Quality time

the meaning of “good,” meta-influence, and how to look for the Next Big Thing(s).

Hello friends,

I have been all over the place in the last few weeks. First, to London for a week (mediocre sandwiches, data protection litigation, rain), then Marseille, Meursault and Dijon (walking in rain and hail to understand Burgundy better), Marseille again, and finally Arles (two low-intervention wine salons). Now excuse me while I expire quietly under my rock.

Low-intervention wine dog.

Upcoming things

19 April: Coffee and not-knowing. I'll be in Portland, Oregon to give the opening plenary at the Specialty Coffee Association’s Re:co Symposium. Specialty coffee, like nearly every industry today, is going through Big Changes — which create plenty of not-knowing about how business will be done and how value will be created in the future. My talk will be about why not-knowing is fundamental to innovation and adaptation, how fear is one big obstacle to having a productive relationship with not-knowing, and what businesses can do to get over this and other obstacles to being in a good place of not-knowing. Come say hi if you’re at Re:co too, or in Portland more generally (19-21 April) and Los Angeles (22-26 April).

20 April: “Misnaming the beasts.” The fourth session in the Interintellect series on not-knowing will focus on one of my pet peeves: how the word “risk” is now used to describe all kinds of not-knowing that are not actually risky, and the many problems that result from this sloppy usage. The pre-session reading is a short essay: “How to think more clearly about risk.” Online (Zoom) on Thursday 20 April from 8-10pm CET (12-2pm Pacific, 3-5pm Eastern, 7-10pm UK). Open to everyone. Drop me a line if you want to come but the ticket price is an insurmountable barrier — I'll sort you out. Tickets and more details here.

Quality time

Recently, I spoke with a futures and foresight team about how and where to look for the Next Big Things in a CPG industry I know something about. My position is that doing this well is hard and requires focusing on understanding meta-influencers (not influencers) who are followed by influencers with growing reach (not influencers who already have enormous reach).

Understanding where the future might go begins from thinking about what people consider as markers of quality. For me, quality means the particular product characteristics which map onto “good” in someone’s mind. Products with those characteristics become worth buying and even paying a premium for.

This is important: Quality is not something universal and objective. All you need to do is look around at the enormous diversity in what we consume and like to see that quality means different things to different people. For the same type of product — say t-shirts — different people will like different characteristics (an oversize cropped fit, or seamlessness, or organic slubby cotton, or whatever). Market segments are groups of consumers who care in similar ways about similar sets of product characteristics, who share the same definition of quality.

Quality changes over time. One way this happens is that the range of possible product characteristics that mark quality changes. In coffee 50 years ago, fair pricing to the producer for green coffee wasn't a product characteristic on anyone's radar. Today, fair trade certification has become a marker of quality. Another way change happens is that consumers change what they care about as markers of quality. This kind of change happens for every wine-lover who starts with conventional Bordeaux, has a conversion moment with low-intervention Beaujolais, and then goes deep into zero-sulphur wines. Market segments change over time as consumers learn about new things to care about.

Effective foresight is about detecting signal — seeing emerging quality markers and emerging segments of consumers who care about the same sets of markers — amid a lot of noise. It’s tempting to look at influencers as a way to detect signal, but this is a mistake.

Today, influencers with mass reach on TV, radio, or social media guide what huge numbers of people choose to buy, who they vote for, and what they choose to believe. But the influencers themselves are unlikely to be the ones out scouting for the next big things. Having mass reach usually means investing in having a coherent identity, and searching for the future is antithetical to this kind of coherence.

Instead to get signal about the future, watch meta-influencers: The people who can search broadly for emerging trends, who don't need to maintain a coherent identity and mass following, and who influencers look to for guidance about what’s next.

So:

1. To detect signal of emerging new product characteristics that map to quality, watch the meta-influencers and the patterns in what they are consuming.

2. To detect signal of emerging segments, watch influencers with growing reach (not influencers who already have enormous reach).

3. To identify what the Next Big Thing might be before it hits the market, watch the meta-influencers who are followed by influencers with growing reach.

(My so-far unsold proposal for a book about MFK Fisher and the sudden elevation of Japanese food to the status of fine dining in America is about these and other mechanics of meta-influence.)

Other writing

1. On the topic of idiosyncratic definitions of quality, I wrote about the definition and management of personal mango quality.

2. I’ve always enjoyed old and worn-in things. I wrote a while back about the different ways in which things can become better as they get older and more heavily used.

See you soon,
vt