Top 10 Consumer Trends (by Trendwatching)

  1. Business as unusual Forget the recession: the societal changes that will dominate 2010 were set in motion way before we temporarily stared into the abyss.
  2. Urbany Urban culture is the culture. Extreme urbanization, in 2010, 2011, 2012 and far beyond will lead to more sophisticated and demanding consumers around the world.
  3. Real-time reviews Whatever it is you’re selling or launching in 2010, it will be reviewed ‘en masse’, live, 24/7.
  4. (F)luxury Closely tied to what constitutes status (which is becoming more fragmented), luxury will be whatever consumers want it to be over the next 12 months.
  5. Mass mingling Online lifestyles are fueling and encouraging ‘real world’ meet-ups like there’s no tomorrow, shattering all cliches and predictions about a desk-bound, virtual, isolated future.
  6. Eco-easy To really reach some meaningful sustainability goals in 2010, corporations and governments will have to forcefully make it ‘easy’ for consumers to be more green, by restricting the alternatives.
  7. Tracking & Alerting Tracking and alerting are the new search, and 2010 will see countless new INFOLUST services that will help consumers expand their web of control.
  8. Embedded generosity Next year, generosity as a trend will adapt to the zeitgeist, leading to more pragmatic and collaborative donation services for consumers.
  9. Profile myning With hundreds of millions of consumers now nurturing some sort of online profile, 2010 will be a good year to introduce some services to help them make the most of it (financially), from intention-based models to digital afterlife services.
  10. Maturialism 2010 will be even more opinionated, risqué, outspoken, if not ‘raw’ than 2009; you can thank the anything-goes online world for that. Will your brand be as daring?

 
Top 10 Digital Marketing Trends (by Stuart Parkinson)

  1. The year that people get to grips with marketing on social networks 2009 has been the year that a few brands and agencies have produced stand out work that properly leverages the scale and features of social networks and utilities such as facebook and twitter.
  2. The year that brands begin to realise it’s about lighting lots of fires in different places Agencies have known that the days of a monolithic creative idea are dead, spending 99% of the pot on one idea, was ironically, how the clients were used to working… all your eggs in one basket, anyone? It’s taken a while, and a lot of work from digital agencies and industry folk such as Mark Earls, for clients to catch up.
  3. The year it becomes less about technology showcases and more about ideas I don’t think I’d be exaggerating if I said that this is one of the most often clicked, longest played with online ads that has ever been launched. This one probably isn’t far behind.
  4. Someone will figure out how to do something interesting with Google Wave I have no idea what it is yet, but it’ll happen. I’ve got my thinking cap on.
  5. The Android is nigh 2010 will be the year that Android grows and grows. It was released early to fanfare amongst geeks and not much noise elsewhere, Android 2.0 is being released as we speak and it will mean that the various devices that run it will get a worthy, mass market, operating system.
  6. Transparency gets even more radical fmylife.com, facebookfails.com, myparentsjoinedfacebook, untagmondays, textsfromlastnight.com etc, the list is of bare-all, social network based sites grows ceaselessly.
  7. Crowdsourcing Momentum is building, I’d need several more hands than I posses to count the amount of times that Dell’s Ideastorm or ‘My Starbucks idea’ are wheeled out in presentations, yet clients, especially in the UK have been slow to respond.
  8. The internet will bleed into reality People will sort of cut up the internet and use bits of it to augment the real world. It’s a hard thing to explain, but you can see a nice example of what I’m talking about here where Poke London built, using Arduino technology a device that lets the baker tweet out his freshest produce to the surrounding shoreditch ad-men and fancily sneakered designers so they can take a break from Powerpoint and flash coding to gobble a pain au chocolat and a double espresso.
  9. Everything will change, but nothing will change at all Just as with online ads, the sooner people obsess less over media and technology and more over insight, originality and creativity, the better the work will be and the less presentations you’ll have to listen to about ‘Why X is the next big thing’.
  10. People will switch-off My flatmate arrived home the other day to show me that on his ‘jailbroken’ iPhone, he’s programmed buttons on his homescreen which enable him to choose not to receive calls, just be able to make calls and just be able to use the 3G data connection. He’s reached the point where he needs to switch off, and so do a lot of people.

Do you have any other good top 10 list for the year coming? Fell free to post below.