After an intense and disruptive year, how will consumer behaviors and expectations change? How can you best meet the future’s emerging needs?
For this year’s Annual Report we have selected a handful of trends detected early by our AI, interpreted those signals, and identified 4 of the newest bets for you: a collection of emerging trends that will dominate the future of various industries and shape the 2023 consumer landscape.
You can check them out in full in our Trend Confirmations & Predictions for 2023 report, but if you’re looking for a short and sweet summary, we’ve got you covered.
Scaling-down Attempt
The first word to bet on for 2023 is Reduction (+38% predicted growth in the next 6 months).
Over the past 3 years, we’ve witnessed the rising need for all-encompassing flexibility across different fields, ranging from F&B to Beauty, from work-life balance to retail and travel. However, the concept of flexibility is itself changing. Triggered by the growing complexity and instability of world events as well as the multiplication of solutions on the market, the search for flexibility is now being replaced by a reducing approach.
One of that case studies - that you can find in our Annual Report - related to this future trend is about the Berlin-based start-up Blue Farm. The brand states it is “radically redeveloping milk” with its powdered plant-based products, which include oat bases and oat latte bases. By eliminating water and selling only the fermented plant base, the company is significantly reducing the footprint of oat milk (In this year the company has sold enough oat drink powder to create over 750,000 litres of oat drink).
Hopeful Tomorrow
How do people look to the future? According to our experts and data, the second word to bet on for 2023 is Future-Proof (+41% predicted growth in the next 6 months).
Nextatlas' emerging keywords from online conversations about "Hopeful Tomorrow" among young Ecoconscious, Civil Rights Activists and Experimenters.
Humans have constantly searched for the secrets to eternal youth and longer life; longevity has indeed become a common indicator for measuring health and happiness.
This future-driven and life-extending mindset - triggered by the pandemic and climate change - doesn’t apply exclusively to our personal longevity. It also applies to the lifecycles of consumer goods and is now evolving into an hopeful take on the present, especially among younger generations, pushing us to embrace long-termism, trust in humanity, and put the wellbeing of future generations at the center of the debate.
Frictionless Interoperability
When we talk about future perspectives and evolutions, we can’t avoid exploring how the technological landscape is evolving: from Metaverse to Web3, from Decentralization to Interoperability. Interoperability is, in fact, one of the most complex and challenging imperatives for 2023 (+22% predicted growth in the next 6 months).
Conversations about “Interoperability” among GenX and Millennials with experimenter attitudes will mostly have an echo in the Tech, Financial & Insurance industries.
Since blockchain interoperability allows data and value to be transferred across different networks, it has become an increasingly important feature of Web3.
Achieving it across all identity systems and blockchain networks, without compromising security, will increasingly be a fundamental requirement of the future, as interoperability may allow for the creation of powerful new products and services.
Empathetic Connections
Last, but not least, the fourth word to bet on for 2023 is Empathy (+27% predicted growth in the next 6 months).
The quest for self-care and the desire for guilt-free, indulgent taste and sensorial experiences has been steadily growing in the aftermath of the pandemic, pushing a new wave of hedonism that eventually gained stability. More recently, online conversations are shifting the emphasis from self-indulgence to the importance of empathy and genuine connections to ensure emotional well-being.
Playfully blending fast food with a gourmet experience, US fast-food restaurant chain KFC recently opened the doors to its Kentucky Fried Chicken Dégustation restaurant pop-up in Alexandria (Australia) offering patrons a luxe tasting experience inspired by some of its most iconic menu items. The echo around the activation was massive, showing how food, especially guilty-pleasure and comfort-food, are a mood changer and source of joy for people with an emotional attachment with a certain food: fried chicken in this case.
Consumer choices are often framed as one of the most important drivers of change, but in today’s scenario there’s a Polycrisis (download our report to discover more about this topic) to keep in mind. After all, while consumer needs are navigating tough times, there’s still a glimmer of long-term-positivity and hopeful direction.
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Discover trends and behaviours that will shape 2023.
Trend lines, data, and information described in this article emerge from the ongoing analysis performed by Nextatlas on its global observation pool made of innovators, early adopters, industry insiders expressing their views on Twitter, Instagram, and Reddit.
To learn more about our AI, discover Nextatlas Methodology here
