Destination Next: Port Cities
Sydney has long been the trendsetter capital of Australia, but its role as Olympic host in the year 2000 will ensure its influence is felt far beyond those shores. Increased tourism means more ‘messengers’ will visit Sydney, returning home with a catalogue of experiences from a city in which styles are set by the gay community, a highly educated creative community and ‘new money’ entrepreneurs. Other ports to watch: Genoa, Marseilles, Rotterdam and Hamburg. The latter two are among the edgiest, each with a noteworthy fashion and music scene.
Destination Next: Cities with an Edge
For hardier souls who like their trends a little edgier, there are alternatives: most notably, Moscow/St Petersburg and Naples.
Moscow/St Petersburg In a Europe where everything is coming together, Russia will give adventurous Europeans the chance to experience something very different – an advanced, industrialized European country living in the raw, close to the edge. As Zoya Ivanova, account executive at Y&R Europe, Moscow Representation, sees it, life in Russia will get harder but more interesting as people fight with their brains rather than guns. This will be a thrilling and disturbing experience for cosseted young Europeans – far more exotic than trips to more distant destinations. It will also give them some new angles on things they take for granted.
Naples For adventurous Europeans who can’t face the chill of Russia, Naples offers the experience of managing chaos under azure skies. Without the tourist hordes and self-consciousness of many Italian cities, Naples will be the place to observe old Italy head-to-head with the twenty-first century – rapier-sharp native wit and invention devising strategies to handle high-tech and regulations. Marco Lombardi, planning director at Y&R Italia Milan, notes that Naples is today a dramatization of Italy’s good qualities and faults: ‘When you are there, you can feel in the air a positive tension, a mood of statu nascenti, which is best expressed through the music of the people coming from centri sociali (self-managed young communities).’
Destination Next: New Asian Hubs
After centuries of bigger-is-better nationalism around the world, it’s easy to forget that some of the most influential and successful human enterprises have not been huge countries, but rather city states – Athens, Florence, Venice to name but three from history. In Asia, Hong Kong and Singapore have proved the value of small concentrated units, increasingly rivalling each other as regional hubs – meta-capitals, acting as magnets both for their hinterland and for overseas entrepreneurs looking to do business in the region.
The scene is set for other influential hubs to emerge. Shanghai already has a glorious heritage from its pre-revolutionary days and will act as a focus for talent to rival Hong Kong and Guangzhou. In a recent America Online interview, Pete Engardio, a Business Week staffer covering the region, said that China’s coastal provinces are so economically dynamic that they could absorb about five cities like Hong Kong, although Hong Kong is likely to retain the unique advantages of a legal system, a free press and a corruption-free society.
Meanwhile, emerging nations such as Singapore, Malaysia and Vietnam are jockeying for position in the regional and international community. Malaysia, which aims to oust Singapore as the cornerstone of South-east Asia, is busy developing a vast high-tech enterprise zone, the Multimedia Super Corridor, with the aim of leap-frogging Malaysia into the Information Age. Vietnam is focusing less on technology and more on its unique cultural heritage. DY&R’s country development manager predicts great things for Vietnamese artists and creators, both in the field of plastic arts and in TV and advertising, and foresees a vogue based on Vietnam’s traditional womenswear: ‘Western women will start to wear the Vietnamese national dress, the “ao dai”, or Western fashion designers will adapt it for Western women to wear. The dress is too feminine, too “sexy” for designers to pass up.’
‘There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in their home.’ Ken Olson, then chairman of Digital Equipment, in an address to the World Future Society, Boston, 1977
A couple of years ago, Richard Eastman of Billerica, Massachusetts, who managed a genealogy forum on online access provider CompuServe, noticed some odd messages from one of about twenty computer users during a regular weekly gathering of their ‘cybercommunity’. A message from the Reverend Kenneth Walker indicated that he wasn’t feeling terribly well, and the reverend soon began transmitting messages with gross typographical errors. Another member of the cybercommunity, a nurse from Long Island, New York, immediately began asking Reverend Walker for his symptoms. At one point, according to a report from Reuters, Walker wrote, ‘By keyboard it melting … I jest nuut.’ Minutes later, he typed, ‘Helo … have broblemd … thimk I am waying stroke.’ Eastman then started asking him for his phone number. After six attempts, he finally got the number, called a telephone operator, and found himself talking to a police officer in Scotland. The police forced their way into Walker’s home minutes after Eastman called, and took Walker to a hospital.
Walker, who said doctors believe he may have suffered an epileptic attack, called Eastman to thank him. ‘This wasn’t any great heroism,’ Eastman said. ‘The only thing different in this case is that it was online.’ Eastman, who has written a book about genealogy, and Walker, considered an expert on Scottish records and archives, have since found they have many things in common. ‘It’s kind of an interesting thing how two lives 3,000 miles apart get wrapped up,’ Eastman said. ‘Obviously, we share a common interest. There is a kinship, if you will.’
Welcome to the global neighbourhood.
The Human Faces of Change
For those who have become ‘plugged in’, the Internet offers a world of new people, new ideas and new information. It opens up avenues of communication that allow us access to places we otherwise might never have gone. It’s becoming increasingly evident that the Net also will alter the path that trends take around the world. Today, online communication is taking place primarily in English (an estimated three-quarters of all Internet sites are located in English-speaking countries.) As the Internet attracts a more global audience, however, there is a mounting effort to broaden the appeal and usefulness of the Net by taking down the ‘English only’ signs, thereby enabling and encouraging people to communicate and collaborate in their native languages.
The number of multilingual Websites is growing. The Internet Society and Montreal-based Alis Technologies have established Babel (http://babel.alis.com:8080/), a site aimed at internationalizing the Web by promoting the use of languages other than English. Babel will eventually be available in approximately ten languages. Dynalab (http: www.dynalab.com.), a Taiwanese font manufacturer, is marketing GlobalSurf, a utility that provides fonts in twenty-three languages, including Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Thai, Hebrew and most European languages. The product solves the common problem of garbled type resulting from double-byte Asian characters by using fonts that support Unicode. Web pages can now correctly display these foreign language characters on any browser that supports Unicode.
As the online population gradually falls more closely in line with global realities, we can be sure that cross-cultural influences will no longer emanate primarily from Western trend capitals. In the past few years, the online community has evolved beyond ‘technogeeks’ to encompass the thought and opinion leaders who – with close, smart tracking – can serve as important barometers of how, when and whether particular fads, trends and styles will evolve from the ‘mindspace’ of the Internet to the ‘marketplace’ of the face2face world. It’s these pioneers of next who will reshape the world of marketing communications and commerce for the future.