The fact that Citibank sponsored Elton John’s 1998 world tour speaks worlds about that brand’s commitment to being what its customers need it to be: honest, human, humane and spirited. What more could a brand ask for than a celebrity endorser who has aired all and been lauded for his integrity, for his passion for his art and for the causes he’s supported and moved the world to support? When we consider Sir Elton John, we are really considering the quintessential millennium brand, an individual who has risen above his blemishes and warts, has been transported by his ambition, commitment and talent, and who remains firmly rooted in the real world while he lives a life far beyond anything a working-class kid from England could have ever imagined. Elton John is a millennial brand because he is trusted, because he is genuine – and because he is familiar. We know him, and we draw comfort from that.
Smart marketers have been quick to take advantage of consumers’ nostalgic leanings. Microsoft launched Windows 95 with help from the Rolling Stones; Nissan reconnected to its history with the aid of Van Halen and G.I. Joe. Around the world, we’re most definitely seeing a rise in ‘stake claiming’ to the past, as companies work to ensure that tomorrow is familiar because of its linkage to yesterday. Going forwards, we’ll see that the most effective marketing strategies meld the essence of nostalgia (reliability, quality, beauty, familiarity) with the positive elements of futurism (functionality, convenience, versatility).
Big Next: ‘Perpetual Youth’ and our Ageing World
It used to be that people over fifty were old, and people under thirty were young. Then Mick Jagger turned fifty and continued to strut his stuff on-stage, and our entire theory of ageing had to be revamped. Today, ‘midlife crises’ occur not on one’s thirty-fifth birthday, but on one’s forty-fifth, fifty-fifth or even later. Men and women in their seventies and eighties are remaining physically (even sexually) active, travelling the world, and are sometimes even involved in running companies – and countries.
Throughout much of Europe and North America, women are delaying childbirth until their thirties or even forties. Adults are running around in tennis shoes and short shorts, working out at the gym in an attempt to delay some of the normal ravages of ageing – and having plastic surgery to mask much of the rest. The fashion industry has been forced to redesign its ‘youth’ fashions to fit the bodies of the middle-aged men and women who continue to wear them rather than adopting more ‘grown-up’ fashions.
In the years ahead, expect the world’s ‘elders’ (whether ageing boomers or their parents) to command unprecedented attention from marketers and the media, and to have an enormous impact on the rest of the population. The reality is that we’re entering into an era in which the elderly will make up a larger proportion of the global population than ever before. Already, the most rapidly growing age group is made up of those aged eighty-five plus. In the US this group will double in size by 2025 and increase fivefold by 2050. Consider the implications: By the year 2030, approximately 20 per cent of the US population will be over age sixty-five. That’s 69 million people. Around the world, half of all people aged sixty-five and over who have ever lived are alive today.
Our ageing population promises to influence everything from financial planning and home design to the way products are made and sold. Likely developments include everything from ‘adult friendly’ caps on medicine bottles to wider car doors and foods that compensate for changing tastes and dietary needs. We’ll also see even greater shifts with regard to our attitudes regarding what it means to ‘age’. As the number of elderly continues to increase, so will this group’s power in terms of influencing public policy. Images of the elderly as victims will become historical; instead we will see seniors who grow more active in politics and who maintain and even increase their economic power as they move fully into their second half century of life. Socially, politically – and certainly economically – the implications of this ‘Big Next’ will be felt by us all.
We’ve chosen to place our final two Big Nexts – the United States of Europe and an Independent Asia – in a separate chapter. These Big Nexts differ from our usual ‘stock in trade’ in that they focus on geopolitics and regional economics rather than on consumerism, popular culture and the like. Whether one lives in one of the regions in question or in the Americas, Africa or elsewhere, the implications of life next in Europe and Asia will be enormous.
Big Next: United States of Europe
For many of Europe’s 350 million-plus citizens, the next five to ten years will be the most exciting, promising, and/or disturbing era of their lives. Only those with vivid memories of the 1939–45 war or the radical sixties might find these millennial years less than seminal. The quarrelsome patchwork of nations, peoples, cultures, economies, climates and topographies loosely known as Europe is facing the next millennium more united – or at least more closely bound together – than anyone could have dreamed just fifty years ago.
Brussels
The capital of Belgium has become shorthand for the ambitious project of European integration that started in the early 1950s. The changing names of the project over the decades reflect the broadening ambitions of the ‘Eurocrats’ and the visionary politicians who have driven it – the European Coal and Steel Community (1952), the European Economic Community (1957), the European Community (1967) and now, the European Union (1993). What started out as a forum for collaboration among six countries in a limited area of industry has evolved into nothing less than a drive to create, in effect, a United States of Europe, with its own single currency and supranational legislature currently covering fifteen countries, with more in the waiting room.
Not everybody in Europe is on board. The sort of people who used to be known as ‘right wing’ – typified by Britain’s Conservative Party and its former leader Margaret Thatcher – resent the political dimension. They think the project should stick to fostering trade and commerce and keep its hands off social policy, let alone political integration. Some ‘left-wing’ Europeans see the whole thing as a vehicle for big business to have its wicked way with workers, playing off those in high-wage countries against those in lower-cost areas.
As the process grinds on through committees, white papers, debates and summits, it may seem like a typically European phenomenon – long-winded, ponderous, bureaucratic, short on star performers and sex appeal. But it’s worth remembering that the western Europeans who have grown up watching this process are the first in many generations who haven’t taken time out to knock the hell out of each other in battle. And as recent events in former Yugoslavia have shown, Europe’s capacity for ethnic violence can never be completely discounted.
Slowly but surely, nations across Europe are in the process of uniting their destinies with former foes, of handing over strands of sovereignty previously held dearer than life itself. Long term, for many Europeans it will mean living under rules invented by other Europeans who don’t even speak the same language. This sort of prospect used to lead to fighting in Europe, but so far it has only sparked a war of words between the ‘Europhiles’ and the ‘Eurosceptics’ within countries.
With a fair wind, the early years of the next millennium should see the laborious but peaceful emergence of a true European Union, put together by committees rather than by combatants, but nevertheless a heroic achievement. What the late General de Gaulle said of his native France is even more applicable to Europe as a whole: ‘My friend, you can’t expect to unify overnight a country which boasts 257 different types of cheese.’
Déjà History
One of Europe’s big problems (and points of pride) is that the past is always getting in the way of the present and the future. For example, engineers