esirable outcomes through foresight.  Strategic foresight is a powerful tool for organisations, providing solid footing in a shifting landscape. By using future-focused insights, retailing marketers can evolve their strategies to stay abreast of change.  A marketer’s crystal ball? Foresight does not require a belief in astrology. This highly strategic approach is less gazing into a crystal ball while ensconced in flowing robes, and more using robust frameworks and tools to determine insights into what might happen. Strategic foresight involves gathering information about an organisation’s future operating environment by considering social, economic, political, and technical developments. These trends occur more widely than just in your organisation’s immediate industry or sector. They may seem unrelated to the work you do, but the drivers of greater change almost always affect an organisation’s interests in some way.  Foresight is growing more important as the world becomes increasingly interconnected. Instability in one country can send tremors around the world. A startup disrupting an established brand can send ripples through industries globally. Events are no longer isolated. The domino effects of change are stronger and more far-reaching than ever.  Without foresight, you may be limited to seeing only short-term trends, or those immediately affecting your industry. So when changes happen – and they will – you may feel blindsided and wish you had known what was coming in advance.  It’s not about predicting the future  Foresight doesn’t attempt to predict the future. There is no guesswork about specific outcomes. Instead, strategic foresight is an evolving approach that helps confidently guide organisations in the right direction.  With the right tools, we can offer a point of view on the direction retail is going and where it will likely lead. By developing scenarios, carrying out cultural audits, and using semiotic analysis, we can identify strategic opportunities and insights for growth. These tools cover future thinking and contextualise contemporary culture. For example, weighing up trends such as the super-inclusivity ushered in by the Black Lives Matter and #MeToo movements, and what this means for brands and how they advertise. At TRA, we don’t just have a finger on the pulse but a stethoscope. We look at trends, shafts, signals, and drivers as they’re happening, and even before they happen. By monitoring emerging cultural signals, which we call cultural currents, we can make sense of where the world is going. Cultural signals are often green shoots of trends that will surge into the mainstream in a few years, presenting commercial opportunities for clients.  No matter the position your brand or business holds in the market, foresight tools are designed to support you in building on your goals. Whether that’s staying in step with the market, setting yourself apart from competitors, taking a leading position or even seeing opportunities before they appear.  Powerful campaigns Lion tapped into cultural signals to understand how to maintain relevance for the Speight’s beer brand, beyond its traditional aura of masculinity. Cultural analysis helped to identify that masculinity as we have traditionally thought of it was changing. The Speight’s definition of what friendship, or mateship, looks like between two men was quickly becoming outdated. So, Speight’s changed the way it illustrated belonging and companionship among men. This resulted in a campaign that reframed male friendship by showing two mates dancing together. The campaign won the Grand Effie in 2020, showing how cultural insight can launch resonant ideas attuned to the zeitgeist. The fact that this ad is still relevant in 2022 shows the strength of this longer-term vision, first conceived in 2018.  In another instance, ASB Bank used cultural insights to reveal that New Zealanders’ attitudes around success were changing, moving from ideas of individualism to ‘you do you’ and ‘progress not perfection’. ASB developed a new brand platform around a protagonist called Ben, creating communications that connected with New Zealanders relating to the emerging sentiment around ‘progress’ in culture. This campaign ended up being so popular it has repeatedly been voted as the nation’s favourite ad in TRA’s Favourite Ads survey.  TRA is currently working on a foresight project for a large retailer in Australia to help them understand the attitudes of a particular demographic and how they affect shopping behaviour. We’ll help the business understand their needs across departments and categories, and they’ll use these insights to shape specific initiatives within the business across product, promotions and store design. We are also forecasting the market spending power of this group and quantifying it as a revenue opportunity in the future. Shape the future you want More important than peering into the future is the opportunity to shape it. These campaigns from Speight’s, ASB, and VTNZ have become so much a part of New Zealand’s national consciousness that they serve to illustrate the most important part of foresight. It is not just about anticipating the future, it’s about shaping it.  The future is not predetermined. Foresight uses an exploratory process that acknowledges uncertainty and an array of outcomes. It stands apart from analytical thinking in the sense that it doesn’t seek to find a single ‘right’ answer.  It’s impossible to predict accurately the future operating environment. But by understanding and anticipating the drivers of change that are influencing future outcomes, we can actively shape future operating environments through the decisions we make in the present. In this way, we can explore what’s possible, plausible, and probable. Aligning marketing strategy to a range of potential futures allows us to mitigate risks and reduce unintended consequences, while taking advantage of opportunities. Plus, by using strategic foresight to get stakeholders onboard with your plans, you’ll have stronger support for achieving desired outcomes, increasing the chances of success. Then there is the consideration that even thinking about what the future might hold encourages innovation. Famed management consultant and author Peter Drucker is often quoted saying that the two basic functions of any business are marketing and innovation. Given that foresight leads to more significant innovation in services, products, and marketing initiatives, it stands to reason that this way of thinking and strategising should be an integral part of business planning. Preparing for the future can bring forward innovative products and services through powerful processes of original thinking and co-creation.  Looking to the future is the future of marketing Some of us might wish that we had known what was coming in late 2019. In 2025, we might be wishing we could have known in 2022 what was to come next. In short, the time to start incorporating future thinking into your marketing is now.  The world is experiencing fast and unpredictable change. In this precarious environment, strategic foresight needs to come to the fore. We can’t control future events but we can control how we prepare for them.  Using foresight, you will be able to protect and boost the future purpose and position of your business, and also grasp the behaviour of people in the future. Understanding consumers is an essential element of marketing, so it stands to reason that understanding your future consumer is paramount.  A future focus offers a competitive advantage. At least it does when we can translate possible futures into strategic guidelines. Knowledge alone isn’t enough; future preparedness is predicated on strategic plans. Elevating knowledge to insights is the most crucial element of strategic foresight.  By understanding how the world is changing, we can make the most informed decisions. Ultimately, strategic foresight equips businesses with the ability to navigate uncertainty with greater confidence. This story first appeared in the November 2022 issue of Inside Retail Magazine.