Every year many agencies and consultancies like to publish their predictions for trends that will affect the industry in the coming year—offering insights about consumer interests, purchase behaviour and culture trends that brands can leverage.
The Nearly Now 2024 trend report is developed by OneMethod and Faculty of Change and is currently in its second year, having replaced Faculty of Change's own annual report which started in 2017. The published report is preceded by an annual talk and discussion at The Combine in partnership with Faculty of Change and OneMethod. This year OneMethod’s managing director and EVP, Max Sawka (pictured top right) joined Kareen Proudian and Jared Gordon on stage to discuss everything from the end of Saturday nights to the commodification of the girl.
In the last six years cumulatively, predictions have been approximately 80% accurate on average, said Faculty of Change’s co-founder Jared Gordon. Sawka told The Message, that while accuracy is important, they are more interested in sparking forward thinking. “If our predictions ever hit 100%, we probably need to be taking bigger swings or be thinking further out,” he explained.
While the Nearly Now trend report establishes 10 trends for 2024, The Message has summarized five that speak to changing consumers habits.
“At War w/Enshittification”
Last year’s Nearly Now report predicted that people would be training their algorithms to show them more of the stuff they want, but moving forward, people are more inclined to manipulate and trick their algorithms to their advantage.
The term “enshittification” comes from Toronto-born author and journalist Corey Doctorow who coined the word in a blog post he wrote in January of 2023, republished in Wired. The word describes the downfall of social media platforms: “Here is how platforms die: First, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.” Last month, the American Dialect Society named “enshittification” the Word of the Year for 2023.
As more people become disillusioned with social media, there appears to be more talk about how to make algorithms work for you, rather than catering to them.
Nearly Now cites Uber as an example, writing that “a quick click through r/uberdrivers reveals over three hundred thousand global drivers discussing things like how the algorithms work and the best ways to manipulate or trick them.” One piece of insight is that non-drivers can download the Uber driver app to see where surge price zones are, and walk to another pickup location to skip surge pricing.
Brands will need to be mindful of consumer’s changing feelings towards popular social platforms, and may need to consider pivoting focus to more local and co-open platform options.
‘The End of Self Help”
Self-improvement and self-help content often suggests that there’s a linear path to success, and that if you follow the right steps, you will ultimately achieve it. What this fails to acknowledge is how messy and chaotic life is (especially in 2024), so in many cases it actually has a negative effect: feeding social anxiety surrounding the definition of success.
That’s why going forward, perfection will be replaced with being slow, real and imperfect. Nearly Now cites the example of the Slow AF Run Club, an online community for slow runners, and walkers, whose goal is basic movement for personal health, instead of improving individual speed. Similarly, “the zen calm mind will be replaced by an appreciation for well articulated anger and irritation with systemic failures. Self- improvement will give way to communal improvement, with more focus on sharing the burden to make life better.”
This trend suggests an opportunity for the wellness industry to create products and offerings centred on real societal and communal needs, rather than mass standards of perfection.
“Losing Ourselves”
Digital interactions have cultivated a culture of expressing multiple personality identities rather than a singular, unified one. Consumers are more defined by their relationships and interactions, than their individual selves and possessions.
Personal identity is increasingly situational, and contextual. For example, there's no expectation that an influencer is being authentic; it is widely recognized that they're playing a role.
Marketers need to consider new purchase motivations, as commonalities based on demographics (age or gender) or psychographics (beliefs, interests, lifestyle) lose their analytical and predictive power. More focus should be placed on understanding behavioural contexts, relational needs and consumption habits that are interconnected and cut across people’s multiple identities.
“Saturday Night Dead”
“Thanks to hybrid work, Sunday night is the new Saturday,” writes the report. Monday has become the most popular WFH day of the week since the pandemic triggered a culture of remote and hybrid work models. Younger (and younger-minded) people are going out more on Sunday nights, knowing that the next day is conducive to sweatpants and general sluggishness.
As the traditional days of the week erode, business owners, brands and marketers can expect a change in consumption patterns and may consider more departure from contextual advertising.
“The Girl Inside All of Us”
Girl was a trending social media term throughout 2023– girl dinner, girl math, hot girl walks, baby girl, but it isn’t gender specific. Saltburn and Priscilla actor Jacob Elordi is notoriously known as baby girl in fact, and the preceding terms all have to do with gender neutral concepts. Girl dinner is a meal comprised of random things one feels like eating that may look nothing like a traditional meal. Girl math is a matter of using reverse logic to trick yourself into thinking you’re being financially responsible—like spending more to avoid shipping costs—and hot girl walks are simply mental health walks.
Brands have been capitalizing on the popularity of these terms, posing “the girl” as the main character of 2024, and thinking of “the girl” is a marketing ethos. “The girl is a shared narrative of an imagined youth state, where there is no responsibility for the greater fate of the world,” writes Nearly Now.
What marketers may not realize is that the adoption of girliness is leading to a consumer rejection of traditional gender binaries, which actually means that going forward, consumers are likely to pivot away from labels and gender coded products and experiences.
Photo courtesy of The Combine.
