Know how consumers will behave before they know it themselves
WGSN's new flagship forecast, Future Consumer 2027: Emotions (available to download here), identifies three key emotions that will shape consumer behaviour in 2027.
This forecast provides a roadmap to future-proof your business, enabling you to understand exactly how consumers will be feeling in two years’ time and, importantly, how they will want to feel.
Emotions offer a new framework for understanding consumers and supercharging product innovation, business growth and customer engagement. They are a powerful tool that can be harnessed to shape how customers react to your brand’s narrative, products and experiences, ultimately influencing their purchasing decisions and building brand love.
The three emotions covered in the white paper are:
- Strategic Joy: to combat negativity and reimagine the world as a more inspiring, inclusive and affirming place, joy will be essential
- Witherwill: defined as “the longing to be free from responsibility,” this emotion will shape 2027 as people continue to be overwhelmed amid a polycrisis
- Suspicious Optimism: as people grow apprehensive about the role of technology and AI, they will be tempering optimism with suspicion
These consumer emotions should be used as an overarching narrative for developing business strategies and hyper-targeted product lines across fashion, beauty, food and drink, interiors, sports and outdoor and consumer tech.
Nik Dinning, Vice President of Marketing at WGSN, explains the fundamental role emotions play in understanding consumer behaviour:
“Our emotions shape who we are, connect us with others and define what it means to be human.
Since the pandemic and the polycrisis that followed, emotion also became the central driver of all consumer behaviour. How we shop, what we buy and the brands that we choose have become inextricably linked with the way that we feel.
For brands, understanding these emotional drivers is fundamentally important. Your success will be determined by how your future consumers react to your brand’s narrative, products and the experiences that you create.
In our new flagship forecast, Future Consumer 2027: Emotions, we offer a roadmap to these key emotions and explain how you can create the right products for your consumers by tapping into their thoughts, feelings and behaviours.”
Thought starters
The white paper includes three key thought starters that brand and marketing leaders can action:
- How can you integrate play and joy into your products and internal processes to improve the health and happiness of your customers and your business?
- As people face pressures on multiple fronts, how can you lighten their load and help them enjoy a less pressured life with fewer responsibilities?
- Technology is transforming our world at warp speed. How can you build trust and inspire optimism in its potential to create a better future for all?
The WGSN methodology
Our job is to make you and your brand successful. The rigour of our proprietary STEPIC™ methodology reinforces the accuracy of our forecasts, currently standing at 93%, helping to de-risk your decision-making and – crucially – keep you in profit.
We contextualise global research, design directions and quantitative and qualitative data to deliver strategic forecasts and analytics, which are fundamental to product development, planning and trading.
Our signature STEPIC™ methodology is the lens through which we observe and synthesise seemingly disparate factors that converge to become a trend. This methodology uses data from a range of sources, including shows, social media, retail, searches and sentiment analysis, to predict trends and help clients make informed decisions.
This data, combined with the forecast intelligence of our 250+ experts worldwide, makes WGSN the most accurate forecasting tool in the world.
About WGSN
Trend forecasting solutions for people ahead of their time
Our foresight helps businesses understand the changes they need to act on now so they can make the best products and services for tomorrow.
If you need to know what will fill consumers’ wardrobes, bathroom shelves, kitchens or even their hands in the future, WGSN’s proven combination of consumer insight, data and industry expertise will guide you.
For more than a quarter of a century, we have explained the big macro shifts in consumer lifestyles, values and needs to ensure our clients achieve future product and commercial success.
Email press@wgsn.com for more information and expert interviews. For more information, visit wgsn.com.