Rewind: Shifting Trends and Prevailing Patterns

Phillip: [00:00:04] Welcome to Future Commerce Rewind, the summer series of the Future Commerce podcast that takes the news of today and pits it against an episode from yesterday. I'm Phillip, and we are still the podcast at the intersection of culture and commerce. Today, we are going to talk a little bit about what the culture is doing from a trends perspective with our good friend, Matt Klein, a cultural theorist and trend forecaster, And his seminal work, through his publication called Zine, which puts out a trends report, the meta trends report every year. And so we're going to go back to March of 2024, just earlier this year when he talked about his new trends report. And you'll hear a little bit more about that in just a little bit. But the macro trend conversation seems to have shifted in the past week and a half. Now the podcast is obviously in a summer reset. I'm actually recording this right now from London where I have been filing our London Brief series over on The Senses, which is our weekly newsletter. And I have been spending the entirety of the summer here learning about how Britons think about their government and how they have sort of been economically stalled for a number of years. And a lot of investment in outside capital has been waiting to come into this market because they were unsure of the political future. And now with a potential political future secured, with a new prime minister in general elections, it seems like there is a little bit more certainty about what the next 4 to 5 years would look like, and it's interesting that we just had a very similar occurrence happen in the United States. Obviously, I'm talking about President Joe Biden's decision not to pursue the presidential candidacy and now steps in Kamala Harris. And the whole vibe has shifted, especially with the online tenor of the very online and very terminally online crowd who are making TikTok edits of such things. And so as the trends follow the macro vibes, if you will, I think that the meta trends begin to shift when we have more optimism, a hope for a race that's not solely a gerontocracy or really just focused on this predominant narrative of older generations having won last generational control over government, government spending, programs, investment of programs, and policy. These are all very important. And if you did catch the rewind from two weeks ago, you'll know that we have actually covered policy on a segment called Future Policy with our friend, Danny Sapulvita,   who was the Dep Sec at State under John Kerry many years ago. And so this is an area I'd love to dive more into. We'll have plenty of time to do it as the general elections in the United States progress over the next few months. So I'm sure we'll hear way more about that than anybody really cares to. But I think that it really uniquely ties into this idea of doomerism and macro trends shift that Matt talks about in his meta trends report. So today, we're not just talking about trends and data. We're talking about a deep human need that's driving patterns and how businesses can begin to sense those patterns and tap into and address the core desires and anxiety of people, and that's what it's all about. So thanks for listening. We're so excited. Join the Future Commerce Plus membership. So many people are jumping on board. Future Commerce Plus is how you get episodes of this podcast ad-free. And you want ad-free episodes, it seems. But ads still do support the work of Future Commerce. They do support our advertising partners. But if you can't afford it and it doesn't cause you any sort of hardship, please, through your business or through your personal means, support Future Commerce by joining the membership. You're going to get 20% off merch and print. That's all of our annual journals, including our upcoming 2025 journal, which we're deep at work on already. And it's going to include things like exclusive briefings. We just filed a 2,300 word brief on Yotpo's historic turnaround. All of that is available to you plus ad-free content and bonus content of the Future Commerce podcast, which is called the After Dark, and that's going to be back here at the end of the summer in just a couple weeks time. All of that and more, get all of the details of what you get when you join the membership when you go to FutureCommerce.com/Plus. Join Future Commerce Plus today. Alright. Without any further ado, a couple of words from our partners, and then we'll get into our rewind episode. We're going all the way back to Episode 341 of the Future Commerce podcast featuring Matt Klein, cultural theorist and Founder of Zine, asking the question, why haven't macro trends changed for the past few years? Hey. We're standing at the metaphorical intersection of culture and commerce, Brian. And in our alternate universe, down the street, saunters a good friend of ours, a cultural theorist, I would say, damn near genius, when it comes to sensing what's next in media and how media shapes the world, our world views in the world around us, and the person who I think is, I don't know, our inspiration, a muse of sorts for us. It's Mr. Matt Klein, the Founder of Zine. Welcome.

Matt Klein: [00:07:03] Oh, hey, guys. How are we doing?

Brian: [00:07:06] Good.

Phillip: [00:07:06] We're glad to have you back. This is one of those times of the year where you're inundated with a lot of different messages. I think we just kind of came out of trend report season, trend season, and it's kind of your job to take all of that in in the world. But for those who aren't up to date on that, what was this year's trends, meta trends report from Zine like? What was it like to compile? What all is in it, and what can people expect from it?

Matt Klein: [00:07:32] Maybe we take one step back. I think it was 2017 or 18, that winter, I decided I was going to take on the task of reading every single trend report available and just make sense of all of them. And I was curious, one, were there any patterns to these reports? Were they all saying the same things? Were they saying different things? And second, I just had the personal curiosity of what was being reported in these things. And third, I decided, well, if I was to read all these and identify the patterns, why don't I just report on that so you don't have to read everyone else's reports and you could just read my report? This is now, I think, the 7th or 8th year. Lost count for better or worse, definitely, I think it's 7 now. And what's really unique about this process is noting what is changing and what's not changing, and more often than not, what's not changing. And I did this exercise where I laid out all of these trending trends, if you will, and identified that more often than not, what is being reported is not changing. They're tethered back to these kinds of main pillars, and we could dive into them or we could save later. But I think what was really surprising to me was this extra exercise I did this year, which was I inputted all this language into a tool with this organization called Scenario DNA, and they are a essentially linguistics company where they were quantifying language. We threw all this language in from all of these reports, from not just this year, but the last 7 years to identify how is this language being coded. Is it emergent, disruptive? Is it established language? What we found was that year after year after year after year after year, what is meant to be disruptive or trending language is in fact established nomenclature. That the language being used to describe the most fascinating, radical changes of our times are in fact just normal words. And at this point, after 7 years of this, I'm not surprised. I'm not surprised. And if anything, where we net out is that this is a call to action, and it's quite cliche, but it's a call to action for a little bit of bravery of not what's already being reported and said and what's comfortable, but what do we want to see, what does not yet exist, and how do we put our neck out there, and really speak about the things that are uncomfortable, fringy, edgy, and strange because after all that is where change emanates from.

Brian: [00:10:01] You've caught something super important here, which is it turns out that innovation is just part of our normal activity as a society. We're doing exactly what Marshall McLuhan said, looking in the rearview mirror as we step into the future. And I think the reason for that is this. This is my take, and I'm curious. I actually really want to talk to you about this, but no one can get taken seriously in a corporate environment without data, and in the current moment without data, to point to, to say this is what's happening. And so when we look out for the strange and the weird and the outliers, businesses tend to say, "Well, that's an outlier. We don't know if that's going to take hold." Business is about predictability after all. Right? Good business is a predictable business. It's a safe bet, And so when we say trends, what we really mean is things that are safe bets.

Matt Klein: [00:11:10] Bingo. Exactly right. I mean, look at our entertainment industry. Our creative landscape is the case in point here. It's why fund or why make anything that hasn't proven? And what we're left with are the reboots and sequels and catalogs that hog the charts. And I think the phenomenon with the trending trends, and we're only going to hop on the thing that's been proven. I mean, data is such a lagging indicator at this point. And I think the same could be applied for all these other industries as well. And it goes back to this idea of bravery or creative or cultural savviness to go beyond the thing that is already present and that we're already seeing. And that's not to say it's impossible. I mean, we're using the entertainment example. I mean, they're a little cliche at this point, but I think for the right reasons. I mean, you look at A24. I mean, they have proven a business in bucking the status quo or zagging where things aren't prudent. And you could still survive, if anything thrive, in going against the grain. And how do you then apply that to understanding culture as well? And we see that within our headlines and what are really just memes at this point of, like, the micro trends. It's like four people have spoken about it. Oh, that's enough proof to now make this a thing. And I think it goes both ways.

Phillip: [00:12:30] Ask ChatGPT "What are the trends for ecommerce? What are the future trends for ecommerce? What are the future trends of commerce?" Or even just bluntly, "What is the future of commerce?" And you're likely to get whatever the first page of Google results says from an SEO article. Does that mean that the trend casting industry in the ecommerce industry was correct or was it a self-fulfilling prophecy because we've sort of all been in this conversation for a decade that we made it so?

Matt Klein: [00:12:58] I think that's spot on as well. It's it's completely a self-fulfilling prophecy. It's an ouroboros or the snake eating its own tail. The story I love using is that I mean, I write something in Zine, and I read one of these reports, and then I'm cited as the proof for the existence of this trend in the trend report. It's spooky. So here's the thing though, and I think this is the opportunity. There is an opportunity to what I'd call hacking these trend reports. So we did this exercise, Sarah DaVanso and I,   we partnered up a couple of years ago to quantify some of these meta trends. So bear with me as we kind of geek out on this story. There are two ways in which we can rank these meta trends or the quote/unquote "most reported trends" from all these, you know, reports. The first is what is most frequently mentioned? So we could take, you know, new commerce trends, social shopping, live shopping, omnichannel, whatever, whatever. And that could be reported as the 5th most important meta trend for the year. And then you could take something like environmentalism or I'm having to create a trend like name, but like all things eco. And that could be the number one most reported thing from all these reports. And where we're left is, okay. Well, the Eco Everything meta trend is everywhere. Therefore, let's invest in this thing. But then there's another way in which you could rank these meta trends, which is quantitatively. So we partner with this organization, NWO.ai, which is essentially cultural listening on steroids. They're ingesting academic papers, memes, film scripts, social data, media analyses, etcetera. They're ingesting all this data, and we could quantify the presence of each of these meta trends around the world. So even though the ecommerce meta trend is ranked number 5, when you look at all the cultural data, it's actually the number one most important meta trend based upon the energy, the sentiment, yada yada. The reason I share this story is that when we look at the discrepancy between these rankings, and this happens time and time again every year, there's a difference between what the humans think is most important and what is being mentioned in these reports versus what does the cultural data, where does it exist? It exists online. And that in itself has plenty of flaws. But regardless, there's a discrepancy, which lands us to this opportunity. There is an opportunity to hack these trend reports. That the more you talk about the thing, the more likely it is to be the case. So even though Eco Everything or this environmentalism trend isn't quantified as the most important thing, wouldn't it be rather a world in which all these organizations read these reports, think that Eco Everything is the most important thing, and then therefore act upon that as, "Okay, well, I'm seeing it everywhere. I'm seeing it in Matt's trend report thing, whatever, therefore, this is now the thing. This is the future. We have to act upon x, y, and z." And you could implement or seed various ideas across these reports that inevitably become the truth or become the self-fulfilling prophecy for better or worse. And the last thing I'll say is, yeah, it's a trend report. So what? But there is something to be said that the most powerful organizations in the world that are upstream of so much, not just innovation, but campaigning and communications or propaganda are influencing culture at scale.

Brian: [00:17:31] So in many ways, whoever can publish the most kind of wins.

Matt Klein: [00:17:36] Ideally, the organization research and culture is looking at that data to see, oh, you're merely exposed to the frequency of x y z keyword or x y z phenomenon. But, yeah, you could you could totally seed nonsense at scale. I mean, what is the difference between that and what we've seen politically over the years? Or, I mean, it's the same thing.

Phillip: [00:17:56] True.

Matt Klein: [00:17:56] You just seed the thing and, oh, well, that's reality. And that's its own kind of worms of what is reality. Right?

Brian: [00:18:03] That is the show title, Seeding Nonsense at Scale. Seeding nonsense at scale is I feel like this is the future. {laughter}

Phillip: [00:18:11] What we just described is really just the Larry Page rank of Google from 2,008. This is not a new idea. The idea of what becomes authoritative really depends on the number of back references. Right? It's a very academic approach to say the more authoritative a source is the one that's cited most often. The problem is the scant few people that are actually doing this type of work and research and will put, you know, put the quantifiable and qualitative mind to analyzing trends is a small group of people that are all highly self-referential because they're all analyzing the same cohort of data because they're all kind of tapped into the same algorithm. And this becomes its own challenge of where do you go looking for signals, Matt, outside of the same feeds that we're all tapped into because we're all having the same simultaneous inspiration.

Matt Klein: [00:19:06] I wish I had an answer or a list of those sources because that's gold. Right? Let's reframe that question, though. Instead of looking at, or this is how I'm thinking of it. Instead of looking at the sources that are so off the beaten path that are going to give you insight that perhaps lives outside of that bubble, We could also just look at history because instead of looking for the change, can we look for the static or the things that are unchanging? Because so much of this is repetitive. So rather than taking a bet on the thing that's new, how do you also place the bet on the thing that isn't going to change at all? That is, you know, 0% change, and that is just human nature or we've been here before. So I'm increasingly interested as dry as it is to go down the rabbit holes on the History Channel or what I love is the CNN decades. That series is the perfect blend of both history and entertainment. It's like, oh, you watch that and you're like, oh, fuck. We've been here before. Like, this is not new. This idea, this concept, this campaign, this political figure, whatever it may be, it's like, oh, we have been here. We have so been here. Adam Curtis documentary is notwithstanding. It's the same thing. We have been here before.

Brian: [00:20:22] When we first started Future Commerce, we were looking at tech a lot. We were like, how do you look around the corner of what's coming in commerce? Well, technology is changing, and that's going to have a huge effect. And it does. No question. But as we got further and further in, we're like, wait a minute. It's actually culture and how the world works in general, like philosophy and psychology and the way that people have interacted with new things or with the different cycles that we go through. And so we actually shifted Future Commerce pretty heavily back in 2017, roughly, 2018, and started rethinking our viewpoint on how to look around the next corner.

Phillip: [00:21:13] Matt, what specifically are you covering in this year's meta trends report? Can you give us some of the top lines on it and some of the interesting things that you found?

Matt Klein: [00:21:22] So the number one thing that had surfaced this year is what I'm calling global burnout. It had come from a meta trend last year called doomerism. It's actually quite surprising in that a trend report would even surface this, but it's this idea of this permacrisis collapse anxiety, this demoralization or kind of this nihilism that is spreading. I think when it appeared last year, it was, one, surprising that, you know, organizations would even want to kind of touch that. And I think that's a good thing. But the fact that it would come up again and, second, was the number one most reported trend across 70 plus reports is quite fascinating. The caveat here is that when you score it, it's only 8 out of 14. But still, I think it's a really important meta trend in that it that's kind of the groundwork, kind of the, dare I say, vibe of the rest of the report. Another one that I find really interesting is this idea of late-stage wellness. Wellness, for better or worse, has been a part of these reports since I started it. There's always been some iteration or manifestation of obsessive wellness. But I think what's really unique about this year, this is the 3rd out of 14, is the variety or the spectrum of the ways in which wellness is trying to be productized and sold. The keywords here being heal, holistic, longevity. There's obviously Ozempic talk, breath work, saunas, cold plunges, Zen's biotech immortality, you know, no alcohol, soberism, etcetera. What's unique about that one is while I've mentioned it was 3rd out of 14, you quantify it, and it's 2 out of 14. Which to me when you kind of start stack ranking or sizing a lot of these, you could determine what are the most, I would say, I don't know, spacious or has the most legs, if you will. But then further, again, as you lay these all out, you can start to understand the story. That while you have something like global burnout or doomerism, the answer to that is late-stage wellness or is this obsession with, you know, how far can you go to try to cope in an environment that feels so out of control. So I think as you kind of go through this list of meta trends, they all start playing on one another and there's a larger story about what's happening within culture. What's exciting to me is it was the 8th most reported one, which I'm calling airplane mode, defining it as straining effects of digital inspire life away from screens. There was a lot of talk about this kind of retreat, the dumb phones, the physical, the touching grass, questioning what is reality, looking for unplugging moments, all things minimal, meeting up in person, outdoors, etcetera, etcetera. And again, I think what I'm trying to tease at with kind of this high level overview is that the meta trends act as trail heads for understanding all else within culture. It's kind of like this ecosystem. And then further trying to root it back to human needs. So for something like airplane mode, it's nature, it's slowness. For something like late-stage wellness, it's confidence, it's security, it's prosperity. As an organization, you don't have to address late-stage wellness explicitly. As an organization, you don't have to speak to global burnout in your social media posts. But when you acknowledge what's trying to be desired here, the human needs being stability or faith, that is what you can answer to. That is what you can act upon or activate within these deeper human needs. How it's manifesting is almost moot. Because the second you try to, you know, hop on some of these things, either, one, it moves on, or second, it's not a fit for you. If you understand beneath the surface what people actually need, that's where organizations find success.

Brian: [00:27:01] The idea of global burnout pairs really nicely with airplane mode. They're like different sides of the same coin.

Matt Klein: [00:27:09] Exactly.

Brian: [00:27:09] And if you add it all up, feels like maybe the pace of change is part of the issue. TikTok is not the place to look because things are in and out in a flash. Feels like if you miss them, you actually miss that on language or parts of the world... Where did the word rizz come from? All of a sudden, it's in our vocabulary, blink twice, and it's there. The airplane mode is a protection against this.

Matt Klein: [00:27:44] Yeah. It's a push and a pull, a give and a take. Here's the thing where I get hung up with the pace of change conversation. I would agree that, you know, where'd rizz come from or the Stanley Cups, whatever. I think those are products or words, not as much as they are trends or changes in human behavior. But at the same time, where I get so stuck is like, you go back and read Future Shock from the seventies, and they're talking about the pace of change. We can't keep up. This is crazy. Our minds can't keep up. It was, you know, 50 years ago. So at what point is this a unique experience in which we're having? Because I do feel, and I would agree that something is up. Right? Something's different. But how much of it is just the human condition and feeling as if we can't keep up is the way of life? That's just how it is today. And I battle with that tension of what is new or what feels like it's new, but it's always been a thing.

Brian: [00:28:44] Oh, it's so funny that you say that. I was actually going to bring this up, but I was just re-listening to Okay Computer by Radiohead, and they had a song called Fitter Happier. And if you look at the lyrics of that song, it addresses the exact idea of burnout and what's required to maintain health and how that's actually contributing to our neurotic behavior and feeling like we're behind. And I feel like you're onto something. Are we just repeating, is every generation just repeating the same words of the last generation?

Matt Klein: [00:29:25] In all fairness though, it's not like everyone has experienced prior generations. Everyone's just re-experiencing something that has already taken place. And that's not a knock, I don't think it's a knock or a negative thing, but we are re-experiencing or confronting something or being exposed to something which we haven't before, and now we're just trying to figure it out just like everyone else has before us. And I think when you're in a space in which we obsess and research and discuss culture in the world to the extent in which we do, it feels as if, oh, how could this be the case? How can everyone else see it? But not everyone else is spending their life or getting paid to do something like this.

Phillip: [00:30:04] Yeah.

Brian: [00:30:04] I just feel like this is happening on a global scale now. It probably happened in more specific pockets in the past, but because of the Internet, because of electronic communication, these are now feeling like global cycles, which I mean, maybe not fully or maybe not global, but...

Phillip: [00:30:24] I will push back on that to say that...

Brian: [00:30:28] More collective. That's probably a better way to say it.

Phillip: [00:30:31] Well, it depends on who you're talking about. The Global Population Center now is in Southeast Asia and actually India.

Brian: [00:30:41] Right.

Phillip: [00:30:41] And you're looking at, you know, how many of those people are really concerned about the evolution of language and the word rizz.

Brian: [00:30:50] Right.

Phillip: [00:30:51] I think the broad human experience, these are elective properties. We have decided to tap into this ever changing stream of consciousness and now we're saying, "I didn't realize that this was the tilt a whirl. I'm really dizzy. I want to get off this ride," but the ride's not stopping. So the issue I have with sort of the analysis of such a thing is there are so many, this industry tends to be the generation of its own critique in that you're pointing out the issues inherent in analyzing, in the status and almost the naval gaze culture of analyzing trends and talking about the breakneck pace of change, but we could all just unplug from it, I think. Can't we? I mean, the airplane mode, I think, is hard to do, but we just had Kyle Chayka on the show. He wrote Filterworld. I don't know if you've checked it out, Matt.

Matt Klein: [00:32:00] Mmhmm.

Phillip: [00:32:00] Kyle was talking about his algorithmic fast. Lent is coming up. Maybe it's time to take an algo fast. The fact is that your life collapses down to a few handful of things that matter when you're not tapped into what everybody else is worrying about. It's not that those things change, it's that your perspective on it changes.

Brian: [00:32:22] I built a house out in the middle of nowhere. Woods. I've sort of mid-disconnected. I'm on pseudo-airplane mode as much as I possibly can be. I think, Matt, you're on to something here. There's a lot of desire to become like a half Luddite. Someone who catches up on everything that's going on in spurts and then backs off and disappears into the woods for other parts of it.

Matt Klein: [00:32:49] What I hear is just balance. I mean, maybe that's what we're after, a life of balance, which is perhaps what we're not feeling right now. I mean, here's the other thing, and this is what I was thinking of Phillip when you were speaking, which is how much of this is just entertainment as well? This is the entertainment of business. It's fun. We're just doing it because it's fun. It's interesting. I will say there's certainly importance, and maybe I'm saying that because there's a livelihood or a career anchored or tethered to it. But I would say there are some implications and serious business consequences that come from this, but it is also fun. It is entertaining to be talking about these things and to be dissecting and analyzing. No different than a conspiracy theorist trying to make sense of the season finale.

Brian: [00:33:33] I think to your point, the business outcome is why most people engage with it. That they're looking for personal gain. They've gotta make a way in the world. I genuinely believe that a lot of people would fully unplug if they didn't feel like it would sort of destroy their shot at their next career move.

Phillip: [00:33:55] So the argument stands to reason that we could all probably spend a little less time being extremely online. I think that we justify our addiction to this behavior in our own conversation by trying to derive business value out of it. It's not the other way around. The business doesn't dictate the amount of focused conversation obsession that some people are spending in this circle.

Brian: [00:34:20] My cynicism around that is that I think a lot of this is based out of fear of being left behind. I think that people operate mostly out of fear, and so whether or not they could do it in half the time is neither here nor there. They're quote/unquote "addicted" because they're afraid of missing out on something that that will leave them without being able to interact or be able to speak the language of their industry or the language that gets inserted into their everyday work conversations that makes them look like an idiot if they don't have it. So, yeah, I was actually saying I think fear is driving a lot of trend chasing more than anything else is.

Matt Klein: [00:35:02] I think where we get stuck is thinking that, again, rizz is a trend. You see rizz, like, you hear it. You see the words of it, and it's easy to latch onto that thing, it's a little bit of a Rorschach test or trying to interpret that there's something more than there is. And sometimes there is and sometimes there's not. I would agree with Brian in that, I mean, having been a part of so many RFPs and, you know, trend agencies and trend work streams, you're so much better off selling in this positive anxiety of imagine if you don't do the thing than doing the thing. I mean, it's all, from fear. No one wants to be disrupted. No one wants to be the disruptor either. No one wants to be the one... That goes back to this idea of bravery, being the first to say something or sticking their neck out or reporting on the thing that no one else has reported.

Brian: [00:35:54] You look like a weirdo.

Matt Klein: [00:35:56] There's that. So you operate from a sense of, well, we want to be the first to be second.

Phillip: [00:36:04] That's profound.

Brian: [00:36:05] Yeah.

Matt Klein: [00:36:06] Everyone just wants to be safe. And this is not safe from an organization point of view. Let's be real. It's safe from a career and employment stand of view. That's where this stems from. I was just talking to someone. They were talking about brands. I'm like, can we just stop talking about brands as brands? It's not a thing. It's imaginary. It's made up. The brand does not exist. It's a team of people on laptops, on Zoom. That's the brand. They want their job. They want to go home. They want a bonus. They want to retire. They want a vacation. That's what the brand is. I mean, it's so extreme. But when you break it down to that, you know, minutia, it starts to make a little bit more sense.

Brian: [00:36:47] Except okay. So I want to come back to something from earlier because I think it fits in here too. I do believe that there is a set of people out there that do drive next steps for real. One of the problems that we have in trend reporting and in deriving trends and the way that it's calculated by these trend reports that come out is that a lot of times, there's no weight associated with where the data is coming from. There are people out there who are pushing boundaries, and they will have people follow them down those roads. I think there is a set of people out there who are a little bit different than the rest of us. I don't think everyone's... I don't think everyone has an equal voice. I don't actually believe that. And so not everyone just wants to go home and retire. Some people have a different understanding of what drives them in their life and in the world, and those are the people you kind of have to watch out for because they become models for mimetic action. I actually believe this to be true. Some people set the model, and those people often don't have the same drive as the masses do, but the masses follow because of the mimetic model.

Matt Klein: [00:38:20] Sort of things get really complicated and the house of cards begins to kind of teeter and fall apart, which is you use the word weight, and I think this is where the word subjectivity then comes in, which is all of this is subjective. You could imagine the diffusion curve of, you know, the life cycle of a meme or idea or product adoption. That diffusion curve, that bell curve is not the same for everyone. My bell curve is different than your bell curve. You sit at different places. What is mainstream to some is late for others or what is early for some is so dependent upon where you sit within culture, not just sit within culture, but where you sit within, and I'll use this word sparingly, within that subculture. There are so many subcommunities that have different bell curves, and where you sit within that one gives you a different bell... It's so complex and so subjective. So when you attempt to have a standardization or a waiting for a trend or try to plot it on a bell curve, the thing falls apart because, I mean, what is new for some has been a thing and old for others for so long. And the tension with that is as a marketer or as a business, you want the largest feasible audience possible. You want as many people. You want the total addressable market. So how do you hop on things that there are too many people in that audience for you to try to have a message or have a product that hits all of them in the right spot? And that's just the ultimate tension. That's the ultimate tension with trends work. You try to be hip and cool, but your audience isn't always hip and cool because you want as many people as possible.

Brian: [00:40:03] Right.

Matt Klein: [00:40:04] And you swap hip and cool with any other word, any other product. That's how you get "How do you do fellow kids?" That's how you get all the classic mess ups. It's all coming from a good place. And by a good place, I mean wanting to be culturally relevant and help push messages. But you're using a shotgun approach for I think of a beer example. You try to say the right thing, but that right thing isn't for everyone. And this goes back to multiplayer mode and so many other concepts. So, like, how do you be something for everyone? That is the problem with modern branding.

Brian: [00:40:40] There's so much to take away from this. My brain is flying right now on the idea that you've gotta incorporate these trends in ways that people can absorb them. And maybe that's part of our job as marketers is actually softening up different pockets to some of these ideas when you know that they're going to have a hard time absorbing them. Who do you hit with really quick and fast and hard with some of these ideas while sort of trickling them into other places? This could be part of where we're headed here.

Matt Klein: [00:41:23] The logistics of that is just a nightmare.

Brian: [00:41:25] Yeah. It doesn't scale. And this is something I was talking to with another friend of Future Commerce, Nilla Ali. A lot of this stuff requires deep research into specific cultures to find out who is actually making a meaningful impact on that spot. So the contents become a joke because people are just trying to build for what you said, Matt. How do we hit the broadest possible set of people at the right moment? But the only way to do that is just to water down everything. So all these trends are becoming a joke because they're just all getting watered down and poor, approachable, mediocre contents being put out because that's the way to make sure that you can hit the most people and "get the most eyeballs," quote/unquote. But I think the future looks like specific research done into specific communities and going after the people that are actually having a meaningful impact on that community, even if they don't have the broadest pop up possible audience. And, Phillip, you brought this up recently. You heard on a podcast that a long form piece that gets 3,000 reads is worth more to media organizations right now or should be worth more than 300,000 TikTok hits.

Phillip: [00:42:59] It was more like there was an equivalence in the B2B space... Somebody's trying to draw an equivalence between what a CPM even means. And so if the target audience is so very, very small, how do you quantify that in terms of TikTok reach? Do I want a TikTok that goes to 300,000 people or do I want a blog post that goes to a couple a couple thousand people? Which one actually has greater signal for my organization that my goals are being met? Is it memorable? Is it referenceable? Can I surface it again? Is it searchable? These are all factors that aren't necessarily all true for things like TikTok. And I guess where I get lost is, okay, let's zoom back in on meta trends, Matt. This is the work you do for companies, the kind of which listen to Future Commerce, and they're thinking about how they plan their future. What is the synthesis of a report like this, and how do you help them make sense of it for their organization so that they can turn it into strategies and tactics rather than philosophical musings on a podcast?

Matt Klein: [00:44:20] For the longest time, I always considered the meta trends to be kind of the finish, the finished product, the end. It's like, here are the things. But what I've recognized is that in fact, what they really are are the beginning, that when you take these meta trends, they act as the trailheads for, one, what is not discussed within them. But second, the implications or provocations for now how do they map back to a business? Because every business is unique. Everyone has their different challenges. Everyone has their different audiences. And those audiences or those products interpret each of the meta trends uniquely. So what this really is is the starting point, not the answer key. So what I've done in the past is help organizations take these and map them back of, one, how do we stack rank and prioritize them? And second, how do we exist within the world of each of these concepts? What do we do or perhaps what do we don't do in order to remain culturally relevant? It's almost your checklist to make sure that we are prepared for a future of both change and stagnation, and we're thriving within culture rather than being found flat-footed.

Phillip: [00:45:25] And, of course, there's a specific size or scale of an organization where you no longer have necessarily a very clear direction or intuition of what you need to be for your future customer because to your point earlier, there are so many of them and that means so many different things to so many people. You have to find a way to create more facets in your business where somebody sees themselves in the mirror.

Matt Klein: [00:45:49] 100%.

Phillip: [00:45:50] Right. So what do people do? Where do they go? How do they get this work started? Or how do they shift that work over to a person like yourself?

Matt Klein: [00:45:59] Reach out and say hi more than anything else. I'm KleinKleinKlein, everywhere online. KleinKleinKlein.com. And we'll go from there. And I think it's a really important point that you just wrote up, Phillip, which is this is more of a compass than anything else. This isn't your blueprint. This isn't your answer key. This is how do you navigate or how do you position yourself within a really weird foreign territory? How do we make sure that we're going forward in a way that everyone's prepared and everyone's confident in?

Brian: [00:46:30] Love that.

Phillip: [00:46:31] Great place to leave it. Thank you, Matt. Thank you so much for joining us. Can't wait to have you back again. I think we have a couple ways that we will continue to put you in front of the Future Commerce family in the months and the year to come.   congrats again on your publication. Love to see it.

Matt Klein: [00:46:48] Thanks so much. Really means a lot. Thank you.

Phillip: [00:46:50] Thank you all for listening to Future Commerce. You can find more episodes of this podcast at FutureCommerce.com. You can get ad-free episodes of this by joining the membership Future Commerce Plus. That's ad-free episodes, bonus content, a monthly exclusive, and also, hey, discount on merch and print, which you'll need for the Muses Journal, which is our brand new annual journal, just came out just a couple weeks ago. And you can get your copy now, scant few left at musesjournal.com, and you'll save 15%, not on your car insurance, but on the definitive piece of written content that sort of summarizes our thoughts on how Future Commerce is looking at the future of your business. You can find that at musesjournal.com, and, of course, to get 15% off, FutureCommerce.com /Plus. Thank you for listening to this episode of Future Commerce.Thank