The MBS Group

To be new, or not to be new?

Yesterday I had a meeting with two young, intimidatingly bright founders of a well-funded dotcom startup. On the zeitgeist, well-connected in the world of bright young things and Harvard alums both, I was really excited when I used my new word, ‘newism’, and they had not heard of it! We all know that the idea of the new has never been more important, whether in business or technology and even in our social lives. More than ever, we cannot get ahead of or stand out from the crowd without having access to the first, the fastest and the best. There have been numerous recent examples of this, such as the astonishing uptake for apps like Draw Something and Instagram.

One of the best sources of innovative thinking in the business sphere in my view is the monthly briefing from Trendwatching.com, which has chosen to deal with ‘Newism’ this July. It raises a number of excellent points, foremost among them being the sheer speed at which information is being delivered and consumed. Instagram collected 10 million users in under a year; Draw Something, meanwhile, had 35 million users in six weeks. These figures would simply not have been possible just a couple of years ago, before the rise of social media and the constant presence of smartphones in most of our hands.

The rise of the new, in terms of importance to people’s everyday lives, can be summed in up one word: experience. It is no longer enough for a company to have a one-dimensional website; instead, combining an internet offering with Twitter, Facebook and a deeply experiential smartphone app is the minimum consumers now expect. People are changing their attitudes to conventional advertising, too: billboards carrying QR codes that open up portals to yet more entertainment and information platforms are rapidly becoming the norm. Experience encapsulates the world of the new, as something offering us all a different, better option every single day.

This may all be well and good, but what about the artificially shortened lifecycles of startups now that consumer demand flits from one thing to the next so quickly? And what will become of heritage brands, brands that have built their identities on enduring qualities and characters? The ideas raised by Trendwatching are so wide-ranging and complex that this cannot be dealt with in just one week, so I’ll be back next week with more thoughts on the consequences of our ‘new’ society! Is there something new that you can share with me? Email me at moira@thembsgroup.co.uk if you have any thoughts.