Ten Warning Signs the Business Landscape is Changing Forever
Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been talking to Ruby about how I think we might be going through one of the biggest cultural and business shifts in living memory, but nobody is talking about it.
Could that be possible?
Turns out, this has happened a lot with big, global, cultural shifts, and basically, we can only ‘name them’ after the fact, once all the dust has settled.
** The dawn of Christianity
** The Renaissance period
** The beginnings of the internet
** The social media era
It’s only well after the big shifts happen, that we can point to them and talk about them easily.
And once we have a name for the shift, and the mainstream media is already talking about it, the change has already happened.
The bigger the change?
The easier it is to miss it while it’s going on.
I think right now, we’re going through one of these changes. Something that is completely inverting the way that we do life and business.
Right now, the entire order of status, power, trust, and truth is getting flipped on its head. People that we looked up to as experts a mere five or ten years ago, are quickly becoming irrelevant. Old value systems are withering in real time, while new values are rearing their head into the culture and buying behaviour of people.
If you’re running a business, it can make things feel super volatile.
We don’t have a name for this shift yet. But in essence, it’s the end of the information age. And the dawn of a new age.
Old competition and paradigms have become less relevant. While new businesses and thought leaders are re-shaping the entire game at a breakneck pace, as consumers flock from one side of the court to the other. We are moving from a ‘push’ model, where big business, big tech, and university-led and qualified experts are dictating the terms and pushing them onto the culture, to a ‘pull’ model. Where new values, and the demand for a new, more ‘human’ experience is meaning customers are dictating the terms of business and what ‘good’ business looks like.
This change is impacting all sides of the culture, and with it, almost every small business (except blue collar - which we’ll cover later).
The rise of the Post Information Age
1 - Trust in experts is at an all time low.
The blue collar crew is an exception, alongside farmers and craftspeople.
Who have a lot of trust right now.
But most health experts, technology experts, marketing experts and business experts are largely ignored, and even shunned, across most platforms. Traditionally, they had their own ‘inner circles’ on LinkedIn where they could pat each other on the back, but even this is breaking down.
This move away from ‘worshipping the experts’ is bigger than many think. It reached a tipping point when trust in the entire health industry and health experts plummeted.
In April of 2020, public trust in physicians and hospitals was over 70%.
Four years later, it’s plummeted to 40%.
(Source: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2821693#google_vignette)
And?
We’ve been raised to see the expert is a gatekeeper or guide for high value information.
If we don’t trust the expert, what does that mean about the information?
2 - Business case studies don’t replicate (very often)
We’ve been yapping about the death of ‘claims based marketing’ for years.
And this has finally been recognised by the big time marketers, who have largely (albeit late) switch to a story based approach.
However, even their stories are no longer trusted.
While case studies show the success of an individual, they often don’t replicate, because so many businesses have survivorship bias when they present their client results.
The audience knows this, and put far less weight into success stories and so called ‘testimony’.
There have been far too many cases where for every success we see, there are a dozen failures we don’t see. This is the case for training, the health industry, marketing, business, agencies and more.
Real time demonstration still has power, but with the rise of AI video, who knows where this will go.
3 -Big tech cares more about creating device addiction than creating a good experience
‘We the users,’ have never been the customer for social platforms.
Still, once infinite scroll was brought into every platform, big tech realised it was more profitable to shift the focus from entertainment, to distraction and addiction, where they constantly trigger your dopamine response.
The main goal social media companies have now, is addiction.
They want you on the platforms as long as possible.
The problem is, we know they’re addictive, and people are sick of it.
They are having a bad experience with the platforms, and a bad experience with themselves when they are on the platforms.
I was speaking to a general manager of a global health company the other day:
“I’m just done with it. I’m done with all of it. The ads, the feed. The constant pitching of offers. All of the addictive content. It’s too much.”
Of course, this creates a secondary pushback against all of the information, and all of the experts pushing the information out there.
4 - Plagiarism is being exposed everywhere (Harvard, politics)
I was watching a video the other day about how the Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese did a speech, and it was basically a carbon copy of a Michael Douglas speech from the movie The American President.
It basically was a dead copy.
And in the end, he admitted it. Maybe it was his speech writer? I don’t know.
But the funniest thing, is nobody really cares. Because plagiarism is coming out at the highest levels, including the president of Harvard University herself.
It’s not just the elites. Plagiarism on the small business content and marketing level is insane.
And while it won’t stop, it means people have less trust than ever in the ‘expert’ who shows up with the latest tips and strategies.
5 - AI is being positioned as a source of knowledge, but it is wildly inaccurate. We all know it, but nobody talks about
It only takes a few minutes with AI to pick up the hallucinations, wild inaccuracies, and downright average work it produces.
And instead of fixing these things, or even acknowledging them, the tech companies behind it all just push out more AI.
And people keep using it.
They tolerate it out of lack of energy and time, not creative genius or accuracy. Mostly, we’ve given up on the tech companies actually making the platforms better.
6 - Technology and social media is being used to exploit, not inform
People dread notifications from their email service provider.
They hate when they have to run an update on zoom.
They’re tired of being tracked, retargeted, spammed, and pixelled.
We used to rely on news sites, and software updates to make sure that we were informed, and things worked.
Now we can barely tolerate them.
People are using apps, blockers, and retreats to get away from it all. Technology has shifted from being something we looked up to, to just plain annoying.
7 - Scandals are everywhere (and half of them are fake)
The daily frequency of high level scandals, affairs, arrests et cetera from influencers, politicians and technology, medical and science ‘experts’ is bad enough. But then we realise half of them are fake just to get engagement and help the slowly fading experts somehow stay relevant.
Nothing holds attention like drama.
Then for each scandal, there are thousands of comments on the articles and posts. But the funny thing is you never meet anyone who actually comments on them.
A lot of the engagement is fake too.
We aren’t just losing trust with the experts and information world…
But we’re also disassociating from them as people, looking elsewhere for leadership and values.
8 - People don’t like who they are when they consume social media
When you’re using social media for your marketing platform as a business, there’s one inherent problem:
People’s main mode of engagement when they’re on the platforms is distraction.
And a lot of people don’t like that.
They find themselves using the apps. But they’re frustrated at the same time.
And you get associated with this feeling.
The challenge you face then is to show up as one of the few ‘welcome guests’ on the platform, which is becoming increasingly difficult.
This further pushes them away from the experts.
9 - Companies think they can spam you every day with marketing information if you download or buy anything
As soon as you interact with anything, you start getting emails, and retargeting that follows you everywhere around the internet.
We’re so immune to it now that we kind of ignore it.
But subtly, and persistently, by being clamped into funnel after funnel, people are losing trust for the very experts behind not just the platforms, but the companies themselves.
We yearn for creative businesses and companies that we seek out, instead of businesses who need to ram as much as they can down our throat hoping we buy more.
10 - It’s all starting to look the same
The video formats.
The podcast reels.
The tips on how to lost weight. “Why you need more motivation…”
I read an article last week about how almost 80% of the music streamed on Spotify is old music. It’s the classics, being replayed over and over.
The same thing seems to be playing out in the online world.
Most of the stuff is old.
People are so tired, that there’s no creative energy left to create something new and exciting. It’s just re-hashed tips and tricks.
I’ve heard this called ‘dumpster’ content. Which is pretty accurate.
You see the information, you block it, you move on.
We’re craving a richer experience, and something that makes us feel something… a little more human.
What’s going to happen?
I’m not sure.
But a lot of people are going to get sidelined by this change, as their engagement plummets through the floor and they don’t realise what’s going on.
To counter, we’ll see profit margins drop as businesses push more money to ad spend, hoping that if they just get in front of more people, more often, it will bring back the old normal.
But the old normal is gone.
And a lot of businesses that bank on that will struggle.
Especially those that have built their business on short form content and information.
The good news?
Every door that closes leads to another that opens.
People are craving thoughtful content that makes them feel good.
They’re actively looking for deeper, high quality long form content to sink their teeth into.
They’re craving experiences that don’t make them feel ripped off.
And as we move forward, businesses and companies will either figure out how to bring a more human-centered approach to their marketing and business, or they’ll die out, and newcomers will take their place.
And when that happens, it will be at warp speed.
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