As Global Consumer Trends and Futuring Manager at Ford, Sheryl Connelly’s work sees her analysing everything from alien invasions to the more realistic trend of ageing population to determine the future strategies and prospects of the company.
Here, Connelly talks to Ruth Dawson about how predictions feed into production
When you have identified a trend, where do you go from there? How does your work feed into production?
In the early days, we would come up with the trends, and talk about the implications for Ford. We were a push organisation: we’d have to knock on doors and ask to go into meetings, to share what we found. If we were talking to designers, for example, we would take them through the trends and explain how Ford might design a better car. This, of course, was very naïve because we are not designers, So it was decided that we would avoid that.
Where we could contribute was to highlight things that were not within the view of the experts closest to the vehicle. We started to talk about trends, and looked outside the auto industry and found illustrations of how other categories were responding. That became a springboard for discussion for the experts who were best able to determine what implications it would have for Ford.
Are there any trends you paid less attention to in the past which have turned out to be quite important?
Because we have a three-year development timeframe, what we watch is fairly slow moving. If it were to change rapidly, we’re probably watching the wrong things. I always explain how we think of trends by using denim as an illustration. Denim has been around for 150 years and, in the early 1900s, it was often associated with a lower social economic status because it was a work uniform; it wasn’t expensive, it was durable. If you look at denim today, it’s high fashion. Consumers are willing to spend a great deal of money on a pair of jeans. That is a manifestation of a trend: it’s a shift in a deep-rooted value, attitude or behaviour.
By contrast, if you were to look at styles of denim – boot cut, acid wash – those are fads. If the things we watched changed that rapidly, by the time it played out and you’ve built a car around it, it may no longer be relevant.
I can’t really think of anything that I can say we didn’t see coming, but there were instances where we were focusing on a symptom and not a cause. We used to track middle-market squeeze, recognising that low cost producers were moving up the value chain, trying to offer more premium goods, and, at the same time, luxury producers were trying to work their way downstream. The middle-market – the bread and butter brands like Ford – felt that they were being squeezed out. We came to conclude that was just our point of view. What we were seeing was a by-product of market fragmentation, customisation, globalisation. We then started focusing more broadly on market fragmentation and the desire for personalisation.
Do you have to prepare for unexpected trends or events? When the tsunami hit Japan in 2011, for example, the automotive supply chain was severely damaged.
When we explore the future, we talk about wild cards, under which a tsunami would fall. We talked about tsunamis when I first started the role, and, within a year one occurred. Wild card events are important: they have a low probability of occurring, but when they do, they have dramatic and widespread implications. Disruption of communication; disruption of infrastructure; strain on resources – whatever the tipping point is, you know that those things will follow, and you have to ask how are we prepared for that.
We also track global trends – that are probably visible today or on the horizon, and try to explore the boundaries of possibilities. And we use scenario planning: it’s a very rigorous process where you write stories about how the future will unfold. Again, staying true to the premise that no one can predict the future, the power of scenario planning is that it forces you to imagine multiple scenarios of how the future would play out, and you try to do it in extremes. For instance, if you write one story about economic prosperity, you have to pair it with a story about economic collapse so that you can explore the nuances in between.
What trends are you looking into at the moment?
We have a database of 200 trends: we take off the top ten or so to start our discussion, and over time they rotate. They are not mutually exclusive; you see a lot of overlaps.
In recent years I’ve spent a lot of time talking about the tension between two conflicting trends: information addiction and how reliant we are on having things available; and the feeling of being inundated with information and not having effective tools to determine what is accurate or credible. I don’t see it playing out black or white, there’ll be many shades of grey, depending on the individual and what their preferences are. But we recognise that there is a nuance in there, that there is no one size that fits all in terms of reliance and access to information.
Given that Ford has a global reach, and trends vary so much from country to country, how do you adapt forecasting for regions?
When futuring was centralised, it was because Ford was worried that teams across the world were trying to anticipate where the market might go, but if they weren’t talking to one another, we were running the risk of coming up with not only inconsistent but incompatible views of what was most relevant. The idea behind us forming a trends team was that there would be a one-stop shop to help guide discussions.
We’ve spent a lot of time identifying global trends and trying to figure out how the implications vary from region to region. For instance, having a discussion about ageing in a place like Japan is quite different than one you would have about ageing in Italy or Germany. There are different dynamics, different cultural structures, different politics, different birth rates. In the US, aging is less visible because you have so much immigration, by contrast Japan does not have a lot of immigration and so the problem is highlighted.
How do you reconcile the fact that younger generations are less interested in driving and buying cars with the aging population trend?
Our values, attitudes and behaviours towards individual vehicle ownership are really evolving between the generations. If you came of age in the ’60s or ’70s, purchasing your first car was this major milestone into adulthood. For a long time it stood as a marker of the level of professional success that you had achieved. But younger people don’t really see the car in the same way. In fact, an argument can be made that it’s been displaced by cellphones. Cellphones to a young person are a much greater marker of status and a tool of freedom and independence. But, because of that, cars are being developed and marketed in a way that says it can do so much more than just transport you. It used to be that you would sell a car based on performance features; now it’s more about what it does beyond transport. Developing features like Sync and MyFord Touch, and enabling platforms that allow you to pair handheld devices with your car has been a big part of our strategy.
It’s really important to note that that’s not going to appeal to some people. One feature we don’t spend enough time talking about is the ‘do not disturb’ button that comes with the system. There are those people who say ‘my car is a sanctuary, it’s a place where I decompress from the day’. In that regard, it’s not driven necessarily by age. I can’t say the ‘do not disturb’ button works more for an older person than a younger person, it’s very context driven.
It has been predicted that there will be up to four billion cars on the road by 2050. Combined with the development of megacities and rapid population increase, how do you think cars will fit in as a means of transport?
This is one of my favourite areas of exploration: I was so inspired by Bill Ford when he gave a TED talk two years ago and tackled this. His words were something to the effect of ‘I used to spend all my time thinking about how to sell as many cars as possible; now I worry what happens if you sell as many cars as possible’.
Central to his concern is the advent of global gridlock. If you have travelled in a densely populated city – Shanghai, Mumbai, New York – you would know that it’s not convenient, it’s not conducive. Henry Ford believed mobility was an integral part of the advancement of freedom and innovation, and if mobility comes to a stop you put this freedom and innovation in peril.
As a by-product of that we have to explore a range of solutions. Bill Ford talked about mass transport and things like car sharing, or vehicle to vehicle communications. But he also has alluded to the fact that how that plays out won’t be decided by OEMs alone, there are so many stakeholders, not least of which are urban planners and those who decide what kind of infrastructure is put into place.
Ruth Dawson
