Future Trends

The Challenge

One of the world’s largest cosmetics companies needed a reliable take on the complex interplay of cultural trends and counter-trends in beauty. How will the world of beauty look ten years out? Which forces will prevail? Will new technologies or agile new competitors disrupt the current business models in beauty, and how?

Our Approach

After in-depth stakeholder interviews, we designed twelve “possible futures” of beauty, archetypal stories where a specific cultural force – out of six pairs of opposing ones – has prevailed in the world.

Rather than just listening to the voice of the moment, our predictive methodology tuned the minds of beauty consumer experts onto the far future. We tasked them to predict meaningful real-world KPIs selected to represent each possible future trend. We fielded this prediction market in seven carefully chosen countries worldwide, covering different cultures, ethnicities and stages of socio-economic development.

The Result

The client got a clear picture of the "probable future", with prevailing trends expressed as verifiable predictions. Using the resulting numerical data we built an interactive simulator which predicts the strategic fit of proposed initiatives.

The client can now take timely steps to secure a long-term competitive advantage and steer their large organisation into the tailwind of future trends.