• by Jack Loechner , Staff Writer @mp_research, January 15, 2008

Significant Trends to Impact Business Planning Future

While the Research Brief yesterday summarized several consumer media trends in 2007, today is forward looking from newspaper executives who identify the current trends they believe will have an impact on the future of businesses.

The list of 66 trends provided by eight newspaper executives will serve as the center piece for a "scenario planning" workshop, to be held in January, and published by the WAN Shaping the Future of the Newspaper project.

Some are profound and others are seemingly minor -- but all have the potential to shape the future of newspapers. These are a few of the identified trends:

• Infotainment, with games, DVDs, tickets, samples and other non-traditional products becoming an increasingly important component of the media offering.
• Changing demographics, with more single households, older people and non-traditional families.
• Growing choice, with an infinite number of options making it hard to decide what products and services to buy.
• User-generated content that provides opportunities for self-expression and social interaction.
• Consumer power, where the customer is taking control over brands and information flows on the internet.
• Mobile devices becoming faster, smaller and user-friendly.
• The growing importance of social networks.
• Multi-channel strategies and the diminishing differences between types of news media.

Martha Stone, Director of the SFN projec, said "The trends will be used as the catalyst for the scenario planning process, and... describe current trends  that are likely to have a certain degree of importance in the future... We will focus on the most important trends and uncertainties and use them to build possible scenarios for the future."

The trends, which touch on everything from aging demographics to expanding media choices to globalization, can be found here.