Small Business Labs

Wunderman Thompson's and Euromonitor's 2022 Trends Lists

One of our favorite trend reports is Wunderman Thompson's annual Future 100 reports, and they've recently released the 2022 version.  

The report is 222 pages long and covers 100 trends across 10 trend areas - technology, health, beauty, culture, food and drink, travel, marketing, retail, luxury, and work.  

Our favorite tend is their Top 3 Travel Destinations. 

These are: Valletta, Malta, Ljubljana, Slovenia, and Xishuangbanna, China.

See the report for why these locations made the top 3, but we've been to all three and agree with their choices.

We've followed this report since its first edition in 2015, and it's consistently fun and informative.

We consider it must-reading (or at least perusing) for anyone interested in consumer trends.  

Another trends report we like is Euromonitor's annual consumer trends report, which was also released recently.

The 2022 report covers 10 consumer trends: backup planners, climate changers, digital seniors, financial aficionados, the great life refresh, the metaverse, pursuit of preloved, rural urbanites, self- love seekers, and the socialization paradox.

Because of our interest in post-pandemic economic geography, we found the "rural urbanites" trend quite interesting.  

We've recently posted on rural areas and small towns likely benefiting from the pandemic.  

The Euromonitor folks seem to agree.

As with the Wunderman Thompson report, we think anyone interested in trends will find the Euromonitor report of interest.

As a bonus, both reports are free.

European Cities Embracing Digital Nomads

There's been a recent flurry of articles on European countries and cities launching efforts to lure digital nomads.  

Our favorite is Sifted's article The world’s first digital nomad village, one year on.

It covers a digital nomad village on the Portuguese island of Madeira.  

For those not familiar with Madeira, it's a sub-tropical island off the coast of Morocco. 

In addition to nice weather and spectacular scenery, the island also offers fast Internet and a time zone relatively convenient to Europe and much of the U.S.  

Our favorite article quote is on one of the downsides of being a digital nomad in Madeira - too much social activity. 

Key quote from a community manager at the digital nomad village:

“It can be very social. In high season for nomads, which is in March until June, you might have to make a conscious effort to take a break from all the social interaction, depending on your personal social battery. You just have so many activities every day that you could participate in, that sometimes you don’t even notice when it’s a little bit too much and you just need the day off,” she says.

It's not just Madeira looking to attract digital nomads.   

Bloomberg's City Lab article Can Remote Workers Keep Venice Afloat? covers Venywhere, a program designed to attract digital nomads to Venice.  Venywhere describes itself as:

A platform that gives you everything you need to live a unique, safe and frictionless remote worker experience in Venice.

More broadly, European Cities Marketing recently released Understand the World of the Digital Nomad - How Cities Can Tap Into New Sources of Traveling Global Talent.

This guide is meant to help cities across Europe develop programs to attract digital nomads.

The reasons cities and countries want to attract digital nomads is they spend more money than tourists, don't put much strain on public services, create jobs for locals - and sometimes even start local businesses.

Expect more cities and countries to offer digital nomad visas and other specialized programs to attract remote workers and digital nomads.

See our Digital Nomad section for more on this topic.  

What are Social Tokens (also called Creator Coins) and Why You Should Care

A social token (a.k.a. creator coins) is a form of cryptocurrency used to build communities and provide benefits to community members. Selling social tokens also generates revenue for the token creator. 

The main way social tokens are used is for membership and reward programs. Think of social tokens as crypto-based frequent flyer programs.  

There are two main types of social tokens:

1. Creator coins are created and used by content creators and usually sold (but sometimes given away} to the creator’s fans. Token holders receive benefits such as unique content, access to group chats, the ability to buy exclusive merchandise.  

Many bands and musicians have creator coins that they sell to their fans. The coins generally grant access to online chats with the musicians, early access to new releases, discounts on merchandise, and often special seating sections at concerts.  

Creator coins provide musicians with an efficient way to generate revenue while also providing benefits to their fans.  

A wide variety of professionals have released creator coins.

For example, the well-known technology analyst Jerimiah Owyang has a creator coin (which we own).  

We also own tokens from several other consultants and analysts. In all cases they provide coin holders exclusive content, discounts of various forms, and access to the analysts.

2. Community tokens are issued by a community and provide benefits and access to token holders, much like the creator coins.  

The Friends With Benefits (FWB) community, for example, is a popular virtual community with Web 3.0 and crypto enthusiasts and has several thousand members. They have active online chats, education programs, social programs, and events. Think of FWB as Soho House without the house.  

Anyone can join FWB, but you need to buy 75 $FWB tokens, which currently costs about $2500. 

This is quite a bargain since only a couple of months ago, 75 $FWB would have cost closer to $8,000. 

Like all cryptocurrencies, social token prices are volatile.  And the recent bitcoin and cryto price swoon has also hit most social tokens.  

But most people who buy social tokens aren't doing it to make money (although that is a nice potential side benefit).  They buy tokens to be part of a community and access the associated benefits.

The why you should care about social tokens is straightforward.  

Social tokens can be an efficient and effective way for creators, solopreneurs and SMBs to engage, build, reward, and monetize a community of fans and/or customers.  

Because of this, we expect to see growing numbers of creators, solopreneurs, SMBs - and even large enterprises - develop and use social tokens to engage with their customers.

The short video below is from Rally, a leading social token minting service and marketplace.  It describes the advantages of creator coins.  

John Deer's Autonomous Farm Tractor

Farming equipment maker John Deere recently announced the release of their first fully autonomous tractor.  

The tractor combines Deere's 8R tractor, a chisel plow, six pairs of stereo cameras, and an AI system to perceive its environment and navigate.

Tractors with the ability to steer themselves are not new. Decades ago, I drove a tractor with an "autopilot" function that kept the tractor on a straight line during tilling and harvesting on my family's farm.

The autopilot was helpful, but the tractor still required human operators to make turns, avoid objects in their path and maintain the necessary location precision to till or harvest a field.

But the Deere tractor does all this and more by itself (see the movie below).

Autonomous tractors will reduce the need for hard-to-find farm labor and significantly increase efficiency. Farms of all sizes will no doubt quickly adopt this technology.

Top Rural and Small Town Trends for 2022

One of our favorite sources of information on small businesses in small towns and rural America, Small Biz Survival, released their 2022 Top 5 Rural and small town trends list recently.

Despite around 60 million Americans living in rural areas (that's about 1 in 5 Americans), there's limited coverage and information on the trends and shifts impacting rural areas of the U.S.

This is why information sources like Small Biz Survival are so important and valuable.

Two of the five trends really jumped out at us because they're related and the pandemic has accelerated them:

1.  New Residents are Arriving:  Small Biz Survival points out, "this isn’t an explosive exodus from major tech and population centers, but the more subtle diffusion of opportunities to a broader swath of places."  The shift started years ago as remote work became possible.  But Covid has resulted in what's being called "Zoom towns" as remote workers seek more space, lower costs and access to the many amenities of small town life.  

5. Economic Barriers are Falling: The expansion of rural broadband and remote work, coupled with the Internet making it easier and cheaper to start and operate a small business, has made rural and small town businesses more viable and competitive.

The combination of these two trends means small towns and rural areas are much more attractive places to start a business than they were even a few years ago.  

This creates a positive cycle of greater economic vibrancy in small towns and rural America, leading to more people wanting to move and start businesses in small towns.

Thanks to these trends, the next decade is looking to be very positive for rural America. 

See the article for the other trends and more details on the ones covered above.

Below is an overview of the trends by the authors.  Register here (it's free) to see a more detailed presentation of the trends and related materials.

2022 Rural Trends from SaveYour.Town

 

Accenture on Social Commerce

Accenture, a global consulting and services firm, predicts that social commerce will grow to $1.2 trillion in global revenue by 2025.

Accenture defines social commerce as:

"The integration of social experiences and ecommerce transactions in a single path to purchase, enabled by platforms."

The Accenture chart below (click to enlarge) provides more details.

Social commerce, which is also called social selling, isn't new.

The traditional direct selling industry (also known as multi-level marketing) has been around at least since the 1940s, with well-known brands such as Avon, Tupperware, and Mary Kay - all of which integrate social experiences of some form on the path to purchase.

But we agree with Accenture that social commerce is experiencing explosive growth thanks to the rise of ecommerce and social media platforms.

We've also seen in our research a surge in social commerce.

The MBO Partners State of Independence study series has found that the use of social media by independent workers (self-employed, freelancers, independent contractors, etc.) to find and sell to customers has substantially increased since 2014.

With the rise and continued growth of the creator economy - which is reliant on social commerce - we agree with Accenture that social commerce will substantially grow over the next few years.