Kantar Futures (the leading global futures consultancy and part of the Kantar Group of WPP) is launching a major new initiative and program of thought leadership which will see the company focus its analytical efforts on one overarching topic – The Future of Consumption.
For the rest of 2017 and 2018, every piece of work Kantar Futures does (including white papers, podcasts, videos, infographics and slide shows) will consider at its heart the fundamental changes to the nature of consumers, how and what they consume and their relationships with the companies and brands that provide them with what they consume.
The Future of Consumption program is launching this week with a white paper introducing ‘The Third Age of Consumption’. All future content and thinking will be hosted in a new Kantar Futures web portal which articulates the argument for how the world is moving to a Third Age of Consumption and, going forward, will provide a framework for future research and reports.
J. Walker Smith, Executive Chairman of Kantar Futures, says: “The First Age of Consumption was an age of exploration and luxury for the few. The Second Age was about machinery and the democratization of the marketplace. The Third Age will be post-industrial, high tech, decentralized, disintermediated – and mindful. It will be defined by the manifold challenges of capacity – consumers’ capacity to process myriad marketing messages, companies’ economic capacity and the planet’s capacity to provide resources, to name just a few.”
Smith adds that modern brands were a creation of the Second Age of Consumption, the age of plenty and that “it is no surprise that many brands are struggling as the marketplace starts to come to terms with the new challenges of capacity.”
Topics which Kantar Futures plans to explore throughout 2017 include*:
- New Business Models, not New Products
- Social not Product Innovation
- Centennials not Millennials
- Doing Stuff, not Owning Stuff
- Access, not Ownership
*More details on each of the topics can be found here: http://thefuturescompany.com/the-future-of-consumption/
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http://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/11648eff-7ada-4afa-bfa4-c3cfc6d2b001
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A photo accompanying this announcement is available at http://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/e5c17be5-b10d-4c9b-9af9-69d2f93c1b6a
