep into the future, into what is possible.
Luckily not all they predict becomes reality, but here are some of their predictions:
2012: personal “black boxes” record everything you do every day.
Why you would want to record what you do every day is beyond me, there are some things I would rather forget. But somehow, with the rise of blogs, video diaries and podcasts you could see this particular prediction actually becoming reality.
2015: images beamed directly into your eyeballs
The new television. Who needs to make a decision between plasma or LCD anymore and more importantly where are you going to put the TV in our increasingly smaller houses (see below).
A neat idea – now you can drive and watch TV at the same time –hmmm? I don’t know.
2017: first hotel in orbit
Great. I’d love to be one of the second people to go and try this out (just want to make sure that they come back safely). But just don’t tell me where all the effluent goes, OK?
2020: artificial intelligence elected to parliament
This doesn’t surprise me. I don’t understand why they don’t do it now. They all seem fast asleep when you look into Parliament TV. What I want to know is how they’re going to programme the robots to lie constantly.
2040: robots become mentally and physically superior to humans
Why did it take them so long? Anyway it seems to me, it’ll be all over by then and we’ll just be human playthings – though they might not have our ability to ruin the planet so successfully.
2075 (at the earliest): time travel invented
A pity this is going to take awhile. I would have loved to come back and correct all the mistakes I’ve made so far.
So there’s your starter for 10 - from some of the greatest thinkers on the planet as to what to expect in the next seventy years or so.
Here’s some thinking that’s more relevant to here and now and it has to do with the cultural phenomenon called brands. In my view, brands represent the single greatest gift that commerce has ever given to culture. Brands have now become a shorthand to recognise your kind of people. A shorthand to state “this is who I am or who I want to be”.
Imagine you walk into a dinner party and you’re one of the last people to enter. You do a quick radar of the room and within 6 seconds you’ve evaluated who’s a friend, who’s a foe, who’s interesting, alluring. attractive and who’s not. Amazing, huh? And all by the clothes people wear, hairstyle, accessories, posture and general attractiveness. This is the power of brands.
What once was a signifier of quality and consistency has now become our way of identifying “our” tribe or “their tribe”.
Another interesting facet of brands is this relatively new phenomenon of what the brand gurus call “brand extension”. This is something as simple as assessing the values or attributes of a given brand and imbuing those values into another product/service, thereby extending your brand to a whole different product category. Brand extension is a recent remarkable development because it implies that the brand has a life and personality all its own and if the emotions, attributes or values surrounding it are sufficiently powerful, credible or believable, then we will accept that it is capable of delivering. So we have Caterpillar –one of the strongest manufactures of trucks and heavy lifting equipment that realised that their brand is known for being dependable, tough, rugged and reliable. Searching around, they happened upon the outdoors footwear market and so was born the Caterpillar hiking boot and urban boot and so on.
This is why we wear Porsche or Bulgari Sunglasses, even if they are not made by Porsche or Bulgari but by some contract sunglass manufacturer. |
