The consumer goods and retail industry is affected by issues ranging from
social developments like our aging society and urbanization, to environmental
concerns like sustainability, and changing consumer behavior such as the digital
lifestyle and personalization. The overall objective of the Emerging Trends/Future
Value Chain project was to identify concrete collaborative (non-competitive)
industry actions to respond to the most significant of these trends.
The first step was an extensive trends analysis of more than 200 reports
from leading research institutes, NGOs and think tanks. This resulted in the
identification of 20 trend clusters comprising a total of 84 subtrends (Figure 1,
pages 10 and 11). The list ranged from Health Awareness (including subtrends
such as the growing private market for health products and services, and
the convergence of industries like healthy cosmetics and functional foods)
to Entertainment Society (with subtrends including the increasing demand
for entertaining and unconventional POS, and the growing number of people
playing games online).