Need to know
18 : 08 : 17

Sweden – The latest marketing campaign from luxury fashion house Acne Studios marks a shift in branding from playful imagery featuring Millennial models to a more family-focused approach. The brand has collaborated with Instagram influencers and real-life couple Kaleb Anthony and Kordale Lewis on a photography series featuring the couple and their four children.

As explored in our Neutral Culture macrotrend, Anthony and Lewis featured in Nikon’s 2015 campaign I Am Generation, which was designed to encourage consumers to rethink their idea of ‘normal’. The Acne Studios campaign builds on this idea by acknowledging that the term ‘nuclear family’ encompasses a range of family units and parenting styles. ‘I wanted to portray households of today in all constellations,’ says Jonny Johansson, creative director of Acne Studios.

Brazil – The brand’s new campaign, which celebrates female drinkers who do not conform to stereotypes, is designed to speak candidly to a Millennial audience.

The tv spot by Crispin Porter + Bogusky Brasil depicts a series of young people travelling through a desert-like landscape in solo carriages before focusing on a woman who is visibly anxious. She enters a trance-like state and breaks out of her carriage as the tagline ‘The Next Step is You’ fades into view.

The video taps into research conducted by the brand, which shows that Millennials feel increasingly overburdened by excessive choice in their daily interactions.

As LS:N Global explored in our Female Whisky Drinkers market report, which highlighted the brand’s adoption of a more gender-neutral aesthetic, whisky brands are moving to champion both male and female whisky drinkers.

Tel Aviv – Start-up Audioburst aims to revolutionise the way people listen to podcasts by creating a search engine that indexes podcast and radio content. The idea is to make it easier for listeners to locate content that may otherwise be lost in cyberspace by inputting a specific search term.

The brand assigns each subscriber a Listening Identity, which features his or her personal information alongside topics of interest, such as local and national news, and their most listened to sources. The service can be integrated into voice assistants such as Alexa, Siri and Google Assistant, allowing these devices to broadcast audio content that is personalised to the individual’s taste. Read more on the Future of Voice Assistants here.

Growing pressure on UK retailers led by organisations including the Office for Fair Trading to offer more transparent pricing is driving a decline in the number of discounted grocery lines. Multinational supermarket chains are increasingly focusing on keeping their prices low across their product range rather than applying discounts to products to ensure they can compete with discount supermarket chains such as Lidl and Aldi. Download our Food and Drink Futures Report 2016 to find out more.