I am a big fan of Charlene Li and Jeremiah Owyeng . Their firm the Altimeter group is doing good work and sharing views on how to practically evaluate and employ social media as a strategic advantage. Of particular interest is their research on socialgraphics and other topics addressing social media. Their concepts show how organizations can utilize social media which gives a voice to buyers who can now describe their experience and disappointment to a global audience. And, wow, are they saying a lot.
B2B or B2C marketers, eager to know how social media fits into the marketing mix, can use Social Technographic Profiles of decision-makers to design marketing programs that not only capitalize on emerging social behaviors but also fundamentally change the nature of the marketing relationship between buyers and sellers.
The future ahead for fitness and wellness or any business or industry for that matter will be increasingly difficult as growth will become harder to achieve in mature markets like the U.S. and the E.U. Doug Anderson, SVP, Research & Development, The Nielsen Company, confirmed this assertion in his recent summary report on what future consumers look like.
Here are the 5 key trends that can be taken from the report with a sixth thrown in for your consideration:
1. The less-developed world will comprise the clear majority of growth and the rise of the impoverished in the less-developed world will fuel increased demand in those markets.
By 2030, world population will have grown by around 20%. Only 3.2% of this growth will come from the more developed world. U.S. fertility rates have fallen by 44% since the Baby Boom peak and are projected to continue to fall by another 12% over the next several decades. Falling fertility, combined with rising life expectancy and the large Baby Boom generation just nearing retirement age, equates to an aging population.
By 2037 nearly one in three households in the U.S. will be headed by someone over the age of 65. Household size will decline across the board with a large share of the population living in one or two person households. Middle and upper middle classes will shrink the share the most and these consumers fuel the majority of demands for consumer products including fitness and wellness services.
2. Businesses Focus Will Need to Be on Market Share
The share of households that have children will continue to decline as a result of an aging population. By the middle 2020s, the share of U.S. households with children under 18 will fall below 30%. This is a key demographic for fitness, wellness and other consumer and product industries. As a result players will increasingly have to focus on retaining their customers and taking customers away from others in a stable to shrinking marketplace.
3. Messaging to a Multi-Cultural Marketplace Will be Essential
Multi-cultural marketing will be critical when promoting a business. The majority of population growth in the U.S. will come from new immigrants and the children they have in this country. Since most immigrants are young, families with children will become more ethnic, more quickly, than the total population. By 2025, the majority of families with children in the U.S. will be multi-cultural. Less than half of families with children will be native born non-Hispanic White. The industry will need to appeal to this emerging demographic.
4. New Needs Will Emerge From A Maturing Market
Boomers will rewrite what it means to be old as they have rewritten what it means to be children and adults. According to Daniel Pink, author of DRIVE, "The Surprising Truth about What Motivates Us", 100 Boomers turn 60 every 15 minutes and they are seeking "Purpose" for the rest of their lives. This is a demographic that research suggests is connected online 98% of the time ! Hence my item 6 below.
5. Spending on Consumer Goods & Services Will Decline
As population slows in the U.S. Household size will decline across the board and so will consumer spending. The impact of these two trends means that after 2020, per household spending will start to fall.
6. To Be Competitive Social Media Will be an Important Tool
Social Media is a missing trend. Those competitors that have an experimental sense of social media's possibilities will benefit. There is no clear blueprint for how to proceed. Social media strategies are a new frontier. The efforts are flexible, motivational and engaging when done well. And, if you make a mistake, they are pretty easy to correct. Reach your customers more effectively and less expensively.
One of my favorite quotes is that of Daniel Boorstin who observed, "The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge." Boorstin, a renowned historian and former Librarian of Congress who wrote numerous books including, The Genius of American Politics, Democracy and Its Discontents, and The Lost World of Thomas Jefferson, was right. Overcoming challenges is largely a function of letting go of assumptions. As he put it, "If we think we know something, then we face an obstacle to innovation." In his 1983 bestseller The Discoverers , the author chronicled the achievements of Galileo, Columbus, Darwin, Gutenberg and Freud, among others, who emerged as drivers of creativity and courage, and committed ingenious acts of revolt against ingrained habit. Great discoverers dispel illusions and reveal something new about the world as is further evidenced by Boorstin's interpretation of Thomas Jefferson's contributions and philosophies, when he said,
"Jefferson, in my opinion, was the apostle of experience. In other words, he was the person who believed that everything had to change. He thought that every generation should have the opportunity to have its own revolution, to write its own laws, and that was his vision of the past and the future"
Given the crisis of obesity "Globesity as Phillip and Jackie Mills call it" should we not evaluate how the growing fitness industry has not really impacted the problem ? Reliance upon Boorstin's realizations and the lessons of history are more relevant than ever, as is the need for leaders to emerge, dispel illusion and move us forward via our own revolution in the fitness and wellness industry. Obviously what we have been doing has not been working.
Could institutional thinking in fitness and wellness be the very "illusion of knowledge" Boorstin identified? Classic institutions are by nature closed, selective and controlling. Persons participating in institutional thinking have to be "careful" of what they absorb, guarded with whom they interact and controlling of everything. Essentially, risk aversion and maintenance of the status quo is the dna of most institutions and thus the reasons most institutions are failing in an increasingly network oriented world. Are our institutions then at the heart of the problem ?
No matter the debate; be it health care, education, or your organization's effectiveness, adopting network strategies and dispelling institutional dogma is at the core of true innovation. Watch the video by Thomas Power who describes institutional thinking, its limits and the opportunity that the new paradigm provides.
What do you think ? Does the fitness and wellness industry need to change its mindset in order to become more effective at impacting the health crisis we face today ? Please contact me Bryan O'Rourke, and share your views.
Augmented reality is a “disruptive technology.” As a result industries and businesses must prepare to adapt to AR quickly, before those who have assimilated this technology use it to take market share. To learn what augmented reality is you can watch an example here or read about it here. Portions of this post are related to and associated with a recent article by Jack Graham which you can find here . Jack is a reputable writer and thought leader on the topic. Suggest you follow him on twitter.
I shared this clip at IHRSA and during other fitness industry event. If you’re a fitness facility, fitness education or any type of fitness or wellness content provider AR has the potential to greatly impact the industry. Watch the example below and tell me, Bryan O'Rourke, what do you think about AR ?
The Challenges of AR
If you’re walking down the street looking into augspace with your iphone, you lose your peripheral vision. Playing Spec Trek, I was having a great time until I stumbled over a pothole while chasing down an AR ghost. I almost broke my neck.
Augmented reality apps that enable public tagging of buildings leave businesses vulnerable to harassment and vandalism via augmented reality sticky notes. AR apps which perform facial recognition threaten to further erode privacy, removing anonimoty in public places.
The Positives
AR technoogy holds a great deal of promise. Better heads up display glasses, are already appearing and will give augspace even greater immediacy, freeing the user from having to pull out their phone and look through it. Gestural and wearable interfaces will let us click on an object or building in a scene and bring up information on it, or allow complex interactions with phantom objects.
Industry standards for tagging places and objects with AR content will allow apps to access public AR channels. And educational AR apps capable of recognizing parts in a machine from the scene in the user’s camera could be used to coach workers through assembling and maintaining complex devices.
Emergent AR Technologies
Two research projects producing results are MIT’s SixthSense and a project at Cambridge University to create positional tracking for camera-based apps. SixthSense (watch it here) is particularly interesting because it’s in the small class of working AR applications that don’t display their output on a device monitor of some type.
Implications for AR in the Future
Soon we’ll see the emergence of open standards for building and tagging augspace, search engines selling premium AR placement, location based AR audio, and spam (along with spam filters). Farther out, augmented reality will completely transform how we compute. It will allow us to put a user-defined skin on reality, radiate and interact with personal area social networks, and wear graphics like clothing. It will enhance our intelligence, providing instant information on anything we look at and cueing us if we forget a name or a face. It will erase the boundary between the real and the digital, turning the world around us into a search engine whose results are displayed on thin air.
Vuzix makes a variety of video eyewear that enables users to view video content up close and personal. The company recently debuted a new piece of vision wear that allows augmented reality functionality. The new wrap 920AR eyewear overlays information over video of what the user is looking at while wearing the device. This new form of continuous AR will have even more applications.
This device uses stereo cameras to capture the video and gives the user a 67 inch display when seen from 10 feet away. The company will begin selling the new device later this year and will also offer the AR functionality as an add on to their existing video eyewear designs. The merger of the physical and digital worlds continues.
I am a big fan of Charlene Li and Jeremiah Owyeng . Their firm the Altimeter group is doing good work and sharing views on how to practically evaluate and employ social media as a strategic advantage. Of particular interest is their research on socialgraphics and other topics addressing social media. Their concepts show how organizations can utilize social media which gives a voice to buyers who can now describe their experience and disappointment to a global audience. And, wow, are they saying a lot. 
