Same, Revisited (Again)
For the third straight year, we’re using this space to remind you that the deluge of annual trends reports we’re about to receive are mostly worth skipping.
Though there are some that don’t fit this bill, the majority of reports you’ll read this time of year point out how the consumer has changed and how wildly different certain consumer segments are than others.
This type of report is not worth your time.
As we wrote last year:
Your category, your customer, your marketing channels… they all will be more similar to the 2022 versions of themselves than different. And, if we’re wrong about that, it will be for a reason none of the reports prognosticated.
So, trend reports aren’t as helpful as they are distracting.
We’ll admit that some distractions are enjoyable, but this type is somewhat harmful: trend reports often place an emphasis on encouraging you to shape your plans and efforts to the purported market developments, which distracts from doing the foundational and unsexy work that moves a brand and business forward.
This year, we’re seeing reports about how strong the consumer is. Yet consumer spending is on the same linear growth path it’s been on for 20 years.
A good rule of thumb is that your customer will have a little more to spend every year—unless offset in the short term by inflation.
The caveat here is applicable right now, but likely won’t be since we’re past the worst of the inflationary period.
That’s not a trend. It’s not something you can shape a plan around.
If anything, and this is perhaps a stretch, it was a zeitgeist moment that could have informed some ad creative for a few months over the summer. But that’s passed.
And this is the challenge with trends reports.
While they might highlight a zeitgeist moment, they often do so late. And while they might highlight differences in consumers, they often end up accentuating how similar we all are.
Building from this is often harder.
Two years ago, we stated:
In October of last year, after longtime Pepsi CEO Donald Kendall died, The Economist published an article about the “cola wars.” In it, they included a chart that shows Coca-Cola’s share of the soft drink market has increased steadily (and still is) since the 1970s.
While we don’t work at Coke, it doesn’t appear they’ve done this by worrying about minor differences among consumers. Instead, they’ve dominated distribution (always have) and created advertising that resonates across audiences.
If anything, it’s harder to do that than to create a bunch of hyper-targeted campaigns for smaller portions of the market. And it certainly appears to be more impactful.
Perhaps, if anything, slides on differences should be a reminder that we’re mostly the same.