The Data Digest: A Year Of Goodbyes (And Hellos)
As a music lover, this has been a year of goodbyes for me, with many of my teenage heroes like David Bowie, Prince, and earlier this week, George Michael, passing away. It makes you realize how fast time moves on, and nothing lasts forever. As I’ve shared before, I love this time of year: Thinking about what has been, and having a world of opportunities in front of us. And I can’t wait to see what next year will bring.
This year, there were a number of surprises and new developments that nobody predicted. And 2016 was the year of Pokémon. As my colleague Anjali Lai shared in an earlier blog post about this phenomenon: “The Pokémon Go phenomenon is not only about adopting technology or using new, cutting-edge features; it is also about designing a sticky experience that is enabled by the ways customers are changing.”
But, it also taught us all something about hyperadoption. The Pokémon Go trend fizzled out as quickly as it rose. This is the result of changing consumer expectations, which Forrester describes in its Empowered Customers Segmentation: “Consumers are increasingly willing to experiment. In the age of the customer, it’s extremely easy for customers to evaluate their options and take control of their own experiences.”
Forrester’s Data shows that empowered customers will continue to evolve and grow.
Over the past year, more consumers have become willing to engage in innovation; they have higher expectations and a lower threshold for poor experiences. This means they will easily adopt new trends, new technologies, and new hypes when they come in 2017 ― but drop them just as quickly when they get bored or when it doesn’t satisfy their needs. This needs a shift from marketers and product developers in how they think about consumer adoption. As my colleague James McQuivey says in his Brief: Measuring Hyperadoption: “Marketers will take some time to adjust to this fact, because even though customers have embraced a low-risk mindset, executives and the CFOs who fund them have not.”
The Forrester Data team wishes you an empowered 2017 with great consumer insights that will get you ahead of the competition. Happy New Year!