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January 15, 2020

Read time: 5min

Top trends for 2020 – and how to tackle them

Market Logic Team

Market Logic was once again proud to host the Trends for 2020 webinar with our content partner, TrendWatching. For over 17 years, TrendWatching has been scanning the globe for insights and innovation to make sense of change and 2019 was no exception: we witnessed some epic political battles, culture wars and new behaviour. And although it feels like the rate of change is accelerating, the basic human needs driving our behaviours remain constant. Lisa Feierstein, Senior Trend Strategist at TrendWatching shared that when a particular change in the world bumps up against a core human need, it creates tension that can lead to new innovations. Trends emerge, she said, when innovations from around the world resolve those tension points and create new expectations. She provided a sneak peek into three exciting trends for 2020.

Make it mine: personalization and relevance

The first and biggest trend revolves around relevance. Consumers are on a constant hunt to find the “right fit” – take TikTok, for example. From the moment you open the app, it immediately understands how you react to mini video clips and shapes what you see next. As a result, it’s an incredibly addictive user experience, which could explain why the company is now valued more than Uber.

39% of global B2C and B2B professionals have started to deliver personalized experiences in real-time. (Adobe and Econsultancy, February 2019)

In 2020, consumers will embrace products and services that evolve and adapt to maximize value for them. The process of designing for relevance and personalization, called “metamorphic design,” requires brands and organizations to have enough empathy to put themselves in their customers’ shoes. Relevance is a service, and products have to adapt (quickly!) to their customers’ needs to retain loyalty.

Connection and peace of mind

The second trend for 2020 is about connection. While everyone seems to be glued to their smartphones, we still crave true human connection, away from the trolls and the “cancel culture” that bombards us online. Lisa calls the antidote to toxic online communities and platforms “Civil Media,” and predicts that consumers will embrace more intimate digital spaces that facilitate meaningful connections and let them be themselves. The third trend for 2020 is all about peace of mind. Consumers want to be able to trust what they read, and they want a sense of control over their lives. With information, however, has come polarization and the rise of “fake news” – so in 2020, tackling disinformation will be a tremendous opportunity. Pinterest is tackling misinformation head-on by combatting misleading content around vaccines. The company removes the content from their platform and only provides information supplied by leading health organizations, publishing it in a variety of languages.

How can insights professionals provide relevant, personalized content?

Relevance as a service is the goal for many insights professionals, but it can be difficult to tackle in practice. Tim Burge, Market Logic Solution Architect, emphasized how insights professionals need to stay on top of relevant information within their own industry and beyond. One of the challenges they all face is around evolving customer expectations, and keeping up with the pace of change – especially with the sheer volume of sources out there.

Understanding the data – and its impact

So how can insights professionals truly cut through all the noise so they can deliver on (and exceed) expectations in time to actually make a difference? Tim explained that AI technology is key to understanding the volume of data. When properly leveraged, it can bring all the data together to help humans wrap their heads around the innovations in the first place – and, secondarily, understand their impact. Market Logic’s Knowledge Graph brings together all unstructured and structured data to help insights managers grasp the most relevant, personalized information for stakeholders. The knowledge can be applied in one of two ways: push and pull. For push applications, AI assists in creating the most relevant information for insights managers on a personalized homepage. Experts also create and push content to stakeholder groups. The pull function helps people ask questions from all of the structured and unstructured data to access relevant answers. On their personalized intelligence homepages, news and content is tailored to individual users’ needs, based on their role, brand or sector – either through AI (what each user likes to read), or expert curation (what each user needs to read). It means the right content always gets to the right people at the right time. But what above the volume of data? AI-powered search also helps cut through the huge volume of data. The Market Logic search experiences uses AI content analytics to detect common topics from the data. An auto-summarizer produces a quick summary of the condensed version of all search hits to let users quickly scan the results, rather than having to open and read hundreds of documents. When uploading, auto-tagging removes one of the biggest barriers to knowledge management by scanning documents for keywords and tags and feeding them into the body of knowledge. Watch the full webinar and find out about more examples of trends cropping up across all industries.