Analyzing the present...

...because you deserve to know the future.

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Works Cited

Credit where credit is due, here are all the articles and other sources I have investigated to conclude these results so far, which have been referred to in-text as well:

Apple. (2016). AirPods. Retrieved from apple.com: https://www.apple.com/lae/airpods/

Baer, D. (2016). Americans Spend More on Restaurants Than Groceries, Because of Huge Social Changes. Retrieved from nymag.com: http://nymag.com/scienceofus/2016/06/americans-spend-more-on-restaurants-than-groceries.html

Clay, R. A. (2011). Stressed America. Retrieved from apa.org: http://www.apa.org/monitor/2011/01/stressed-america.aspx

Hirschberg, C., Rajko, A., Schumacher, T., & Wrulich, M. (2016, November). The changing market for food delivery. Retrieved from mckinsey.com: http://www.mckinsey.com/industries/high-tech/our-insights/the-changing-market-for-food-delivery

Hot Air Balloon Physics. (2009). Retrieved from http://www.real-world-physics-problems.com/hot-air-balloon-physics.html

Hubble, E. (2017, February 7). Technology will continue to propel the industry forward. Retrieved from veinteractive.com: https://www.veinteractive.com/blog/7-food-delivery-trends-2017/

Justin.tv. (2017, May). Retrieved from wikipedia.org: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Justin.tv

Kanter, R. M. (2012, September). Ten Reasons People Resist Change. Retrieved from hbr.org: https://hbr.org/2012/09/ten-reasons-people-resist-chang

Mander, J. (2016). Trends 2016: Rise of Live Streaming. Retrieved from blog.globalwebindex.net: http://blog.globalwebindex.net/chart-of-the-day/trends-2016-rise-of-live-streaming/

Montgolfier brothers. (2017, May 23). Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montgolfier_brothers

Pappas, S. (2017, May 19). Fidget Spinners: What They Are, How They Work and Why the Controversy. Retrieved from livescience.com: http://www.livescience.com/58916-fidget-spinner-faq.html

Perkins, C. (n.d.). Political Problems Affecting the Restaurant Industry. Retrieved from smallbusiness.chron.com: http://smallbusiness.chron.com/political-problems-affecting-restaurant-industry-62098.html

Pierce, D. (2017). Apple Airpods: Review. Retrieved from wired.com: https://www.wired.com/2017/04/review-apple-airpods/

Trandafir, L. (2016). How To Make Live Video Part Of Your Music Promotion. Retrieved from blog.landr.com: http://blog.landr.com/make-live-video-part-music-promotion/

Wikipedia. (2017). Balloon (aeronautics). Retrieved from wikipedia.org: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balloon_(aeronautics)

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Current Concept: Fidget Spinners

Based on the mega-trend surrounding the need for order and routine, we as people do all sorts of things to reduce stress and keep our lives as systematic and routine-based as possible. This product is actually marketed as a tool for people with hyperactivity disorder, attention deficit, autism etc. (Pappas, 2017).

The core of the concept lies within the spinning nature of the toy. People are attracted to the crisp design and fun movement. The way these spinners are weighted with a ball-bearing content, the momentum is pleasing in a sensory way to the consumer. There is no practical use to the product, which was never the intention of the creators in the first place.

However, the fidget spinners have raised quite some controversy, which is mostly due to numerous schools and teachers banning them in classrooms (Pappas, 2017).

Social media tends to magnify everything that is going on around us, which has led to livestreams where people tally viewers’ votes based on ‘react’ emoticons.

To legally protect this concept, the individual components of the fidget spinner must be free of any copyright claims, and the whole concept must have been filed with a court of law in order to protect it.

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Current Concept: Apple Airpods

In August 2016, Apple conducted testing for their new concept, called “Airpods”. This concept revitalized the concept of wireless headphones as a whole (Apple, 2016). For Apple as a company, the significance of ‘user-friendly products’ shows with this concept, as it is both easy in use, and fairly simple design-wise.

The core of the wireless headphone concept which eventually lead to Apple Airpods lies within the sake of convenience. No long wires resulting in messy knots, no faulty audio leading from broken wires, etc. One will generally compare these advantages with the disadvantage of having to make use of Bluetooth all the time. Even though many still use headphones with wires, the concept is slowly catching on. We are past the point of innovators within the innovation adoption cycle (Figure 2) of products that adapted this concept and are now somewhere during the early adoption stage.

While having skyrocketed in the news upon release, the Airpods have not quite taken off in the way Apple would have hoped. In theory, the idea seems flawless, but there are simply so many downsides to consider that it would outweigh the positives for the majority of consumers. For instance, headphones are quite big, but these little earphones are so tiny and easy to lose track of in case you accidentally drop them in public. In the near future it is fair to assume that a lot of adjustments will have been made to the concept to make it more suitable for the average consumer, but as of now, it just seems like a very flawed alternative of Bluetooth headsets (Pierce, 2017).

To claim the concept of the Airpods, Apple has attached their company name to the product and filed this concept with a court of law to protect it. This has given them the trademark for “Apple Airpods”. Bluetooth earphones and headphones are free for use since they are just a type of product and cannot be claimed as a whole.

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Current Concept: Live Streaming as a Promotion Tool

Live streaming is a trend that has been long foreseen. That said, not until very recently has the live streaming industry been this booming. The concept of using live streams as a tool of promotion has been implemented into marketing strategies very recently. One of the earliest competitors in the field of live streaming was Justin.tv, as far back as March 2007 (Justin.tv, 2017). This platform allowed people to create so-called ‘channels’ and stream self-generated content to be streamed online for the whole world to see. Soon enough, Justin.tv got taken over by “twitch.tv” which continued to be the most popular platform for gaming live streams. Through other social media platforms such as YouTube and Facebook, this concept became more popular amongst non-gaming communities and we have now arrived at a time where streaming real life activities has become somewhat usual (Mander, 2016).

The core of the concept lies in the way in which social media promotes sharing experiences of any kind. First, Facebook was mainly used to share stories and pictures that one might find worth sharing. As of recently, the simplicity of turning on a live stream made it so accessible to the public that a wider margin of the population started ‘trying it out’, which led to interest of viewers increasing and trying it out themselves.

Various artists have tried to use the concept of promotional live streaming to boost their musical careers, and it proven to make a more lasting impact on the fans, especially when they perform activities similar to the content they are trying to sell, like playing a DJ set (Trandafir, 2016).

The use of livestreams as a promotional tool is not a concept by itself, it is a trend which seems to get overtaken by certain copanies who attach their name to it. Thus, organizations like Twitch and Facebook market their livestream tools in a way that enables users to make use of the streaming opportunity the way they like to. For this purpose, these organizations are allowed to claim a copyright on “(Company) Livestream)”.

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Past Concept: Hot Air Balloons

The fact that birds are flying all around us alone was plenty of proof that the concept of flying is indeed there. Around the 15th century, people started experimenting with wacky ways to be able to lift themselves up in the air by means of wings attached to the arms, these are called ‘ornithopters’.

The first recorded flight by man however, took place in a hot air balloon, in 1783 (Wikipedia, 2017). The Montgolfier brothers did so in Paris, and reached and approximately topped at 150 meters.

The thing that makes hot air balloons so interesting conceptually, is that they are very simple yet extremely effective for what they are set out to do. The air inside the balloon gets heated with a type of gas that is lighter than its surroundings, which leads to the balloon rising (Hot Air Balloon Physics, 2009). Up until this day, helium is still used for all types of aircrafts, which shows the immense impact it must have had initially when its purpose was reinvented and basic scientific knowledge was put to use back in 1783.

The core of its concept lies with the element of morbid curiosity. What makes it possible for, for example birds, to fly naturally? And if this is investigated thoroughly, would artificial wings be able to replicate this system if we get to a point where the technology is advanced enough? This craving to create ‘ornithopters’ was obviously very risky, so hot air balloons became a popular concept from the late 1700’s onward which allowed scientists to study and test the hot air mechanism countless times without putting lives at risk.

Towards the end of the 18th century, patent rights were starting to be seen more as intellectual property right, so the ability for a scientist to get patent rights to something he invented became much easier. That said, the Montgolfier brothers had the rights to their invention as it was already developed into a tangible product, claiming patent rights to concepts was much more difficult back then.

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The essence of divergent brainstorming!

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Future Trend: AI Music

It is already being talked about: artistic products are being generated by artificial intelligence driven programs. You have probably heard somewhere that formulas for creating ‘catchy’ music are being worked on. Based on these formulas, algorithms are being produced to generate music that is generally appealing to the mainstream crowd.

The things we believed to be ‘creative’ professions all the time may start to get taken over by the increasingly profound artificial intelligence as a result of improved technologies. Of course, when products and services such as music that are so widely consumed can be generated automatically, we consider it to be a good thing. On the other hand, an extremely substantial margin of the job market relies on these artistic professions to be around. If all of a sudden the demand for ‘real’ or human-generated – for lack of a better term – art goes down, the unemployment rate will increase which is already considered to be an issue in most western countries.

As this could be the most polarizing trend I have discussed thus far, I will include both DESTEP and SWOT analyses to take a closer look at the positives and negatives. The analyses can be found here: https://ultimatetrendwatcher.tumblr.com/post/161387015637/destep-analysis-ai-music

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Current Trend: Dinner on Demand

In the past few years, the takeover of on demand services and goods of all kinds has become very apparent. People do not let TV channels, cinemas and/or radio stations dictate when and where they listen to music, watch TV shows or watch movies. Most notably though, the food delivery market is believed to reach an amount of €20.000.000.000 roughly 8 years from now (Hirschberg, Rajko, Schumacher, & Wrulich, 2016). A big reason for this is the increasingly globalizing world with new technologies being implemented at a quick rate (Hubble, 2017).

As this trend has already taken up a significant amount of the food industry in the past few years and can most definitely already be considered a major trend, this is a current trend. However, it is expected that the role that dinner on demand plays in the food and delivery industry will be even more significant in the future.

The majority of the current contenders in the food delivery industry are no longer in the stage of reinventing the concept. Rather, they try to outdo their competitors by differentiating on customer service/communication-related fields. This makes for some interesting discussion about the food delivery industry in the near future.

On the bottom of the pyramid we can see that the technological advances in recent times have allowed for a better environment for organizations like these to operate. As such, this is the mega-trend. Next, the food delivery companies step in and make use of things such as improved GPS technologies to improve their business for the consumer level. The micro-trend that started this trend of “Dinner on Demand” was the increasing demnd for convenience in recent times. Everything that could possibly be delivered to your doorstep probably will at some point, and consumers have come to appreciate this convenient service and experience bigger windows of free time as a result from it.

For further elaboration, refer to my DESTEP-analysis of this topic: https://ultimatetrendwatcher.tumblr.com/post/160870879887/current-trend-dinner-on-demand

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Let's face it. We live in a command-based system, where we have been programmed since our earliest school years to become followers, not individuals. We have been conditioned to embrace teams, the herd, the masses, popular opinion -- and to reject what is different, eccentric or stands alone. We are so programmed that all it takes for any business or authority to condition our minds to follow or buy something is to simply repeat a statement more than three or four times until we repeat it ourselves and follow it as truth or the best trendiest thing. This is called "programming" -- the frequent repetition of words to condition us how to think, what to like or dislike, and who to follow.

Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem

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Current Trend: Fantasy Adventure

Nowadays, people have a strong craving for excitement to break free from stressful lifecycles or boring routines, by taking risk-free adventures. This is caused by an increasing difficulty to maintain the balance between work and social life. A total of 44% of workers in America reported an increase in stress at work between 2006 and 2011 (Clay, 2011). This offered the opportunity for less ‘convenient’ stores and services to gain popularity. In 2016, social changes (including the increased level of stress) caused Americans to spend more money at bars and restaurants than on groceries for the first time in recorded history (Baer, 2016). This trend is still very notable in our surroundings.

The basic need that is attached to this trend is hunger/thirst, and the easiest way for people to fulfill this need and at the same time experience something ‘unique’ or ‘adventurous’ is to visit an avant-garde type of restaurant.

To break free from the boring life routines Americans tend to experience, malls now offer a wide array of types of restaurants, stores and even various attractions. This fulfills the need for ‘adventure’ that a great deal of Americans look for.

For this reason, Japanese restaurants have become extremely popular in the western culture recently. However, most people still like to have that western element to it to give it a bit more of a familiar feeling to it, since people generally do not like change of any kind, and even go as far as to resist it (Kanter, 2012).

The different trend levels can be distinguished as such: the consumer level (maxi) trend deals with the restaurants that these people visit, while the mega-trend that accompanies this maxi-trend deals with the globalization, which causes people to associate themselves with different cultures more easily. A micro-trend that could be attached to this is the increasing popularity of Japanese products such as TV shows, music and food in recent years. 

For further elaboration, refer to my DESTEP-analysis of this topic: https://ultimatetrendwatcher.tumblr.com/post/160869025062/destep-analysis-fantasy-adventure

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DESTEP Analysis “Fantasy Adventure”

Demographic: The group that is being targeted with this trend is of a fairly young age, yet old enough to be in a full-time work routine. A rough estimate would be from age 26 to 40. Moreover, these are generally the type of people with an above average salary because they have the time and resources to go to these luxurious restaurants on occasion. Economic: The economic state varies immensely between countries. Nonetheless, it is safe to say that the fluctuation of the economy greatly impacts the way in which goods and services are consumed. Social & cultural: Recently, people like to invest their time into studying different cultures than their own, or at least pretend they do. Globalization has caused more multi-cultural communities to form, which likely leads to the interest. Restaurants merely take the opportunity that has been given to them to make it more feasible for people to fulfill this need of being invested in other cultures. Technological: There are plenty of technologies that enable restaurants to operate more efficiently, but none of these aspects were vital for this trend to take off in the first place. If anything, the growth of food delivery companies hurts the restaurants’ ability to grow. Ecological: As a whole, we could assume that the increasing ecological awareness of the population would affect the trend in a negative way, as having ecologically acceptable food be more dominant could affect the menus quite a bit. Political: The fear of uncertainty that comes with, for example, the American elections, tends to hamper the way in which people spend money in every way (Perkins, n.d.). This of course also includes consumption of services like restaurants. These external political influences are so far out of reach that there is no realistic way of fighting them. Rather, professional marketers try to adjust the pricing strategy to adapt to these situations.

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DESTEP Analysis “Dinner on Demand”

Demographic: The current growth rate does not directly affect the trend, nor does a certain target group stick out significantly. All things considered, the market is currently more appealing to the elderly since going to the grocery store may be more effort than for the average person. Economic: Positive economic growth can have positive and negative results on the food delivery market. Naturally, supermarkets profit from these things just as much (or even more). Social & cultural: - Technological: We may see an evolution in the food delivery market in the near future because of improving technologies. Drones are already capable of delivering goods to the customers, so it will only be a matter of time that these drones will be able to take over jobs on this field. Ecological: The effort invested by our society into ecological awareness creates opportunities for food delivery companies, like “MarleenKookt” in Amsterdam, who put their focus on biological food and serve their food on plates in returnable bags so that customers won’t have to bother with unnecessarily throwing away plastic and such. Political: -

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DESTEP Analysis: AI Music

Demographic: On a micro level, this trend aims towards artistic individuals, mainly the ones that strive to retrieve their daily earnings from the art industry. The main threat of this possible future trend is that it affects the target group immensely, as their jobs will be taken over by robots, essentially.

Economic: On the organizational level (maxi), this trend allows companies in the music industry to expand their business network and employ more people behind the desks, rather than signing artists that make their own music. It can be seen both as an opportunity for the music industry to become more efficient, and a strength because these companies do not rely on artists to be consistent in their output, emotionally stable, etc.

Social & cultural: Depending on the musical preference of the average individual, this may or may not affect the way in which people interact with music. On a long-term basis, there is little to no impact, as musical trends have developed over time for as long as we know. A big cultural weakness could be that we would be less able as people to express ourselves and our culture to other cultures.

Technological: On a mega level, this is modern technology being put to effective use, which is the main aim of developing said technologies. For one, this creates the opportunity of doing further research on what elements comprise the perfect music for certain moods and situations, to which these AIs could make fitting music and playlists. Music as a whole would become more formulaic and systematic, but as long as the result is pleasant to us as people, there would not be an issue with it.

Ecological: -

Political: There are already movements antagonizing the makers of ‘mainstream’ and ‘electronic’ music claiming that it does not have enough emotional depth or musical depth to be considered ‘art’. If we take it one step further and music will actually be fully programmed, there is no telling how these movements will react, but it could stir up political debates for sure. Thus, this could be seen as a threat to modern society in a way.