Signals From the Everyday

I've always enjoyed looking at things that happen close to home and asking if that points to something broader happening in the world. This is far from a formal research method, of course. It's about combining observation of everyday life with the intuition developed across a career to discover insights that can have wider relevance.

With that in mind, two happenings from last week stuck with me.

The first is about why being predictable — long dismissed as a boring word — might be the best place for a brand to be right now.

My wife, who is a state school primary teacher, held a parents evening to discuss pupil progress. Out of six couples she saw, three spontaneously stated that they were really troubled by the state of the world. That feels like a signal to me; if you go to a school to hear how your child is doing and feel compelled to mention a broader global context, then that context is surely affecting how other people think and act generally. In January we referenced in this newsletter one of this year's Accenture Life Trends, The Stability Premium. In essence, ordinary people are craving a breathing space from a constant barrage of discontinuity.

"What used to be discussed and managed behind closed doors now plays out publicly - tariffs, breakthroughs, threats, memes. And all demanding instant attention because they carry ramifications at scale.....On top of this there still seems to be both a long term psychological Covid hangover, and real concerns, felt locally by people in many countries, over “affordability”. No wonder people are craving stability: something solid to hold onto, a chance to catch their breath and find clarity.

The Iran war is more of this. On the one hand, it delivers disturbing real time images of destruction and loss of life. On the other, the oil price just more than doubled and that's going to hit your bills.

And as we said last week in our Full Moon essay, how relevant do humans feel when global events create unpredictable consequences, coming to a job or a price tag near you soon?

Greg Jackson, CEO of Octopus Energy has been in the UK media a lot in the last week for obvious reasons. I think he does a good job of managing expectations around energy prices without blather. He delivers a sense of stability in action.

Brands need to think about this hard right now. Spend time putting yourself in the customer's shoes and ask: how are they feeling? What should I say or do differently to help them feel some sense of predictability? That's not a dull idea these days.

This second signal is about liquid expectations: this is when expectations of service levels are set in one arena, but then expected everywhere else, by everybody.

I woke on Saturday morning and from the window saw stationery blue flashing lights a mile away on a country lane. Something bad had happened. Later I passed by and a car was on its side in poor shape. We found out via a Facebook community group that the driver was very bruised but thankfully safe. He had tried to avoid an enormous pothole in the road but it caught the rear end of his car, which then span and rolled.

Potholes are endemic this year around where I live, and from what I hear in many rural areas of the UK. It is a real problem, as this guy discovered on a Saturday morning. There is outrage — and was on the Facebook group, quite rightly. The council repaired the offending pothole that day. But not many of the others.

There is a huge challenge lurking underneath this. As someone mentioned to me recently: in the last 30 years digital has conditioned us to expect that we can get what we want on demand — taxis, food, printing paper, a date, an answer. Yet government does not move that fast. And probably, given the complexity of funding choices and the range of services we look to it for, cannot move that fast, certainly on its own. Even more so with the unusually heavy rain we experienced this winter.

This is a recipe for on-going dissatisfaction with politicians, which is bound to deliver disappointment repeatedly unless we try to break the cycle. That might mean a party brave enough to be bracingly truthful, and/or a massive opportunity space for private corporations and entrepreneurs to bridge that expectation gap in new radical ways, probably using technology. And that would require bold new thinking about private/public partnership.