Trend School
On Tuesday this week I attended a session of The Intelligence Group’s Trend School here in New York. If you haven’t heard of them, the Intelligence Group is a company that conducts detailed research on younger generations (at the moment that’s Gen Y, although they also look at X and Z) and identifies trends that affect marketing. The entire content of the day was really great, but there were two phrases that really resonated with me that I thought I’d share:
- Accelerated Nostalgia - Exactly what it sounds like. We (and younger people in particular) romanticize a past that is more and more recent. Nostalgia used to be reserved for something 10-20 years in the past; now people talk about the good ol’ days of 2005. I believe that this is a side effect of an accelerated culture, where the amounts of information we consume and the speed at which we consume it increases every day.
- Entertainment Debt - I really identify with this one. Because of all the information we consume, most people have a reserve of content (movies, music, books, etc.) that they want to consume but haven’t yet gotten to, and that’s a source of guilt. For me this extends to web sites - “Have you checked out x.com?” “No, but it’s on my list!”. It’s becoming harder and harder to keep up with what’s relevant in culture because there’s simply so much of it. 10 years ago I had seen almost every Oscar nominated movie each year. That’s not true anymore, and yet the number of movies I see annually hasn’t decreased. There are simply more choices available and it’s impossible to get to everything.
Interesting stuff. The Intelligence Group also offers an excellent daily post/email highlighting a current trend, subscribe if you’re interested.
