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- The New Meaning of Convenience
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Memory of Future Trends, Pt. 1
April 22, 2008
I’m proud to have recently been invited to be a keynote speaker at the 75th anniversary meeting of the Foodservice Packaging Institute. FPI President John Burke assembled a world-class group of speakers and the conversations after each of the sessions were forward thinking and remarkably candid. Personally, I learned a lot by being with this group, always a great reason to attend such events.
Part of my presentation was “Five Compelling Worldwide Trends, 2008,” in which I identified the issues that are setting the agenda for the industry for the next few years. As a time frame, you might consider this: We are about as close to the events of 9/11/2001 as we are to those of April 2015; roughly seven years in either direction. The only real difference is that we look back easily on 2001, but not so easily towards the unknown future.
As business executives, we all need to have as good of a “memory of the future” as we do of the past. What I mean by that is while past events are “true,” we do tend to recall only the things we can picture in our minds. How many people remember that in the spring of 2001 the front-page news about terrorism didn’t include Al Qaeda, but was whether or not Timothy McVeigh should be executed for his part in the Oklahoma City bombing?
Visualizing a “memory” of the future involves looking at today’s events and projecting what they might turn into within the foreseeable future. We reward our leaders in politics and business when they have “vision” and can help us to imagine the future. In order to identify which of many paths to follow, it helps to see what trends are carrying the marketplace forward right now.
The Five Trends I believe are most compelling for our industry in 2008 are these:
• Consumer’s desire for “Convenience”
• The expanding challenges of Supermarket “Made for You”
• Defining the meaning of “Going Green”
• Identifying the search for "Wellness & Authenticity"
• Targeting the shifting “Value Sensitive Consumer”
Over the next five blog postings, I’ll offer my reasoning for including each of these topics, and suggest why they will be of increasing importance for the industry over the next few years.
Just to tweak your interest, I’ll also attempt to make the case that as a market force, the Baby Boom Generation has become irrelevant, and the emerging Millennial Generation is poised to take its place.
The American Marketplace is in love with Youth. Our collective “memory of the future” is about to change.
Posted by Chris Muller on April 22, 2008 | Comments (0)