In marketing, we often hear statements suggesting that things are different now to how they used to be...but how often do we stop and interrogate them? 

This is the ‘new normal’.

The future is more unpredictable than ever.

Our attitudes to the world around us have shifted for good.

Millennials prefer experiences over things.

Gen Z doesn’t want to own houses.

The list goes on…

If you believe every trend predicted in the news or agency presentations, it's easy to assume the near future is going to differ wildly. It's a narrative we are fed by the media and a fallacy that brands help maintain through poor or cynical use of data.

Carl Sagan said, “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”. I believe the same applies to extraordinary change. When we hear bombastic statements suggesting a fundamental shift in human behaviour, we must ask how it might serve the interests of those making them.

Could it be to boost site traffic, sell a book, or maybe even sell a client an idea that could win an award? 

Perhaps they’re easy to believe because change can be reassuring. But as communicators, we need to deal in the real, not the wishful.

Analysing hundreds of TGI data points, Harry Guild & Dean Matthewson from BBH discovered that 45% of topics saw opinion change by fewer than 5 percentage points, and 74% of topics saw opinion change by fewer than 10 percentage points. Not the radical change story we often hear.  

Things that have remained largely the same include our attitudes to the future, how we feel about being in debt, our dislike for being told what to do, our attitudes to gardens, restaurants and, right there at the heart of it, our attitudes to family.

To me, this suggests that the more fundamental something is to our core human needs – autonomy, family, security, pleasure, our place in the world - the less likely it is to change.

This applies as much to the bad as the good though. Particularly shocking is that, despite huge advances in gender equality across society, the number of people who believe that a woman’s place is in the home has remained largely consistent – only those on the fence about the issue have changed with the times.

Some things have changed. Financial prudence has been on the rise since the recession; we are more wary of stocks and shares and are more likely to seek out offers and low prices than ever.

Technology, once adopted widely, also fundamentally changes our attitudes. This can be seen in our preference for using cash, and buying a specific newspaper, both in marked decline since 2004.

Most concerningly for the advertising industry, we are twice more likely to find TV adverts annoying compared with twenty years ago. Perhaps this has something to do with marketers believing we’ve changed so drastically when, in fact, we are more or less the same.

It’s not just Harry and Dean who have noticed that most things don’t change. Rich Shotton, author of Choice Factory, wrote recently about whether Covid really had ushered in an era of ‘New Normal’, as the mainstream and marketing industry media might have you believe.

He references a study run before and after the global Coronavirus pandemic that reveals just how little the fundamental drivers of human behaviour have changed amongst the mainstream populace. Aside from three very slight shifts, we are exactly the same.

From both studies, it’s clear to me that fundamental human attitudes and behaviours are not easily changed. But maybe this is a good thing. Perhaps this is a reason to be optimistic and gives brands an opportunity to speak more truthfully to their customers in 2022.

What can we do about this as communicators? Fundamentally, we need to be more critical of the data and take trends predictions and futurologists with a pinch of salt. Beware those who come bearing shiny new trends with the arrival of each new year. Instead, we must steadfastly create communications from an understanding of real people, living real lives in the real world.

But beyond that, maybe it’s time we started helping audiences find comfort in the things that don’t change, rather than imagining a reality that may never arrive simply because…humans are what we are.