STEPIC analyses macro changes, and the acronym STEPIC stands for “Society, Technology, Economy, Policy, Industry, and Creativity,” which refers to the six factors that influence change in marketing. Researchers apply the STEPIC framework in order to determine the most significant factors influencing the consumer goods and services industries.
The middle of the 20th century began a new historical era known as the Information Age. It stands out for making a quick transition away from traditional industries that emerged during the Industrial Revolution and towards an information technology-based economy. The length of time that an asset continues to be of value to the person who owns it is referred to as its “economic life.” The cost of an asset at the time of its purchase, the length of time an investment is put to use in production, and the regulations that now apply to it are three of the financial factors that must be taken into account in order to calculate an asset’s economic life. After the Information Age comes what is known as the Imagination Age, which is an era in which creativity and imagination are prioritized as the key drivers of economic value. According to this theory, technological advancements such as virtual reality and user-generated content will alter the ways in which humans connect with one another and establish new forms of economic and social organization.
The pandemic caused an epidemic of worry to sweep the globe, and the economic downturn, ongoing conflicts, and catastrophic weather are all having an impact on consumer satisfaction. According to Gallup’s Negative Experience Index, which has been tracking the growth of unhappiness (including anger, stress, sadness, physical discomfort, and concern) since 2006, global dissatisfaction has hit an all-time high. This finding comes as no surprise. The general public’s mistrust of the government and the media is also on the rise in a number of different regions, particularly in Western nations.
In order to be successful in the future, brands will need to adopt a new way of thinking and prioritize investments in imaginative strategic planning. This will not be artistic virtuosity, but rather the ability to foresee ideas and solutions that do not yet exist, with the objective of creating opportunities across the STEPIC domains of society, technology, the environment, politics, and industry through creativity.
Some may wonder why STEPIC analysis is replaced with PEST analysis. The reason is that the traditional PEST analysis (Politics, Economics, Society, and Technology), which is aimed at helping the leaders of a business gain a better understanding of the present market, lacks important components that might be used to manage risk.
In order to thrive in a market that is represented by instability, unpredictability, complexity, and ambiguity, strategic imagination does not constitute a wasteful workshop activity but rather an investment in creating profitable business ideas, product strategies, work environments, and customer interactions.
Let’s go through the six STEPIC themes that are given out by WGSN.
1. Society: From Personalized to Individualized
According to WGSN, by 2025, the Caring Economy will grow to better understand the effects of mental and physical health on society. All services, both paid and unpaid, that provide care to individuals of all ages and capacities are included in the care economy. The global care industry is among the oldest and fastest-growing in the world, contributing significantly to the expansion of employment and global economic growth.
As customers grow increasingly anxious and seek items that are tailored to their shifting emotions and feelings of happiness, personalization will become more customized. It’s time to stop thinking about the consumer and start thinking about the person.
By 2025, it will be even more important than ever for designers and brands to prioritize the individual requirements and experiences of their customers. Reaching success will require seeing consumers as individuals first, with defects, mood swings, and complex emotions, as opposed to just a segment of the population.
Technology will enable customers to collaborate with brands in the beauty and wellness sectors, opening up a greater degree of personalization that can adapt to consumers’ constantly shifting emotions. An in-store fragrance selection device was developed by L’Oréal in collaboration with the neurotech startup EMOTIV. The headgear is capable of measuring a consumer’s emotional reaction to smell using brain activity and providing personalized suggestions based on that response.
Companies that put their employees’ individual needs first will create more and more “people-first” environments that go beyond the outer reaches. Menstrual leave is being offered to employees by Polish game company GOG.com, which said in a LinkedIn statement that it “acknowledges the validity of these symptoms” by offering extra days off to workers who are suffering period discomfort.
Future branding will need to concentrate on how goods and services, using consumer experiences, in-store encounters, and other touchpoints, may both reduce anxiety and enhance mental well-being. while developing people-first products, places, and services that take into account every consumer’s unique experience. In order to tell customers about themselves, brands will also need to invest in data and use technologies like artificial intelligence.
2. Technology: The concept of duality in the Age of Digital technology
Digital twinning will broaden the possibilities of technology in a variety of domains, including communication, healthcare, and urban planning. A digital twin performs by creating an exact digital duplicate of a physical asset’s characteristics, behavior, and functioning in a virtual environment. Smart sensors that gather data from the product are used to produce a real-time digital representation of the asset. Furthermore, it will change our relationship with technology by generating new identities, realities, shapes, and sensitivities.
The use of digital twins is expanding across a number of industries, from factory optimization and tailored healthcare to energy management and smart city planning. Beijing’s 51World, using Unreal Engine, has produced an augmented Shanghai that is an exact replica of urban planning. Digital twinning may also provide a more customized approach to wellness, self-care, and healthcare by enabling the use of “in silico”—computer-simulated human—representations to monitor patient responses to various therapies and enhance personalized medicine.
In order to develop a digital assistant that can anticipate user wants or act as the virtual guardian of digital assets, Cambridge Consultants in the UK has envisioned a novel approach to leveraging digital twin technology. As a way to enable businesses to deliver next-generation customer support in a highly adaptable and economical manner, Auckland’s Soul Machines and IBM have teamed up to produce “artificial human” advisers. Further advances might make it possible for users to rapidly and simply construct lifelike avatars of themselves using Meta’s Instant Codec Avatars.
Many fashion brands will begin to produce artificial human models to style and outfit for photoshoots virtually. Since these models will only be purchased once, it will save a brand’s expenses considering that it will take the place of a 15-20-person photoshoot crew, which includes the models and the photographer.
3. Environment: Sleep for Sustainability
To lower stress on all systems and ultimately contribute to a reduction in global energy consumption, sleep mode for individuals, companies, goods, and services will be essential.
By 2025, as people seek to lower their cost of living and enhance their quality of life, sleep, rest, and “turning off” will become more closely associated with wellness. The focus on consumers may also be applied to the environment. For example, a study conducted by Yildiz Technical University of Istanbul found that if 38 million Turkish houses slept two hours earlier, it could reduce their CO2 emissions by roughly 4,130 metric tons every night.
Consumer interest in products that promote sleep, such as melatonin, adaptogens, and GABA, is growing. A “good sleep chocolate” containing melatonin-rich almonds and soothing reishi mushrooms has been introduced by US-based Eat Gold Organics.
At the same time, Japanese business Deria Foods has created white rice enhanced with GABA, the neurotransmitter released in the brain for sleep. Products are being created or altered in the consumer tech industry to accommodate consumers’ needs for relaxation and detachment.
4. Politics: Borderless World’s
As we spend more time in the metaverse and on personal devices, our understanding of local and global issues will change. By 2025, consumers will turn to new ideological organizations and creative collectives, while Western soft power and political frameworks will be replaced as the world’s leaders.
The average working-age internet user now uses connected devices and services for six hours and 37 minutes a day, or approximately 100 days a year, according to DataReportal’s Digital Global Overview Report for 2022. As we spend more time in borderless cyberspace, geographic location will become less significant.
By 2025, “we’ll be living in the same towns and cities, but in different worlds,” according to Dr. Keith Dear, Director of Artificial Intelligence Innovation at Fujitsu Defense and National Security, during a presentation to WGSN. For example, a new metaverse game named OneRare’s Foodverse is leveraging the global reach of blockchain technology to help increase accessibility to the world’s food market. Players may find and play dishes prepared by famous chefs worldwide and turn them into NFTs.
Designers and creators are rejecting Western ideas and aesthetics in favor of framing their own, and this change is also evident in the actual world and in product design. For example, Thebe Magugu, a fashion designer from South Africa, sourced items for her S/S 23 collection, Discard Theory, from Dunusa, a warehouse in Johannesburg that contains abandoned Western apparel. Magugu created a story about globalization, textile waste, and the definition of luxury by updating the items with high-end materials and reimagining their silhouettes and proportions.
A growing number of non-Western and indigenous identities will influence the way that aesthetics and tastes are perceived in many industries.
5. Industry: The End of Abundance
The period of abundance will come to an end by 2025, when a series of environmental shocks brought on by the climate catastrophe will render exhausted resources unable to meet the growing demand. Innovative companies will use this change as a platform to develop new, stronger models and antifragility systems that make use of fermentation techniques, seasonal and local foods, and waste minimization.
Christoph Langwallner is the founder and CEO of WhatIF Foods, a firm that aspires to diversify the food supply by including climate-hero foods that may restore biodiversity to devastated ecosystems. He contends that companies must take a step back when examining their supply networks. Many supply chain systems are regarded in a linear fashion, which is no longer appropriate. Using a circular strategy, there is potential to build stronger, more efficient value chains (where value is contributed to resources rather than taken away from them).
With her project ClimaFibre, multidisciplinary designer Jess Redgrave, a graduate of the Material Futures course at the University of the Arts, London, reimagines fashion’s place in a world running out of natural resources. She investigates how sunflowers may be produced as a single, regenerative source to create viable material alternatives for the fashion and interior sectors, ranging from cellulose for fabrics to an assortment of colors. Using fermentation and avoiding waste will also create equitable resilience.
6. Creativity: AI Surrealism
In a period of polycrisis, the 2020s will witness a rebirth of creativity that defies rationality, just as Surrealism did in the 1920s. Anticipate the application of artificial intelligence by innovators and artists to investigate the most sinister facets of human emotion—not in a depressing sense, but rather in the spirit of imaginative reconstruction.
Both professionals and amateurs are being empowered by a new wave of human-machine collaboration to swiftly generate new types of content and explore new ideas. The amazing advancement of high-quality AI-generated text, photos, movies, audio, speech, and 3D models has given rise to the phrase “generative tech.”
For example, Danielle Adams, a recent graduate of Central Saint Martins, created the project Post McQueen, which uses AI to examine the history and impact of the British design house Alexander McQueen. For the project, Adams used photos of the label’s creations to feed an algorithm. Adams utilized the AI model’s ability to create fresh images of comparable fashion styles as inspiration for creating a range of clothes. By 2025, the only ways to decompress from the strain and anxiety brought on by polycrisis will be through creativity, imagination, and dreaming.
As more people become aware of the urgent need for change in the ways we treat our communities, organize our businesses, and interact with our environment, there will be a challenge to long-held beliefs and an increase in local and global conflicts. Though new partnerships and possibilities will also present themselves, and new technology and forms of creativity will be embraced as agents of advancement, polarisations will only deepen. Whatever our political stance, we will all be refocusing our energies to come up with creative, group-sourced solutions, keeping in mind the words of American poet Robert Frost: “The only way around is through.”