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A Vision of Our Lives in the Future
Ira Matathia, Marian Salzman
Ann O’Reilly, Christy Lane Plummer
Contents
Introduction: The Times are Changing
3 Globally Speaking, What’s Next?
6 Rites of Purification: Body and Soul
How Commerce and Media Work Us: Next Persuasion
17 You are what Influences You
People tend not to think about the future. In fact, I would wager that most of us have a pretty limited sense of what we’re likely to be doing any time after next Wednesday. The authors, on the other hand, do very little other than think about the future – in fact, they virtually live there.
But, unlike so many ‘futurists’, this team of authors has a genuine capacity to generate knowledge about trends and social movements that business people can actually use. And, today, that’s one of the most valuable skills around. After all, nowadays just keeping up with life is a defensive proposition.
Technology and information are moving at a breathtaking pace. We’ve created enough gadgets to keep us busy pretty much every waking hour. And that’s getting to be all twenty-four, since we can go online all night long – to check a stock market halfway around the world or buy anything from a paperback to a three-bedroom apartment.
As consumers and corporations alike teeter on the brink of overload, who has time to think ahead? Or to try to understand the impact all this change will have on our world, our attitudes, everything? The present is overwhelming enough.
Of course, there’s a huge opportunity in all this uncertainty. Marketers have always needed to understand consumers’ current concerns and experiences with their brands. But if they are to thrive in the years ahead, they must also anticipate where technology, social trends and a myriad of other change agents are leading, so that their new products and services will have a place in the consumer future.
Ed Vick
Chief Operating Officer, Young & Rubicam Inc.
Introduction: The Times are Changing
We’re living in a fascinating age, for even those people who claim to be immune to millennium fever can’t help but wonder what lies on the other side of the date we’ve long held to represent the future. In these last days of the twentieth century, we’re focused not so much on the triumphs of the last hundred years as on the promise and uncertainty of the next hundred. If this century saw the global adoption of automobiles and electric lights, men walking on the moon and advances in medicine that have extended average life expectancies into one’s seventies or eighties, what might the next century bring? How will those of us who will be alive in 2050 be living? What will our homes be like? How will we get from one place to another? How will we shop – and what will we be shopping for?
While literature abounds with long-term prognostications about life next, our view is more pragmatic. Here’s why. International. Global. Worldwide. We’re living in what we used to call ‘the future’. In 1955 Canadian academic Marshall McLuhan on Take Thirty (CBC Television) explained,