Given our fascination with all things futuristic, a day at the Future Laboratory‘s Trend Briefing was time well spent. The Future Laboratory (to the uninitiated) specialises in identifying consumer trends which just are emerging, but which will have a large impact when they become mainstream. The Future Laboratory’s motto is borrowed from SciFi writer William Gibson – ’the future is here, it’s just unevenly distributed’ — and many of the neologisms that litter newspaper headlines have been dreamt up by them, Staycations being just one example. It’s also where I used to work before joining the agency.
One of the most compelling trends presented on this occasion was that of the ‘Just Nots’. This is a tribe defined by what they don’t have, rather than what they do. They are ‘just not’ earning enough money to buy a house; they are ‘just not’ getting their kids into the right schools and they are ‘just not’ feeling that they are getting what is rightfully theirs. And they are a growing phenomenon. Nicolas Sarkozy calls them ‘alarm clock France’ and in the UK they form a significant part of our ‘squeezed middle’.
The Future Laboratory says that ‘Just Nots’ earn between £15 and £23k per household and account for around 20m people in the UK. They have been created by the dramatic economic indicators with which we are all familiar: the first fall in disposable incomes since 1981, rising unemployment, wage freezes and the shift towards an ‘hourglass’ world, a phrase coined by Citigroup to describe the increased polarisation between high and low earners in developed economies.
These ‘Just Nots’ are asserting themselves as consumers, in both surprising and unsurprising ways. They are aspirational: almost half of iPhone users earn less than £20k a year and one in five are always overdrawn at the bank. But they are also savvy: one indicator of this is that charity shop profits rose 8% between 2008 and 2010. And they are angry. This is a group of consumers who feel like they have done all the ‘right’ things, only to be severely let down. One of the ‘Just Nots’ interviewed by the Future Laboratory is a married pensioner with a fixed household income of £22k. She says, ‘I’m not frustrated, I’m angry. I’ve paid taxes all my life and I’ve never had any help from the government. And now we only have enough for the essentials.’
Brands and services are slowly starting to respond to this group (and politicians should get a move on). P&G has launched Gain, its first bargain soap in the US for thirty eight years. Layaway schemes are on the rise again. Meanwhile in the UK, the People’s Supermarket is popularising food co-ops, suggesting that the Just Nots are leading not just an economic shift but a fundamental social one.