Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

What would you give to see today what your future customers will want? This text should alert decsion-makers to market and consumer behavioural patterns that should enable them to deliver exactly what their customers want. In a world where tomorrow's answers no longer lie in yesterday's data, learn how to read people rather than reports.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• CI The Tomorrow People - Tomorrow Happens So You'd Better Be Prepared!
• A snapshot of tomorrow's consumers
• The world they will inhabit
• How they will shop and why the future is less about product specifics and more about needs mapping, desire fulfilment, simplification' and lifestyle bundling
• Why? Because tomorrow's world will be radically different from the one we inhabit today
• It will be a world of bio-technologies and geno-medicines
• Of nanoarchitecture and technology convergence
• One where we will no longer talk about the "haves" and "have nots", but of digital economies and those that are still offline
• We will also witness the rise of consumanism (shopping as a way of demonstrating one's politics)
• Brandocracies
• Triple bottom line trading, even the Value 500 index, where companies, brands and corporations are rated according to their ethical, social and environmental credentials rather than their abilities to generate profits
• A world then radically different from our own and one therefore that will require radically different tools and techniques to work, rest, play and succeed in
• C2 Devices and Desires - Why The Future Started Yesterday!
• So how do you equip yourself for such a world?
• As an individual, a brand, a corporation?
• With foresight, knowledge, instinct and a technique called cultural reconnaissance or brailling: the deep mining of the future for market intelligence but also for the creation of ideas and knowledge that can be put in place now, or indeed on the shelf for future consumer needs
• To understand how and why cultural reconnaissance or brailling works, it's important to understand HOW trends work, WHY they work and more importantly, the mechanics, both internal and external that drive them
• C3 The Blinkered Corporation - Why One Man's Prejudice Is Another Man's Profit
• Even if we accept in principle the need to braille or deep mine the culture, it isn't always the case that we do it without prejudice, or preconception
• Both are anathema to any brand, body or corporation which wants to see the future as it really is
• They skewer a company's vision, its objectivity and prevent those in it from identifying the future as it is set to become, rather than the future as they believe it is likely to be
• What do we mean by this? In essence that companies, brands, people and ideas fail because they refuse to abandon the banks of the familiar for the supposed dangers of the mid stream
• C4 Smoke and Mirrors - When Seeing Isn't Always Believing
• When an idea is ready and how to make it ready will be looked at in later chapters, but to do this we still need to know how to look for ideas, indeed how to profile the future so we know which ideas are likely to flourish there
• Removing prejudices and preconceptions as we have seen is core to this process, but it still doesn't help us with the how
• In this chapter then we look at the basic tools, methodologies and techniques needed to needs-map the future
• These includes cultural scanning techniques, data mining, data management, maven group monitoring, trend logging, field research, and data analysis
• We learn how to create maps of the future
• Visual cartograms of ideas, consumers or services that help us better visualize the future, but also to plot our positions in it, and to chart our paths through it
• C5 Brailing the Culture - Its Not what you know but how you know it
• Here we look how and why knowledge (insight) is sometimes confused with information (data), and how this confusion leads to the building a company, its mission statement and its presence in the future on a series of suppositions and expectations that are in essence flawed because