Cornish business leaders attended Unlocking Potential’s Future Focus event at Princess Pavilions last week to hear insights from two influential speakers on consumer trends.
Aptly named, The Consumer Revolution, delegates heard from ‘consumer trends futurist’ Will Higham, who forged his global reputation having worked for a range of national and international clients including the BBC, Sainsbury’s and Siemens.
Higham talked about why business leaders should pick up on consumer trends to unlock opportunities and growth potential, by thinking about “tomorrow’s consumer”.
He said: “We need to think about the future. Entire new industries are emerging, these include well-being tourism, sports nutrition and e-sports to name a few.
“From these new innovations comes new attitudes, which in turn creates new trends. Cornish business owners must pick up on these trends, identify the needs and find their customers a solution.”
Delegates also heard from a second keynote, Paul Lindley OBE, who founded the $100 million organic baby and children’s food brand Ella’s Kitchen in 2006.
From his own experiences, Lindley told delegates how to find their “inner five-year old” and explored some toddler-based ‘macro-wins’ in order to succeed in business.
He said: “Divergent thinking is a measure of creativity. If we all just learnt how to ‘grow down’ and think like a five-year-old, imagine the creative fun we could have! As five-year olds, 96% of us were disruptive thinkers – that is, a creative thinker without boundaries.
“My nine macro-wins are all based around the thought processes that toddlers have but which we should all adopt in our own businesses. For example, when learning to walk, we all fell down over and over again. We didn’t give up and eventually this ‘failure’ lead to success. As entrepreneurs we need to take risks, try small things that might fail, and then learn from this failure.”
The next Future Focus event will carry on the theme of disruptive change within the marketplace and how this will impact on Cornish businesses.
