代写The Challenges and Opportunities

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代写The Challenges and Opportunities
The Challenges and Opportunities Created by Key Social Trends

Melanie Howard, Future Foundation Group

This presentation comes from a sociological and social science perspective – one which

uses a rigorous quantitative base in order to examine trends of how things are changing and

to develop hypotheses for research. The historical data sets are from the government, the

British Household Panel Study as well as their proprietary survey Changing Lives. The

presentation aims to cover four main topics:

• Arts and culture in a rebalanced world (talking about the way in which the

world is changing);

• The renaissance of collective concerns;

• Exploring the experience economy;

• Complicated lives and time pressures;

And then pull together some of the implications for arts marketers.

The government is moving into ‘horizon scanning’, which means identifying the unforeseen,

the things that can’t yet be perceived (almost over the horizon). This is different from

forecasting which aims to predict things with relative certainty.

The reality is that the political, economic and cultural map of the world will be redrawn over

the next thirty years. While we already have an understanding of the economic implications

of these emerging nations we need to consider what the UK will do in terms of competing, in

terms of stamping its mark on the world and having a role in the cultural landscape of the

future. One idea is that we might offer Britain as a new Venice, or a Venice of the 21

century, a vibrant, internationalist ‘city state’ with innovation and cultural vibrancy at the

heart of what it has to offer and export to the wider world, and to attract visitors form

overseas.

To give you some of the underpinning facts: by 2050, Brazil, Russia, India and China will be

four of the top five economic nations in the world. The following chart shows the projected

GDP of selected nations

Source: Goldman Sachs/nVision

This is a fundamental shift in the balance of power in the spending and with that the

exporting of culture from those countries around the globe with their increased travellers and

the increased migration that we anticipate in these years. There are already 300 million

middle-income earners in India, growing to 500 million, and by 2007 there will be 40 million

new middle class Chinese. These people will be able to travel increasingly and will exert

their influence on cultural development and exports from the growing parts of the world, and

challenging the established cultures, artefacts and exports of more established Western

economies and cultures.

In other words, the dominant sites of cultural production are changing. Bollywood outstrips

Hollywood: India is already the world’s biggest producer and consumer of films, producing

1,000 movies a year in 25 different languages.

Latin America’s film industry is having a

revival and China produced 212 films in 2004, 80 per cent funded by private capital or

foreign investment.

This can be coupled with the growing ethnic minority and immigrant populations established

in European and Western markets. The following chart shows the Future Foundation

projections for change in size and composition of the non-White British population in

England for 2010

Source: ONS/Future Foundation

There is nothing simple about these trends: they interrelate and overlap. In other words, it’s

not just the growing power of nation states, but also the effect of migration and the way in

which growing ethnic minority populations in Western markets will have an impact. All of

these raise questions about how we think about our multi-cultural future. It’s not just an

issue of exporting, but the creation and expression of cultural difference within our culture.

The question is whether an exuberant multi-culturalism be delivered or whether there is a

reaction to liberalisation and that we might be looking at a competing, distinct range of

cultural identities continuing into the future.

Much of this diversity is beginning to hit the mainstream in terms of how businesses are

thinking, in light of the fact that we are now moving towards a new Commission for Equality

and Human Rights, bringing together all grounds of inequality – issues of gender, race, age,

ethnicity, religion, sexuality and disability – so that businesses are more aware of the need

to provide services, talk to communities, attract employees and make their brands

accessible to a wider array of mixed audiences. Of course, diverse groups are unevenly

distributed. London has the highest proportion of non-Christians, the South West the

lowest

Source: Census 2001/nVision (base: England & Wales, religion not stated excluded)

Part of

what we are seeing can be demonstrated by the general decline in identification with a

nation state as a principal source of identity. Again this raises lots of questions about the

roles that culture and heritage will play in the future. The following chart shows the

proportion who agree or strongly agree that they feel closer to people with the same national

background as themselves, by age

Source: Changing Lives, nVision/Taylor Nelson Sofres (base: 1000-2000 adults 16+, UK)

Last year we undertook a project for DEFRA looking at fifty year scenarios for the future of

the countryside. There were four different scenarios, including the idea of preserved

heritage, which was to say that by 2050 everything outside of cities will become like the

national trust or a giant theme park, playing out modern forms of cultural expression or

playing out a heritage picture of the past:

This is one direction in which one might choose to concentrate cultural work and life, the

emphasis of our historic and heritage past as part of the attraction to the growing numbers

of tourists that will be coming in, although others preferred the concept of a more dynamic

heritage or different ways of taking things forward.

Thinking about the way that individuals are changing, and what this might mean for arts

marketers, Sigmund Freud came up with the idea of the self, the id of the unconscious self,

fighting with the super ego to produce the ego. With his introduction of the idea of personal

biography, of the fact that we are created by our experience of life, a century later this idea

has become mainstream and the concept of the individual is an identity that we create (not

as a simple result of birth) and so the idea is that we can express ourselves in lots of

different ways. As John Seely Brown, head of Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Centre posited in

2000: ‘We participate, therefore we are’. There is an increasing emphasis on participation,

on creating the self internally and externally through what we do and activities we participate

in, rather than simply receiving.

Changing attitudes to individualism and fulfilment mean we are no longer accepting

stereotyped labels. There is a lot of evidence for this hypothesis. The chart below shows a

declining proportion of people who say it is important to fit in, and a growing number are

choosing personal fulfilment and ability to express themselves as their number one wish

from selected choices (including buying goods and services)

The individual is now, therefore, the unit and the building block of society rather than the

nuclear family as in the past. However, human desire and motivation is still rooted in the

same needs when it comes to family, friends and social networks. The family network has

adapted to this society as you now create your social and familial networks by deciding who

you talk to and how you participate. Unsurprisingly, divorce means our lives are subject to

more disruptions and changes than in the past. We asked people to rank the importance of

different parts of their social network

Source: Changing Lives, nVision (base: 1000-2000 adults 16+, UK)

Source: Changing Lives, nVision/The Future Foundation (base: All with relation/person in question from 1010

adults aged 16+, 2002)

You can see that for widowers, neighbours increased in importance and for those who are

separated, their ex-partner decreased in importance, ejected outside the warm circle of love

(although longitudinal studies show that 60 per cent of people who are divorced are repartnered

within five years). For single parents, best friends were seen as extremely

important.

The words ‘family’ and ‘community’ are no longer nouns but verbs: sometimes we do things

as individuals but we now want to go out more together and there has been enormous

growth in the leisure industry to appeal to the family group.

The need for involvement in community or neighbourhood life is increasing as we associate

this less with bricks and mortar and more in terms of who we associate and identify with. In

other words, family and community are as important as they ever were, as is sharing

experiences, but the terms are shifting. The chart below illustrates the proportion of people

that strongly or moderately feel the need to be involved in the life of the neighbourhood

community

Source: Changing Lives, nVision/Taylor Nelson Sofres, (base: 1000 adults aged 16+. UK)

We need to think about the way in which we communicate, considering the importance of

word of mouth communication and personalisation. We call it the personalisation of

authority and it can be seen as going hand in hand with the decline of trust in institutions, as

people turn to friends and family to find out where to go and what to buy rather than

institutional sources of information.

As we know, when products are successful they create a buzz: people who have a positive

experience will make recommendations and the graph below models how this is even more

powerful in a technologically advanced environment, showing the effect of additional

connections on the speed with which a message spreads:

Source: MathMatters/Future Foundation – Complex Systems Model, 2002

In other words, if we model the old networks we achieve the pale blue line, but the increased

number of connections through the new network (such as a couple of extra telephone lines)

shows the message spreading much quicker, and if we model the effect of the internet on

longer distance connections as well (the red line) we see a greater number of connections

still. There is a great deal of literature in this area, including Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping

Point, that might help you start to think about how to use this in a planned way, using circles

of communication to get your message across.

Turning now to the experience economy and the aging population. We have to remember

that, for the majority of the population, we are seeing a significant increase in the older

population – an additional 3.5 million people moving into the 50+ age bracket (the baby

boomers) with greater health, vitality and wealth than ever before. This group is a growing

audience in the experience economy. This can be illustrated by the chart below, which

shows the proportion of people feeling a strong or moderate need for new experiences, by

age

Source: Changing Lives, nVision/Taylor Nelson Sofres (base: 1000-2000 adults 16+, UK)

Across the board, in affluent times - the post-war years of peace and plenty - people have

increased their spend (forming a virtuous circle in line with the growth of individualism) on

experiences rather than on material goods. The experience economy is forecast to grow as

people continue to get more affluent (and GDP is forecast to grow at an average rate of 2.5

per cent p.a.). The chart below shows the forecast growth in total annual expenditure on

experiences and activities that enrich people’s lives (£ billion at 2002 prices)

Source: Norwich Union Life/The Future Foundation/Family Expenditure Survey, 2003

e of the challenges facing you, however, is that there are so many different ways that people

are piling into this space:

Travel 33.4

Eating out 15.2

Going out for a drink 12.4

Sport or social clubs 6.3

Take aways eaten at home 8.8

Hair or beauty treatments 3.5

Gardening products or flowers 3.4

Toys/hobbies 2.9

Educational classes/leisure activities 2.4

Social outings 2.1

Alcohol (consumed at home) 2.1

Live entertainment 1.1

Other 1.6

Total £95 billion

What proportion of these is cultural? What do the arts need to do to compete in this

economy? Part of the challenge is to communicate the experience and attract people.

We are also seeing the growth of the third place or third space (out and about in the

experience economy). Time spent out and about has more than doubled since 1960. The

following chart shows the percentage of waking hours spent neither at home nor at work,

excluding travel time, by activity

With the growth of a 24-hour economy, and thinking about other trends such as working

hours, we need to think about issues such as time extensions (timing events when they are

convenient for customers).

Over the next decade we will see a growth in the number of technical interfaces. Think

about these in terms of how you communicate and bring people in. 3G is forecast to hit

critical mass just as 4G is due to appear, and the chart below shows the number of adults

with access to mobile phone, data-enabled mobile phone (e.g. WAP, GPRS) and third

generation (3G) mobile phone:

Source: Jonathan Gershuny, ISER, Essex University/The Future Foundation (Base: UK)

We should also be thinking about how to tie physical places in with the virtual elements of

people’s lives in terms of communications and with your own virtual places such as your

website – Boston Botanical Gardens provides an interesting example of a simple image and

brand that it uses across all of its physical and virtual spaces so that they tie people through

from the experience they have of the organisation in front of their computer at home to when

they visit.

A publication called Complicated Lives has been produced, based on a three-year research

project undertaken with Abbey. Abbey’s strapline ‘Because life’s complicated enough’

meant that they thought they had better check that life has indeed got more complicated. It

found that in all facets of life we face more choice, more complexity, more brands and more

opportunities than ever before. This means that experiencing life is more overwhelming and

complicated and because our time is finite we find choosing the right thing stressful. In

other words greater choice increases our stress rather than reducing it, particularly

technology which is actually seen as something that should make life easier is for many

people seen as something that is making life more complicated and increasing stress. One

implication of this for the arts is about making purchasing a ticket as simple as possible.

We are also seeing a proliferation of content (a review of subjects covered in the

newspapers found an increase between 1950 and 2000 of non public affairs coverage –

consumer, entertainment, sport – compared with a much slower rate of increase of coverage

of public affairs and international news). This is added to an increased sense of time

pressure.

We actually have the same amount of leisure time that we had in the 1960s (although it

might be slightly less evenly distributed) but we are trying to cram in 50 per cent more

activities because of the experience economy and because people want to be well-rounded

people that participate. In the 1980s a lot of the stress was about longer working hours, but

a lot of it is self-driven as people want to express themselves.

The way in which we receive messages and consume culture in the world today is shown

moving from the left of the table below, to the right:

We have moved from a passive receipt of messages and are now less predictable and less

constrained, as we move around more and have more money to spend. However, as with

all social trends, one does not replace another: one paradigm continues underneath as new

things emerge, so there is still a role for the mass, the collective and the simple at the same

time that we also need to cater for greater flexibility.

In summary:

• Arts and culture in a rebalanced world: the long-term challenges and

opportunities of the growing economic and cultural power of the East and more

diverse population in the UK and what this might mean for arts marketing in the

future;

• The renaissance of collective concerns: how individualism is evolving beyond

‘the century of the self’ to new expressions of common values and social

cohesion and thinking about building on networks, not just individuals;

• Exploring the experience economy: how the growing investment in experience

over material creates a wider context and greater competition for the time and

energy of the arts consumer;

• Complicated lives: helping customers cope with the proliferation of choice and

complexity and looking at new ways of simplifying access, purchase and

participation in arts experiences.

Embracing the ‘F’ Words: bringing futures thinking to our organisations

Stephen Cashman, Stephen Cashman Consultancy and Training

Consider the following breaking stories from the near future. Imagine:

• In 2007 the proportion of the UK population older than 65 will exceed that for

14 year olds or younger;

• A sick duck in China triggers H5N1 flu pandemic and millions of people die;

• Identity theft is still Britain’s fastest growing crime;

• NEETs (people Not in Education, Employment or Training) persist as the

major drain on UK public finances;

• The introduction of identity cards gives each UK citizen unique biometric

reference;

• Slowing gulf-stream leaves Britain with a Siberian climate.

Are you excited or worried yet?

This presentation focuses on the process (the how to) of futures thinking rather than on

derlying skills involved are the same: telling detailed stories about

possible futures and teasing out what the implications might be for our organisations. This

is important, because one vital role performed by marketers and strategists is horizon

scanning, to identify what sort of circumstances our organisations are going to be dealing

with in the future. There is an interesting role here that relates to this notion of horizon

scanning, in that as marketers and strategists we are what management scientists call

boundary spanners.

This theory uses a model based on systems thinking and on

modelling an organisation in its environment (so an organisation is surrounded by the world

in which it works). One of the key roles applies to the people that straddle the boundary –

the place where the organisation touches its environment, looking out and in at the same

time. Marketers are boundary spanners and one of their duties is to watch what is

happening in the outside world and feed that intelligence back to the organisation, so it can

decide what it is going to do in the future.
代写The Challenges and Opportunities