Life Beyond 2020 — Trends & Foresight for Brands

Innovation | Branding | Customer Experience

Life Beyond 2020

Glimpse your business in 4 versions of the future.
Strategize your response.

Glimpse your business in 4 versions of the future. Strategize your response.

In these times of uncertainty, we’re all yearning for answers.

How long will these trends linger? What’s next?

And what should your business look like when we get there?

The power brands of tomorrow
are prioritizing the future today.

The power brands of tomorrow are prioritizing the future today.

We’ve coalesced the trends to determine multiple potential scenarios, revealing what life might look and feel like in the months (and years) ahead.

4 POTENTIAL WAYS FORWARD

World 1

Techno Heroes

Big Tech saves the day, renewing our sense of mobility and connection—but at the price of privacy and anonymity. New technologies track our daily health and every move.

World 2

The Year that Woke the World

A treatment decelerates the virus, but we're left with a broken economy and a culture of perpetual prep. As bottom-up justice reform calms, corporate leaders take the reins on equity issues.

World 3

Arduous Transformation

Recovery is slow and, meanwhile, new norms take root. Skeptical of re-entry, we turn to interconnectedness. Resiliency emerges as a major trend across personal health, business planning and economic recovery.

World 4

Choreographed Reclamation

Without a solve from tech or pharma, people unite to quell the crisis through careful coordination. Innovation booms and "socially distanced design" pervades every industry, reimagining spaces, places and interactions.

Develop your Future Fluency.

How should your business behave in a future where tech tracks our every move? Or consumers constantly prep for a return to isolation? “By becoming Future Fluent,” explains Valerie Jacobs, Chief Growth Officer and longtime futurist, “you can learn to anticipate outcomes and act wisely on behalf of your brand.”

Synthesizing the myriad signals on the landscape, explore four plausible versions of the next 18-24 months, told through inspiring human stories and visuals.

From our Trends & Foresight experts, the ultimate edit of emergent trends that will shape culture in the year ahead.

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