Marketing in the Era of Uber Trends

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1:03Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is Jon Jantz. My guest today is Michael Chong. He's an innovation expert, sought-after speaker, and founder of Uber Trends. He's recognized as America's most influential trend spotter by Daily Telegraph. Michael has helped companies like Apple, American Express, and Mercedes-Benz anticipate and capitalize on seismic shifts in consumer behavior and technology. He's known for his energetic presentations, uncanny predictions, and unique frameworks for decoding the future. So, Michael, welcome to the show. Oh, thank you for having me, John.

1:41It's a pleasure to be here, especially with someone who is in the digital marketing arena. For many years, before we had digital marketing, in fact, but still in it. As I read in your bio, you've been called America's most influential trend spotter. So I'm wondering, do you have a kind of a personal process for identifying, you know, real lasting trends versus kind of passing fads? Have you got a methodology that generally is on target? Well, I think that and I have a book called Uber Trends, how trends and innovation are transforming our future. I am really focused on my eight Uber Trends because they are what I consider to be value shift inducing trends.

2:26Most trends just skim the social surface. So those eight Uber trends, the digital lifestyle, the marriage of man and machine, generation ecstasy, been there, done that, voyeurgasm, I like to watch. I know these are, you know, standout waves that I believe repercussed through society, rippling across our social surface and creating many subtrends in their wake. Like if I see a phenomenon that is tied to one of these Uber trends, then I know it's part of a lasting happening. I think that's really how you have to look at it. So, for example, you know, the experience of inflation, which is one of my Uber trends that is, of course, quite appropriate for Las Vegas because we have so many.

3:20a meow wolf and now we have the universal horror experience and you've got the sphere these are all things that are aimed directly under the ages of generation ecstasy at an audience that's become so bored and so immune to excitement because they want to move on to the next thing, just like, you know, been there, done that suggests that I look at those type of phenomena as a part of a lasting change in society. So maybe I better back up a little bit. Let's define first the concept of an Uber trend that obviously it's central to your work. How do you define one? You know, what makes it different from, say, a micro trend?

4:08Okay, an Uber trend is a massive wave, think tsunami that cascades through society, leaving many sub trends in its wake. And what sets it apart, like I mentioned, unlike most trends, it does not skim the social surface. It actually changes people. So let me give you a perfect example of that. Time compression. The acceleration of life. we are all suffering from TBD, too busy disorder, as Ellen DeGeneres coined it. We are all multitasking to save a time. You know, we've all become massively impatient. So, you know, the TikTok video view is now two seconds because everyone clicks off in 1.6 to 1.8 seconds.

5:00That is part and parcel of the time compression Uber trend. So when you see, again, these snapshots in society, I connect the dots. We're all inundated by data. And so what I try to say is, look, this is all part and parcel of a phenomenon that has legs. And that is something that you need to watch as a marketer, especially. So I've been doing this show for coming up on 20 years. Actually, August 1st is my 20th anniversary of doing this show as a podcast. Prior to that, I actually did a radio show. And so I have interviewed many people. I interviewed John Nesbitt, who was the author of Megatrends.

5:44And so he was kind of the first person to talk trends, to me at least. I'm sure there have been others. Has your work been influenced by some of his early work? Well, mega trends is what everybody will call it when I talk about Uber trends, right? But, you know, remember, I'm a marketer by heart, okay? That's my background. I worked a shy day, you know? So when I decided on the Uber nomenclature way before Uber was cool, I was uber cool. I adopted that as the name for my trends. And think about it. You're a marketer. Think about the marketing perspective. You've got the 70s. You've got Alvin Toffler, Future Shock.

6:31Everyone talks about that. Then the 80s appears and you've got John Naisbitt, Megatrends. Everyone talks about that. Then you get Fade Popcorn in the 90s. And some people talk about it. Then you get Malcolm Gladwell in the 2000s, who is more of an author, you know, someone who paints a great story, but I wouldn't necessarily consider him to be a sublime trend watcher. I think he's really more focused on creating these stories and, you know, 10 ,000 hours that you have to become before you become proficient at something. So there is a vacuum in my view and the vacuum that is currently being occupied by the likes of, say, a Rainier Evers at trend watching in the Netherlands.

7:20and there's a gentleman in Jeremy Gucci in Canada with Trend Hunter. To me, yeah. And with all due respect, let me tell you something. Many of their 10 ,000 or so, 20 ,000 or so trend labels, most of those are fads. Most of those are, you know, a picture hook for your wall in the shape of a dagger. Who cares? I don't. That may be good for a small business operator who's looking for a creative idea, perhaps. But I am more interested in the systemic shifts in society. That is my difference. And so when you are looking for a value proposition as a marketer, how do I take an idea of an emerging trend and turn it into a real, you know, shape-shifting business solution?

8:28That's what I'm all about. You know, over the years, you've heard me talk a lot about marketing systems. Today, I get to share something really special. My daughter, Sarah Nay, who also happens to be the CEO of Duct Tape Marketing, just released her first book. It's called Unchained, Breaking Free from Broken Marketing Models and How Small Business Can Finally Take Control of Their Marketing, Lead with Strategy, and Scale with AI. I know, a mouthful, right? But it's everything we've learned taken to the next level. In fact, we're even calling it Duct Tape Marketing 3.0. As a dad, I couldn't be prouder.

9:05But I want you to check it out at dtm.world slash unchained and get ready to take your strategy to a whole new level. Yeah, I mean, I mean, all the conversation around trends is really just kind of almost fun pop culture until you can do something with it. Right. That's the real rub is a lot of people can say, oh, yeah, that. OK, I see that coming or maybe I don't or maybe that's a big deal. But how do I capitalize on it? So how do you advise people you I mentioned in your bio that you work with some big name companies? How do you advise them to take something that that maybe you've defined and you see coming and then say, hey, here's how to prepare for it?

9:47Well, look, there is no real magic in anything that we do as business people. I always say you've got to pay attention to the details. So, for example, in my presentations, I talk about the fact that, you know, everyone aspires to come up with a disruptive innovation. Sure. But Steve Jobs, with all the things that he did, not necessarily create anything new. When he took the iPod, he takes something that came out of Singapore, creative strategies, not a creative strategy, but you know who I'm talking about. They already had an MP3 player. But he just did a best of breed. He put a five megabyte, which at the time was huge, of storage into a device.

10:40But the biggest innovation there was tying it to a music store so that you could automatically seamlessly download some music. So as a business person, when you're looking at emerging trends and you're seeing, you know, all the things that are happening in our current landscape, and there are many, okay? you have to then decide, okay, how do I build a business around that? So again, you take baby steps. You say, what is the pain point in society related to this emerging trend? What are people not able to do or accomplish in a simple fashion to get this to work for them? especially in this day and age where, you know, let's go through some numbers here.

11:32You're in digital marketing. You know as well as I, the Scott Brinker has that barometer. And in May, he said there were 15 ,400 or so digital marketing apps. That took 31 years from the day that first ad banner appeared on Hotwired, right? 1994, May, 1994, till now. 31 years to get to 15 ,400 apps. Since the debut of OpenAI's ChatGPT, November 30th of 2022, we will never forget. We now have almost 40 ,000 AI apps. Yeah. Massive, massive. But what that does tell you is that there is a, and I call this trend, the great Martech displacement, okay? Because in all my explorations, if you will, of the apps that are marketing related, one of the things I noticed that, hey, you know what?

12:37There are almost no traditional players in all these articles that are talking about, you know, the digital sales representative and, you know, Geo, which is now the new SEO, generative AI, it's born engine optimization, is that these things are not occupied by the traditional player. If I was a small business consultant and I was focused on what the next generation of my clients would be demanding, I would suggest that they start looking into what are these leading edge tools and build a business around that. Yeah, I actually think that it'll be interesting. Some of the entrenched players, I think, will try to get it in the space.

13:25But I think that, I think there's a, right now, the AI apps are, you know, there are 200 of them that somebody could use at any given time. I think those are all going to get consolidated and eaten up by somebody who figures out how to create the AI operating system as kind of one deliverable package. and I think people will, you know, right now there's a whole bunch of$20 a month tools. I think there's somebody who's going to come along and create the$5.99, you know, all-in-one package that I think will, especially for small and mid-sized businesses. That's what Elon Musk says he wants to do.

13:59You know, there's been talk about that super app for years now. I have not seen it, you know. That's because it's hard. In 1992, I created the first incursion of what I consider a modulary upgradable CRM system. It was called Hello because I am focused on the user experience. That is what I believe is the number one thing you should be talking about. In this new age, with everyone being hyper-competitive, the customer experience is what sets you apart. So as a small business person, that is what I focus on. Transparency is the other thing that I highly advocate everybody pursue. We are living in an era where that's ruled by voyeurgasm.

14:47I like to watch UberTrend. And that is propelling that urge by society to be able to see more. It's propelled by YouTube. You've got celebrity worship syndrome. You've got reality shows. You know, everything has become transparent. We're living in surveillance culture. You know, again, all of these are opportunities as they keep exploding to create businesses around and, you know, make sure you do that. So, for example, in our business, in our software business, you know as well as I do, every developer out there hides their customer service email. They have no 800 toll-free numbers. They try so desperately to make sure that no one can find them.

15:38There's no street address. There's nothing. It is totally anathema to the wave of the future of transparency. Absolutely. So I go and preach to an audience that is totally hostile. They don't want to hear that. And I say, look at your ketchup bottle. You will see that there is an 800 toll-free number on your ketchup bottle. Why can't you have that if I have to pay you$50 a month for your service? Well, I'm actually, I tell you one trend that I'm seeing then that's directly related to marketing is people, you know, because the buyer now has so much control over the journey and information and what they can find, you know, even creating short lists of potential vendors, that pricing is not going to be, I think, showing your pricing, revealing your pricing on your website as part of the customer journey.

16:37before I ever have to talk to a salesperson, I think is a trend that goes to this transparency, but also kind of, I think, goes to how people expect to buy today. They don't want a salesperson to call them. They want to almost do a self-led journey, even for very high ticket items. I think that you're going to see more and more marketers that are going to put everything on the table because they have no choice. Yeah, I hope so. So, you know, I feel the minute I run into any solution that has no pricing page, I go away. You're not alone. Yeah. Yeah. Well, as small business people, we all know we need to be diligent about our budgets and spending.

17:21So it is absolutely crucial that I know up front that I have full pricing transparency. And that I said, don't have to call somebody. I was going to say, I don't want to waste my time to find out it's 10 times more than I can afford. you know is the answer so so it's like i want to at least know what i'm getting into before i even want to have that conversation or waste my time i think that you know kind of goes to your short attention span you know nobody wants a sales call i mean we want to be able to just do it 24 7 when we feel like it yeah exactly are there any trends that you feel like you spotted early on and you've been able to take advantage of and then i can give you the flip side you know are there any that you feel like you really missed?

18:03Well, I was talking about time compression back in the 90s. Okay. And so I, to me, society has been evolving at a speed. Then when I started to do research into it, I discovered that it really started way back as far as the 40s, 1946, the discovery of the microwave Lovin, the discovery of the Polaroid camera, these both introduced America to instant gratification. And now it's become part and parcel of our culture. We all want, you know, I love that Google finding, you know, the interest in results for open now have increased exponentially as opposed to store hours. again for the retailer that's good to know because really you know i don't want to have to search through your whole website to find what you if you are open now i almost advocate that we go back to that remember those little banners that used to run on the websites in the 90s that had a little neon chasing thing that's what we need on your retailing website at the home page open now.

19:25I mean, to me, that is a, you know, I mean, why do I have to dig it? Now, of course, Google has provided it in its summary of results. Thank God. Because again, not even that directory listing on the right of that business that has the hours and the website and all. I mean, you know, that is all information that you as a marketer should have already provided up front on your homepage. It kind of reminds me, you were talking about the instant gratification. There was a movie, I never can remember the title of this, but characters were teenagers and their mother had died and they found a camera, a film camera that she had taken some, obviously taken some pictures.

20:06And they were like, let's go get these developed, see what's on it. So they take it in the store and he said, do you want the one hour service? And they were like, we have to wait an hour?

20:19I find that to be one of the kind of the funniest moments to really sum up this. All right. So if a marketer wants to become a trend spotter themselves to some degree, are there any habits that that you think that they need to start, you know, building around looking for those? Or is it simply a matter of read your book, Uber Trends, and then try to apply those to some process in the book? Or join Uber Trends Academy, my school, where you will be learning a lot about trend watching. Essentially, it's parsing a lot of information. It's pattern recognition, okay? I mean, I look at 400 to 500 headlines a day.

21:01I then categorize and database the articles. They're all stored now in an Airtable database. I have keyworded them. I track over 350 trends. Most of them related to my Uber trends because I cannot track every trend known to man, you know, because that would be tens of thousands. But I am just looking at the ones that everyone talks about. So I've got about 350 of those. And then what you then do is it's a relational database. So it's categorized, it's tagged. Trends can have overlapping market impacts, so they have to be tagged. So if I were to say to you, okay, you want to become a trend watcher?

21:41Yeah, you can. Absolutely. Read the New York Times, read the Wall Street Journal. They are the biggest providers of trend watching in America. Then you see and perhaps, you know, futurism, you know, Wired. I read Tech Crunch every day. I read The Verge every day. and then I, you know, I go into Google News and I look at what they provide me and then people share a lot of information with me as well. So that helps. That's my informal trend watching army. So I, you know, I get help and I need it. There's too much stuff to absorb, you know? It's impossible, right? So yeah, you can definitely become a trend watcher.

22:26So you have to analyze the data. You have to spot patterns, and that's the critical thing. You have to really understand the difference between a good survey and a bad survey, and most research is bad. Okay? Let me give you that. So when you see a statistic, for example, that says 43 % of kids would love to play video games on their watch. you then have to know that in traditional research we divide audiences into quintiles which are approximate fifths okay and and the spectrum goes from the one end of the spectrum is people who do everything and then the other end of the spectrum is the people who do nothing or as I call them, legally dead.

23:22And in that spectrum, what you will find, and it goes into those approximate fifths beautifully, really, because the top two quintiles, 40%, want to play video games on their watch. And so that 43 % statistic tells me nothing. That only tells me it's representative of the market at launch. Yeah. So reading research is absolutely critical because that is, you know, when they say, you know, 20 % of people never use AI. Hey, it's the bottom quintile. They never do anything. Yeah. You know, Michael, I appreciate you stopping by the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. Is there someplace you'd invite people to learn about you, connect with you, obviously find out more about your Uber Trends group?

24:23Yes, absolutely. So ubertrends.com, that is where the Academy is based. And, you know, that is where you will find plenty of information about our community. I invite people to join it. It's on Mighty Networks, which is a startup by Gina Biancini, who started Ring, if you remember that from the, I'm sorry, Ning, Ning, not Ring, Ning. Yeah, Gina's been on my show. Yeah, Gina. Gina, you get around, man. You know. So, yeah. So what we're trying to create is a community of people that talk to one another. You know, I don't know if you remember, but I was the founder of Iconocast. We were one of the preeminent digital marketing newsletters during the dot-com boom.

25:05So we had 50 ,000 readers each week that were part of and parcel of a very hardcore community. that's what we like to build. Awesome. Again. Awesome. I appreciate you stopping by and hopefully we'll run into you one of these days out there on the road. And by the way, this is a t-shirt that is part of my innovation crusade. You call that innovation is the hashtag. It's a laughing emoji because the reality is, as you well know, everyone talks about innovation, but it's like teenage sex. No one does it.

25:40On that note, Awesome. I appreciate it. Thanks, John.

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