The future of almost eve.., p.15
The Future of Almost Everything, page 15
Hybrid wars – blurring of war and peace
We will see combinations of traditional military; threats and economic bullying; humanitarian aid; paramilitary groups; informal militia (volunteers and mercenaries); concealed, rebadged or disguised armed forces with official deniability; criminal gangs; terrorist acts; drone assassinations; insurgency and cyber-destruction – all accompanied by social media, fear campaigns, subtle propaganda, bending the truth.
The gap between war and peace is already blurred. And future conflicts will be very confusing, hard to interpret – with conflicting reports, and uncertainty about who the ‘enemy’ is, or if there really is a conflict at all.
Covert activities will include commercial espionage; buying members of parliament as consultants; buying up key companies; blackmailing influential bankers, business leaders, media owners or government leaders; and funding dissident groups. Blackmail will be a particular risk for high-profile business leaders who take senior jobs in some emerging nations, where they will be targeted, compromised and corrupted, with the aim of controlling them when they return home. This will mainly be about enhancing national interests and economic growth in a hyper-competitive world.
Challenges from failed states
Time and again, the might of the most powerful nations will be tempered by the difficulties of ensuring stable regime change. Whether in Zimbabwe, North Korea, Sudan or Syria, it will become even clearer that mending so-called ‘broken states’ by sending in foreign armies in traditional fighting machines is a near-impossible task.
One of the greatest challenges will be how to find ways to bring stability and security by other mechanisms, which may include friendly support from neighbouring countries, IMF development loans, NGO activity, use of UN peacekeepers, and so on.
The net result of all these trends will be a radical reshaping of military spending by all major military powers over the next two decades. It will always be true that ‘real’ wars will require ‘boots on the ground’. Tens of thousands of troops, artillery, tanks and other hardware will always be persuasive when massed close to borders. But we can also expect developed nations to invest in more drones, smart missiles, rapid response troop vehicles and helicopters, and better intelligence, for longer-distance operations.
Tribal leadership will also change corporations
Whatever country, army or corporation we look at, tribal leadership will be the most powerful type of leadership in our future world. Every great politician understands how to appeal to an entire tribe, as does every great CEO.
Team leadership is always limited by team size, usually to less than twelve. But tribal leadership can take a hundred thousand people in the same direction, as members with a common vision, inspired by the same dream, marching in step together as a powerful force for change.
Tribal leadership is about relationships rather than structures, aspirations rather than goals. We see tribal leadership in popular movements around the world. Anything that strengthens your tribe will strengthen tribal leadership. Expect huge investment by corporations in tribe-building. Team days, offsites, staff conferences, celebrations and client events.
Every company is a tribe of tribes
Every organisation is a tribe and there can be many tribes inside corporations: front and back office, HQ and regions, sales and credit control, research and marketing. Tribalism in a company makes us proud to belong. Tribalism can weld teams together in a healthy and competitive way. Corporate tribalism raises key issues: can we impose a dominant national culture on a global business – for example, as a Swiss bank? What about cultural adaptation?
Tribalism will be one of the most powerful tools managers use to increase productivity, competitiveness and loyalty. Every great manager needs to understand how to create and maintain a happy tribe.
The more inspiring a leader is, the larger that person’s tribe will be. It’s a law of the universe. The fastest way to change an organisation will be to address the tribal culture. Tribalism is the reason why most mergers fail to create value: take care to honour and celebrate each tribe, and your business is more likely to grow.
Tribes of friends produce three times more manufacturing output than acquaintances and 50% better decision-making, with greater trust, honesty, open communication and respect.
Family business is all about the tribe
A significant proportion of new wealth in many emerging nations will be created by small companies with fewer than twenty employees, of which most will be family owned. They will continue, despite legal challenges, to favour employing relatives, friends, and friends of friends. Expect new government initiatives to help provide venture capital and loans for smaller businesses, as a way to create jobs.
Brands and tribes
Every brand creates a tribe and the more powerful your tribe, the more powerful your brand will be. Apple is the world’s most valuable corporate tribe – worth around $117bn, followed by Google at $107bn, IBM at $76bn and Coca-Cola at $80bn, then GE, McDonald’s, Samsung, Amazon and Toyota. Each superbrand will spend billions over the next 20 years to promote their tribal identity.
Consumers in many nations are already exposed to 30,000 brands. Tribal gatherings are an advertiser’s dream. Create a tribe and money follows. Many more global brands will hide inside local ‘tribal’ packaging, becoming more ‘glocal’, especially where the brand is too closely linked to one nation, culture or religion.
All great marketing will appeal to tribes
Traditional marketing is dead. Customers have moved on and left marketers behind. I have met leaders from all the largest advertising agencies who between them control global campaigns for most multinationals. They are facing an anxious future.
Their big TV campaigns, press releases, mailshots, events, billboards, cold calling of customers or Twitter feeds – all of these marketing plans still work to some extent, but belong to the last century. Even worse, some techniques just alienate customers – like cold calling, or emails, or unwanted ads.
Most young people in developed nations are moving from old-style live TV to time-warp TV, where they skip the ads. Students in the UK spend an average of 9 hours a day on mobile email, texting and social media sites – and less time watching TV. The average student spends 90 minutes on texting alone, and 60% say they might be addicted to their mobiles. So we need new ways to reach them.
But the cleverest campaigns will all be about creating new tribes. So, for example, a Christmas ad featuring a huggable penguin goes viral on YouTube, and becomes an instant hit, with a run on anything that looks like the character, so creating a new tribe.
Selling to youth tribes
Falling birth rates will mean smaller youth tribes in many nations. And here is another issue: radical or quirky, eccentric youth fashions will be harder to create or sustain.
Young people today in most developed countries are far more likely to wear the same kind of clothes as their parents, listen to similar music, frequent similar bars and clubs, have similar hairstyles, and hold similar political or religious views. The main exception to this will be in children of migrants who adopt the culture of their new nation and reject that of their parents.
The M generation, whose entire adult lives have been lived in the third millennium, is on the whole unused to protesting, and is politically relaxed. This may well change in some communities, but there is little sign of it right now.
Surveys of 13–19-year-olds in the UK show them to be the most driven generation for 100 years – excelling in their careers is one of their most important goals. Many teenagers are starting up their own businesses at school, often using digital skills, or are taking part-time jobs. They are also keen to give time as volunteers.
This ambition to succeed is also driving youth tribes from middle-class backgrounds in India, China and many other developed nations. They also want to get educated and get a good job. They also want life outside of work, dream of long-term relationships, and hope to have children one day.
Selling to older tribes
As we have seen, 1 billion people will be over the age of 65 by 2025. This tribe accounts for 50% of US income and 75% of all financial assets, and the UK is much the same. Expect a wide range of products tailored to the ‘grey market’, such as cruise ships, golf breaks and health spas. This is a generation that thinks young, with a mental age of 60, physical age of 70 and actual age of 80.
Redesign for older customers
Expect a rethink about packaging, restaurant menus, instructions and marketing materials, which are usually printed too small for older people to read without glasses. Most people over 50 who stay in hotels will tell you similar stories about accidentally using conditioner instead of shower gel because the text was too small on the bottle. Who wears reading glasses in the bathroom? I realised the other day that I had no idea of the make of my electric razor because the logo is so small.
Some role models in advertising will age 30 years. Grey power will be more visible on the high street, in clothes shops, sports shops, car showrooms, garden centres, travel agents, theatres, cinemas and restaurants.
Personal pension plans and investment funds will be growth areas, and face-to-face banking will be especially aimed at those who are retired. Equity release from homes will be a common way to boost pensions.
Delayed inheritance for middle-aged workers
More than $10 trillion dollars will pass from one generation to another in the next decade in the US alone. These days, people may be in their sixties or seventies before both parents have died. By 2050, they may be working at the age of 75, and caring for an older parent at the same time.
Expect an army of fit and active 75-year-olds to become volunteers for hundreds of charities. These organisations will provide a sense of family, purpose and belonging.
People with no pension
At the other end of the social scale, we will see an elderly underclass – people who work part-time until they drop in their late seventies or eighties (or in their nineties by 2040), unable to survive on miserable state pensions, out of touch with their children.
A huge problem will be growing numbers of people in 20 years’ time who failed to invest adequately in a pension fund. A separate crisis will be experienced by those whose pensions have been hit by low yields or inflation, or because their pension company went bust as life expectancy jumped. Others will run out of cash, after raiding their capital or making very foolish investment decisions, following deregulation of pensions in nations like the UK.
Impact of later retirement
As I predicted, compulsory retirement is already illegal in countries like the UK – seen as a form of ageism. Many older people will cash in a partial pension at any stage from 55 to 75 and will top up with part-time work, or low-paid, full-time jobs for worthy causes.
State pension age for all workers will be set at 70 years by 2025 in many developed nations, for those who are younger than 40 in that year.
However, those with adequate personal pensions will retire, or semi-retire, whenever they like. A key recruitment strategy in ageing nations will be tempting people in their seventies out of retirement. It may be hard to imagine the need to do this today, in nations where up to 40% of young people are still out of work because of economic crisis, but hard times will pass, wages and exchange rates will adjust, and the experience of older workers will be needed.
Shift from marketing to information and revelation
I don’t like the word ‘marketing’ because in future it will imply overselling, hype, spin, presenting a distorted version of the truth. Brands that oversell will be quickly exposed. The best products in future will ‘sell’ themselves. The more you have to ‘market’ a product, the more people will assume that the product is not worth having.
As we have seen in Chapter 1, the most powerful messages in future will be information and revelation in a personal ‘conversation’. At the same time, expect many attempts by retail marketing, advertising and brand agencies to use ever more exotic ways to develop concepts and messaging in a fight to gain customer attention – including neuromarketing, which studies how our brains react to brands, slogans, shapes, textures, smells, ideas, memories, hopes and dreams.
Reaching tribes through social media
Most people are quicker to believe the opinion of a stranger on a social media site than a marketing executive, chairman or CEO. And the more colourful and negative the social media review, the more customers are likely to read it, especially in China, where 66% of consumers rely on social media reports before buying.
Hotels or restaurants that consistently have 5* reviews will be less likely to get bookings than ones which score 4* or 4.5*. Customers want to hear authentic, varied and balanced opinions of real people and mistrust information that looks as though it is automatically generated.
Every one of your future marketing messages, slogans and campaigns is likely to be scored by the online community. It is already happening. So your company ad on Google or Facebook or any other website may appear with a star rating, based on customer experiences.
This is great news for all smaller companies with excellent products or services but tiny marketing budgets. Quality and customer enthusiasm is what will really count in future.
Threat to Google from tribes
Google faces a huge challenge because search results are being damaged by marketing techniques, to distort listings, and to give added prominence to certain web pages.
Google’s answer was to try to turn the entire web into an author network, with each author and web page ranked by the rest of the community for influence, respect and authority in their field. That meant mapping 5 billion people onto the whole web in social terms: who reads which pages, who knows whom, who writes what?
Facebook has 1.4 billion users a month, more than the population of China, and an annual income of $2.8bn. With 1 trillion page views, Facebook had the power to enable Google to do what they wanted in a single step. That is why Google was so disappointed not to be able to buy Facebook, and why it was also obvious that Facebook would itself move into search activities. So Google tried to create a rival with the launch of G+, which has 300 million users – not enough.
Millions of fake identities on social networks
In the meantime, marketing companies have hit back, creating tens of millions of fake people on social networks with fake friends, fake life events, fake activities, fake posts and fake product preferences. Their hope is to influence search results.
There are probably over 1000 social media companies in China alone that exist solely to fool the algorithms of Taobao, one of China’s biggest e-commerce platforms. Each online store displays recent sales figures – and larger figures attract more customers. Pretend customers linger on web pages to make pages appear ‘hot’ on many different websites. We will see many more such attempts to corrupt search results with fraudulent data.
Search results that you see in future will be altered by your previous activity. Imagine someone who is very sceptical about climate change science. Such an individual may think he is searching the whole web for updates on the science, but in future he will only be shown results that confirm his own views. This matters a lot, particularly if people do not realise that the search engine is censoring results in this way.
Does Facebook have a long-term future?
Facebook has made few radical improvements and will soon look tired unless fresh direction is found. Facebook use is already falling rapidly in the UK, a nation that led much of the world in online sales and networking.
New sites will spring up almost overnight, aimed at younger users, but only one or two will become global players. Old social sites will be under huge pressure to allow people to move all their digital timelines, content and networks.
Another major risk to sites such as Facebook is that significant numbers of people will decide to ‘get a life’ by rejecting a hyper-frenetic virtual existence. Is it really sustainable to expect users to spend up to 8 hours a day on social messaging – exchanging relatively unimportant and superficial gossip-type items, one fragment or photo at a time?
The average smartphone user feels compelled to pull a phone from a pocket over 230 times every 24 hours. Head-mounted devices will only increase the number of times we check a display.
Most people would say that social media strengthens friendships, but what about real intimacy and personal attention? Expect a premium for the real, the authentic, breathing the same air, being ‘100% present’, enjoying the total moment. Expect growing numbers of people to turn off their devices as a matter of principle for at least an hour a day.
Tribal fashion, clothing and textiles
The fashion industry has always been about tribes: what kind of person do you want to be? With whom are you identifying by the way you dress?
Expect more tribal-influencers like 18-year-old Bethany Mota who rapidly gained more fashion followers each month than Vogue, Elle, I and Cosmopolitan put together with her YouTube video clips about what clothes, makeup and accessories she had tried out. Expect hundreds of highly influential 16- or 17-year-olds, each with several million social network followers who read their blogs or tweets or watch their videos, to follow suit.
Future of the fashion industry
The fashion and textiles industries are worth over $1.8 trillion, growing 5% a year, employing 75 million people. At present 50% of global growth in apparel sales is in China, which will probably overtake the US as the largest market by 2018. But prices globally have been falling in real terms for two decades, and will continue to do so, with competition and scale economies.
In the US, the industry employs 4 million people, in 280,000 outlets for clothes and shoes. I met an American cotton manufacturer recently who makes 1,400 pairs of socks every minute. Just think about the challenges of selling individual pairs to 84,000 different customers around the world every hour, ordering, supplying, marketing.
Fashion is worth over $40bn a year to the UK economy, employing over 800,000 people – more than telcos, car manufacturing and publishing combined.
