Futures Coaching

We-Think: The Mega Trend behind Social Media

Would communications technology be so successful if people didn't feel the need to interact? Of course not. However, few recognise that our need to socialise and network is growing with or without social media. 

My lastest Slideshare summary, shines the spotlight on this Mega Trend. I call it We-Think (a term I borrowed from Charles Leadbeater).

Many authorities have lost ground due to this Trend, but a rare few get it - and I give example from the banking, supermarket, charity and FMCG worlds.

Have a read. It will take just 5 minutes to update your understanding. Click

 

 

 

How will the past change our future?

Trendspotters often focus exclusively on the future to understand change. But the past gives huge insights into how tomorrow's world will look.

Take Chinese medicine. Many of its ancient principles are now bang on trend and will shape the future of healthcare. How about the most revolutionary idea of Bill Gates - giving away his wealth? Sorry Bill but it's been done before. Canadian Indian tribal leaders already knew of the fantastic status to be gained by giving away all that you own.

How else can history help us understand what's coming next? Go back to the future here.

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Consumer Accelerated Health

There is a revolution going on in healthcare, but it is not 'consumer centric health'. That was yesterday's revolution.

For this 'Growth Story', it is important not to misjudge the trends. Consumers are starting to disintemediate; to bi-pass professionals by participating and collaborating together. Rather than be passive recipents of the healthcare system, they are remodelling it. P2P networking is fundamentally different than the concentric model of patient care. 

Sevices like wegohealth.com; patientslikeme.com; stupidcancer.com; diabetesmine.com; nikerunning.com - are all showing the way. 

Find out more:  Download Consumer Accelerated Health

Consumer centric is dead : The next paradigm in consumer health

There is a revolution going on in healthcare. Information rich patients are getting savvy, demanding treatments from their GP. Doctors are responding by prescribing to patient wishes. The consumer healthcare industry is focused on meeting the 'well-th' needs and wants of the public.

But this is NOT the revolution I'm referring to! The empowered consumer was yesterday's revolution. Tomorrow will be increasingly about CONSUMER ACCELERATED HEALTH.

Under out noses, consumers are reorganising and reprioritising what they do in their lives and what they want in their lives. What they want is more trust and transparency and what they do is more open and internet based. Meaning? Consumers are turning away from 'experts' and finding faith in 'others like them' on the internet.

Disintermediation is happening in most sectors – goodbye travel agencies, goodbye record labels... It's happening in healthcare too. This dynamic requires four pre-conditions and all are met in the health arena. People must want to be open and share information. They need to be driven to spend time and take action. There must be a ready and willing tribe to chat/exchange/advise. Finally there has to be an accessible place – the internet.

Rather than passively react to the healthcare industry, consumers are starting to participate, to collaborate, to join together. This is new. Rather than be at the centre of the healthcare system, surrounded by the experts, together they become proactive actors in true peer-to-peer fashion, pushing the so-called 'experts' to the periphery.

Of course, the future is already here for all to see.

Patients-Like-Me describe their online business as “patients helping patients live better everyday”. They have 80,000 people actively participating in 11 disease communities. Macmillan Cancer Support gets over 4 million unique visitors and hosts active forums and chats. In well-being, Mumsnet  and Nike Running have huge following communities - all real 'fans' and many participating and collaborating with each other.

http://www.patientslikeme.com/

http://www.macmillan.org.uk/ 

http://www.mumsnet.com/

http://nikerunning.nike.com

And whilst paradigm movement can already be seen, I've identified seven levers which will ensure that Consumer Accelerated Health has a growing and massive impact over the decade ahead.

Those impacts will be profound for the health industry – necessitating internal cultural change, increasing technological capabilities and launching radical new products and services.

Organisations wishing to keep ahead of the consumer curve have to invest NOW in the insights, ideas and implications of Consumer Accelerated Health – the central paradigm for the 2010s.

Freeloading

Do you like to get things for free? I know I do. And this motivation is as old as the hills. Perhaps since the dawn of civilisation, people have always wanted 'something for nothing'. And it's not just about not paying, is it? For you get a definite emotional buzz when you take or receive something which cost nothing!

So, as a Consumer Trend, what's changing? What's different today is that freeloading has become much more readily accessible through the internet. Suddenly, not paying is both easy and sociable. Rather than being perceived as penny-pinching and immorale, freeloading is now seen as collaborative and benefiting the cultural commons.

Now, not paying is known as many things - sharing, peer-to-peer, mutuality, swarm behaviour, distributive systems - but it comes down to the same thing in the end - you get something for free.

Here are just a few of the more popular freeloading possibilities that you'll most probably have heard of: music (Limewire), film (eMule), TV programmes (TV Underground) photos (flickr), social networking (Myspace, Facebook), software (Linux, Open Office, Mozilla Firefox), knowledge (Wikipedia, most of the internet).

And as the idea spreads that paying for something doesn't even enter the equation, offline activities are flowing too. Accommodation (couchsurfing.com), exchange of goods (freecycle.org), clothes swapping (swishing .org) etc. And in current recessionary times expect to see lots more alternatives to money pop up. So called 'script money' has been used in various places at various times (LETS, Time Dollars etc) and weak signals point to a growing popularity.

There is a second reason why Freeloading is such a growing force today and that is because so many people are also prepared to give - to upload, to share. Suddenly capitalist principles are being turned on their head. For many, what's important is not how much time you contribute for the common good, or the fact that you get paid nothing for having spent all day Sunday giving free advice on public financial forums. The new form of payment in this collaborative world is prestige and social recognition. And the spin-off for both givers and takers (often one and the same person) is a new form of creativity, innovation and entrepreneurialism sparked by access to materials formerly not available.

If you want to read further, I recommend We-Think by Charles Leadbeater and The World is Flat by Thomas L Friedman. These two books capture what freeloading has come to mean and how its spread globally is provoking a new wave of human enterprise.

Just to recognise, there is another side to the debate, of course. Opposite the freeloaders are businesses and artists with Intellectual Property to protect. The battle lines are shifting but hundreds of cases do arrive in the courts as companies prosecute the public. But, from the viewpoint of Consumer Trends, even if sometimes illegal, freeloading set to continue accelerating. For many, rightly or wrongly, the law is simply not seen as having a place on the internet.

Implications for Marketing: Here are just some of the implication you can expect. Look for new business models if your IP is threatened (eg. iTunes paid-for music downloads); use P2P for viral marketing; use collaborative networks for consumer feedback, consumer research etc; review what 'value' now means in your market (since freeloading distorts traditional pricing relationships).