Modeling the Future of Marketing — Part 1

Looking at marketing through the work futures lens.

If you were asked to describe various alternative futures for your business or marketplace, or even — at the most grandiose — the shape of the world in 2030, how would you start? What approach would you take to distinguish and contrast different possible futures? Would you draw a picture? Tell stories? Clip images on Instagram? Start with what you’d like the future state to be, and work back to the present, aspirationally?

Answering that question — or trying to — is the stock in trade of the futurist. Those who try to think systematically about the future generally are not involved in trying to ‘tell the future’ like some carnival fortune teller. In fact, the questionable practice of ‘forecasting’ that has led many to avoid the term ‘futurist’ altogether, and to be suspicious of those who do. (Personally, I consider myself an anthropologist of the future, which is a convoluted way of sidestepping the ‘futurist’ term, but holding on to the magic involved with ‘the future’.)

Still, we do need to explore alternative futures, and to try to understand the qualitative differences between them, and across a set of potential futures one of the most accessible dimensions to apply is the likelihood of the various alternatives. This way of thinking lines up naturally with the way that our minds are inclined, so we don’t need to create some futures calculus (or invent the crystal ball) to spin stories about the…