How to predict the future | Pavlína Louženská | TEDxUNYP

Transcriber: grime elephant Reviewer: Mahmoud Mohamed Ahmed Raise your hand if you take your coffee with alternative milk like oat milk, coconut milk or almond milk. Great. Raise your hand again if you took your coffee with alternative milk ten years ago I see only Mark almost. Still in 2014, the trend forecasting agency WGSN predicted that plant based milk will take over the world. And in 2017, they added a report that Oatly is that one brand to watch. And they were 100% right. Between the years 2018 and 2022, sales of plant based milks went up 25 times, and Oatly, they made $195 million just last year. No wonder that in that 2014 report, WGSN claimed that they are able to predict the future up to seven years ahead with 95% certainty. Around a time of 2014-2016. They released reports that by now we will all be in love with yoga. Check. That we will ditch heels for sneakers. Check That we will start listening to K-pop. Check. That we will fill our houses with plants. Check. And that for a moment we will consider having AI instead of a boyfriend. Check. When I first discovered the world of trend forecasting agencies about ten years ago, I remember how I called my younger brother. And I was blabbering into the phone. I was like, oh, there are people and do you know what you will love and what you will eat? You know, it was as if I discovered unicorns exist and I somehow did. There were people who could see something none of us could see. They could see the future. So let me tell you a story. How it’s possible that somebody can see the future. What was the first thing you did when you entered this room? You looked around. You looked at the people, their clothes, their facial expressions, their body language. You overheard their conversations. You maybe peeked into their iPhone screens, into their bags. You smelled their perfume or the like of it. Yeah. Or what they had for lunch. Essentially what you were doing is called Kuki wo Yomu. It's a Japanese terms for reading the room. It’s exactly what we as trend forecasters do. We are constantly reading the room. We're picking up signals. We are searching for patterns. We see the world as one global room, and we are looking at social media listening and Google Trends and IPO filings and stock prices and whatever else. We are constantly looking for patterns because on those patterns we are able to build forecasts. Every time I talk about trend forecasting, I always say it's a bit like surfing. Kuki wo Yomu gives you the ability to spot the waves, to see the waves which are coming, and it also gives you the ability to understand when you should stand on that board and start surfing. The best companies in the world are the best surfers. Take Netflix for an example. A few years ago, they saw that the gaming industry is eight times bigger than Hollywood. In fact, it's bigger than music and movies combined. 3.5 billion people in the world are gamers. An average gamer is 35 years old and he has a decent income and I should say she because 48% of gamers are women. Netflix saw that and Witcher Was Born, a TV series based on a video game and fantasy book series, became one of the most successful TV series Netflix has ever produced. In the first month after the release, 76 million people in the world watched at least part of it. For a long time. It was a perfect world. Trend forecasting agencies were releasing reports. Companies were buying those reports for very big money. They were building the campaigns and products around them. And we as consumers, we were falling in love with the products. It was a perfect world until it wasn't. Even though we have the most advanced tools we've ever had, it has become almost impossible to read the global Room. Why is that? Because we produce more content than ever before. In her time, Audrey Hepburn made two movies a year, and each of them lasted two hours. Nowadays, a TikTok star, Victoria Paris, makes 22,000 videos a year, and each of them lasts 32 seconds. We have so much content and we consume so much content. In fact, we consume so much content as if you read one Tolkiens Lord of the rings book a day. No wonder that we need to be connected to our screens 11 hours a day. And talking about the screens. When I was growing up, We had one screen in our house, you know, the TV, you would sit in front of it, 8 p.m. watch whatever was there. Nowadays, an average household has 11 connected devices. All this means we have lost the global room. We don't live together anymore. We live in millions of separate rooms that are changing at a very fast pace. The fact that we lost the one big room means we have lost the patterns. And if we have lost the patterns, we have lost trends, we have lost shared trends. And if we don't share trends, we don't share culture. Ever heard of Bad Bunny? He’s the most listened to artist on Spotify. Three years in a row. Beyonce? She barely makes it to top ten. Ever heard of Shein this Chinese fast fashion retailer is the most searched for fashion brand in 113 countries in the world. Nike in ten of them. How come something can be so popular and still so unknown to us? Because algorithms locked us in our rooms and they threw away the key. Generation Z. Our teenagers are the last generation that we can describe. It's the last generation that shares pieces of culture, that shares pieces of certain language that shares idols. All the generations after them, the alpha and the beta. We will not be able to describe them because they will not share anything. They will not have a shared culture. They will not have a shared experience. Talking about growing up. I grew up in the 90s. You know, everybody back then loved Britney Spears. Low rise jeans and Leonardo DiCaprio in Titanic. Everybody except for me. You know, I was this nerdy girl with the glasses. I played video games. I quoted German philosophers. And you don't get popular by that. And I spent my days in the forest. I felt I didn't connect with anybody. I felt I didn't share their language. I felt like I didn't share what they are sharing together. And I felt really lonely. Last week I met a young girl and she really reminded me of myself and we started talking together and at some point I took the courage and asked her very carefully, like. Do you have any friends? She smiled and replied, tons of them. And she started showing me all those discord servers and WhatsApp groups and messages where she was discussing Dungeons and Dragons and BTS and Roblox and Final Fantasy and whatever it is. And I realized one thing that even though we might have lost this global room, we don't live together anymore. We, in fact, live in this panelak together. We might live in those separate rooms, but you know, if you ever lived in Panelak, you know you are never alone. Internet, It gave us access to hallways, to elevators, to the parks. The fact that mass market trends disappeared is the best thing that could have happened to us, because that means each of us is allowed to find their favorite place in the house. Find their favorite people, and talk about what they are really interested in, like strength training, for example. And it also created the best brief possible for us as trend forecasters. It made us ask a question, how do we predict the future? That's not just for the cool kids. How do we predict the future? That's for everyone. The answer is simple. Kuki wo Yomu gives you the ability to read the room, to see the people, to see their facial expression, to see their clothes, to smell their perfumes, to overhear their conversations. But that's not enough for today's world. In order to understand the hallways and the parks and the elevators. We need to enter them. We need to start talking to those people. We need to gain them trust and invite them to our rooms and visit their own rooms in order to understand what's happening in them. And I think very soon, if you do that, you will find out there's much more than meets the eye. And I'm sure you will find out another thing. That there are 10 million ways how to drink your coffee, and that some people, they drink tea. And I think that’s beautiful. Thank you.