Yearly wrap-ups strike curiosity in people. In marketers? Fascination. Us marketers have an almost obsession to see stats about the last year because it helps us understand people, society, trends, and directions. Understanding all that means we can be successful marketers.
Of course, it could be the other way around – we’re marketers because we’re obsessed with understanding people and the world.
Anyway, moving away from philosophical thoughts, Facebook launched a report predicting 2019 trends. They took a look at the data from their users, aka the world, and showcased the hottest trends in 2018 from which we can more or less predict what 2019 will look like.
Their approach was to group the people’s new preoccupations into categories. 7 to be more exact: Beauty & Fashion, Commerce, Entertainment, Food & Drink, Mind & Body, Science & Technology, and Travel & Leisure.
It already sounds familiar, right? Pretty much describes our Instagram feeds. We’ve got the influencers, the talk shows, the quick recipes, the yoga studio, the new foldable devices, and of course, the destinations we keep bookmarking.
Let’s drill down into what Facebook discovered to define each of these categories and… well… understand the world.
Beauty & Fashion
Ok, so super honestly, I didn’t really know a lot about K-Beauty until now, but apparently – it’s the trendiest thing in beauty. They’re the most innovative out there, we are loving it, and are more than ever open to trying them all.
Patterns have officially made a comeback in fashion. More specifically, animal prints seem to define the picture of fashion streets nowadays. Why? I don’t know. I guess we’re sick of the “little-black-dresses” and we’re eager to try “little-dresses-with-black-dots-just-like-a-leopard”.
The awesome news is that we’ve been very preoccupied in 2018 with what we use in terms of beauty products and not just for the health of our own bodies, but of the planet. Kudos to womanhood changing the world.
Commerce
Our generation’s focus on the world is reflected far beyond beauty products, however. The choices of what we use day to day seem to be defined, again, on how they affect the planet.
And further proof to that is that what we buy is now highly dependent on brands’ values and how they align to our own. It’s obvious, but I have to say it: branding, CSR, messaging that is consistent and stands for something is now more important than ever. How you achieve that? By aligning all the moving parts of your organization and showing a unified brand on all fronts.
From influencers to macro-influencers, micro-influencers, nano-influencers, basically any-size influencers. Newer generations are more eager and open to positioning themselves as trendsetters in their community and people are responding well to these changes.
Entertainment
Ok, it’s official. We’re bored of our mundane, Trump-lead, globally-warmed lives. We need horror movies to keep the beat beating and the blood going. 2018 loved horror movies and it’s been reflected in awards, posts, likes, and reviews.
The world loves their audio with no strings attached. Literally. But as more and more strings get removed, we’re missing the high quality we used to enjoy. So the sound industry is looking at high pressure to make our listening convenient and of good quality.
What did we just say? Plain old reality is clearly soo 2017. Another proof? The love population showed for games. Or the more fancy and general term: “Tech-Fueled Escapism”. We’re sure that the same expectations will be applied to marketing as well. For a while now marketing and entertainment have been blending more and more and the pressure to make marketing activities a form of entertainment will keep rising.
Food & Drink
This one surprised me, I have to admit. Millennials are growing to love cooking at home. Sure, this behavior is probably accompanied by grocery-shopping online, planning recipes through a mobile app, and an Alexa playing “cooking songs” from Spotify in the background. But we’re cooking. One more thing – our taste buds love to travel lately and try more international food. “Grandma’s recipes” are no longer the most popular.
Junk food is out, healthy is in. From sugar-free to vegetarianism, pescetarianism, flexitarianism, veganism, to the ultimate gluten-free-ism, we’re pretty much obsessed with what’s on our plate. And how it looks – because we love to share our food with Instagram. I doubt this changed in 2018, and it certainly didn’t lose its appeal.
While great for our bodies food is on the rise, bread, unfortunately, is not. It’s been losing its popularity for a while now and its bad reputation is not even debatable anymore. But there’s good news. Several start-ups are trying to help it make a comeback through different production processes, ingredients, etc. So maybe we’ll get to eat bread again happily and guilt-free.
Mind & Body
We are cooking, but what? It appears that we’re becoming more passionate about specific ingredients that turn out to be amazing for our health and looks. Top of the list? Eucalyptus, kimchi, and turmeric.
Oh, we likey this one – people are looking and adopting productivity software. They want to make the most out of their time. For us at Planable – this isn’t anything new. It’s why we started Planable after all. To bring back the nights of weekends of marketers.
I don’t think that at any point in history we were ever so focused on our health and wellbeing. At the same time. Another category of Facebook’s report reflects again that we want to enjoy wellness and have the willingness to work and pay for it.
Science & Technology
We’ve talked about sound, but it seems like our expectations apply to all tech-related products. And even more so when we talk about gaming. Compositing, palette, and display resolution came up a lot as well in 2018 so if there was a doubt in mind – graphics are very important to the gaming community.
Screens, screens everywhere. Each device or object has or should have a screen now and what’s more important is that people are looking at the developers to make these screens as good as our phones.
Space still fascinates us. And though unfortunately, the great Stephen Hawking has left us last year, our curiosity when it comes to space, only increased. We’re now looking at unpredictable Elon Musk to show us the way.
Travel & Leisure
The majority of us aren’t necessarily nature-proof if we’re honest. We did grow up “running around the block” after all, “block” being the key word there. We are interested in nature, just not in exploring it all raw, unprepared, and unorganized. It’s why Glamping (I’ll let you connect the dots on this one), via Ferrata, and zip line were such popular words in 2018.
From the American Dream to the California dream apparently. If to older generations America was the place to achieve your goals, to our generation, California, specifically, has it all. The weather, the beaches, the activities, and the opportunities.
Aaand, last but not least, we still like to commit or who knows, actually do sport. But outside. And free. As a result, it seems that cities are focusing on rebuilding or expanding parks to offer more opportunities for outdoor workouts.
It’s been an interesting report. Not all of it is surprising, as, again, it does sound a lot like our Instagram feeds. However, it is at least reassuring to back our perceptions by data. And nonetheless, by Facebook’s data.
That’s it folks!
Miruna Dragomir, Marketing Manager @Planable. Social media fanatic, tech geek & a sucker for learning. Past experience? Social Media Comms Manager @Oracle & Marketing Coordinator @Uber
