A New Lexicon
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TrendHawk 2021 brought to you by:
Introduction
Photo by Gray Malin
Well, 2020 was quite a year. The COVID-19 pandemic became the largest, most impactful global-shared experience in generations. An experience that led to realigning priorities, instilling new awareness of interconnectedness and the importance of community, and redefining the basics.
Meanwhile, a transformation of global attitudes is disrupting the economy across all sectors. For businesses to thrive going forward, they must adapt to the changing needs and desires of customers.
A New Lexicon for 2021
As we deal with COVID PTSD, we will discover that many of the trends sparked by the pandemic will stick (virtual meetings, attention to cleanliness). Some will go away (quarantine pods), others will be around for the short-term (travel pods, flexible travel cancellation policies), and still others will mutate (hybrid workplaces and events). While 2020 ushered in a few new concepts, these “trends” are becoming part of the new lexicon. The pandemic accelerated trends that were already on the rise, including attention to mental health, a rediscovery of nature, and touchless technology.
We would be remiss if we didn't mention the societal impact that the Black Lives Matter movement and recent political upheavals are having on companies of all stripes. Perhaps for the first time, these earthshaking social justice and political events caused even the most conservative companies and associations to take a stand. This newly discovered progressive ethos was not merely confined to making statements on Twitter; instead, it prompted many companies to examine themselves holistically, from hiring practices to their responsibility to the communities they serve. Overall, there seems to be a growing commitment to focusing on equity and justice in corporate social responsibility missions.
Looking back, any “trend outlook” released in early 2020 was out the window by March. If the year taught us anything, it’s that anything can happen. So this year, rather than trends, we’ve decided to examine key concepts that will drive consumer demand going forward. This change called for a new presentation of trends, so we present—TrendHawk—a living breathing website that will evolve throughout the year.
Cybernate
In the year 2020, we all cybernated, hunkered down in our homes while using our screens to work, workout, shop, learn, entertain, and even to date.
COVID accelerated the digitization of everyday life for most, and brought many late adopters into the mix.
According to McKinsey, in the space of just a few months, the shift to and dependence upon mobile and digital vaulted 5 years forward, in terms of digital adoption.
75% of first-time users of digital channels indicated they would continue to log onto digital channels post-pandemic.
Many new bored-at-home users discovered Instagram and Pinterest for the first time, while consistent social media users migrated to growing channels like TikTok and Clubhouse.
This increase in time users spent on social media brought savvy brands and marketers back to the forefront through creative campaigns and programming. The proof is in the spending.
Virtual is Here to Stay
Although in-person experiences will come back at some point in 2021, virtual events and classes will continue to be a thing.
The Digital Nomad
With more people discovering that they can work from anywhere thanks to (almost) ubiquitous Wi-Fi and new centralized digital platforms, it’s highly likely the digital nomad concept will be democratized. The legality of long-term international stays is finally being addressed by governments around the world, with countries that recently began offering visas for year-long (or longer) remote stays including Barbados, Bermuda, Georgia, Dubai, Estonia, Portugal, and Croatia.
By 2022, brands will spend an estimated $15 billion on influencer marketing.
The Influencer
With advertising agencies and production companies temporarily shut, influencers offered brands a highly curated, low-cost alternative, and have become essential line items in marketing budgets.
Brands are discovering that “quarantine” content is more relatable and far more cost-effective than slick productions made in a studio, since creators are able to produce high-quality content on small budgets.
The term “influencers” hardly sums up what an influencer actually does, and when flying out models, photographers, and stylists was not viable, working with influencers, who are adept at playing all of those roles simultaneously, proved to be a sound solution.
In addition to serving as content creators, influencers are poised to become the newest version of retail. As stores closed down in 2020, some influencers developed Instagram pop-up shops filled with their favorite brands—something that could become more attractive as retail spaces continue to empty.
Some fashion brands are even opting out of wholesaling to chain stores and switching to a “smaller is better” strategy. According to an article in Vogue, Tibi’s exit from big retail last year was a move to focus on small boutiques and influencer partnerships.
“[An influencer] can basically buy from us at wholesale and sell it to her clients as if she were a retailer, without four walls…maybe this is a new model we should explore.”
When the SoNo Collection, an art-inspired shopping center in Norwalk, Connecticut, held its reopening amid the pandemic, the shopping center partnered with key local influencers to assure guests of its attention to health protocols and the well-being of their shoppers.
Photo by Ashley Victoria, @styleelyst
Comfort
What is comfort post-COVID? It’s about feeling good mentally and physically. The desire for comfort spanned all sectors, from growth in athleisure wear, to increased sales of residential wellness equipment, to getting “back to basics” with crafting, home cooking, and comfort food to soothe the soul.
Cue Cottagecore, a lifestyle aesthetic centered on everything warm, fuzzy and nostalgic. Introduced on social media channels a couple of years ago, Cottagecore absolutely boomed in 2020.
“[Nostalgia] has an incredibly reassuring power. In times of uncertainty, a well-known past is looked at with fondness and longing.”
— Gemma Riberti, Head of Interiors, WGSN Lifestyle & Interiors
Even Taylor Swift got in on the act, ushering the comeback of cable knit cardigans and American folk music with the release of the best-selling album of 2020.
The meaning of comfort has expanded during COVID, with travelers seeking out wide-open expanses in nature, private villas or glamping-style suites for vacations, second homes in less-populated areas, and transportation via private jet. Even mass carrier Delta won big during the pandemic with its promise to keep middle seats empty.
In the hospitality space, we saw increased interest in self-catering accommodations, and hotels rejiggered public areas to create more private nooks.
Montage Kapalua Bay moved its traditional beachside luau into residential-style guestrooms, offering safe places for guests to experience the local food, dance, and music of Hawaii in the comfort of their own luxurious spaces.
Comfort post-COVID will also entail enhancing feelings of safety and security, largely through perceived hygiene. Since last spring, United has been publicizing its CleanPlus program, a partnership with Clorox and the Cleveland Clinic. Hotels are working to build consumer trust and comfort through health security systems.
Expert-validated safety standards established by Sharecare Health Security, the new standard of global health security.
Biophilia
The word “biophilia” stems from the Greek for “life” and “love,” suggesting humanity’s innate biological connection with nature. It’s why we find a walk in the woods so soothing and natural light so stimulating. Basically, biophilia is why nature makes us feel better.
Mother Nature’s power to soothe was rediscovered during the pandemic. We craved outdoor spaces for exercise, dining and chit chat from safe social distances. We fled cities for the countryside, mountains, or beachfronts.
This yearning for the great outdoors will last, with increased emphasis on architecture that encompasses both indoor and outdoor spaces—think spas, shopping malls, and office buildings dotted with courtyards, open-air atria and rooftop gardens.
All of that will mean greater use of biophilic design, emphasizing natural light, natural materials, and patterns evoking nature. It’s also about reflecting nature in color palettes and creating areas of protective refuge.
Photo by Mary Raffling @cutejetlagger
Palmaïa – The House of AïA, located on Mexico’s Riviera Maya, is laid out to be one with its surroundings. Glass walls in its spa treatment rooms and gym immerse guests in the surrounding jungle.
Love of nature was reflected in our travel choices in 2020, which saw a huge rise in demand for camping, glamping and RV rentals. Thanks in part to the RV boom, many camping sites, including several national parks, experienced record numbers. Already trending up, glamping became mainstream, with resorts adding glamping-style units and companies like Collective Retreats and Under Canvas experiencing rapid growth.
“It’s really putting nature at the forefront of everything that you’re doing in your life. 2020 was the first time a lot of us really gave a sense of more appreciation to the outdoors. For 2021, that sensibility is going to continue to increase.”
— Dayna Isom Johnson, Etsy’s Trend Expert
Flexibility
2020 educated us on the value of being flexible. American distillers started manufacturing hand sanitizer, while LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton, L’Oreal and Coty used their facilities to produce large quantities for European hospitals. Fashion designers started making face masks.
At home, confinement led to versatility, as living spaces transformed into workplaces, schools, and fitness studios. Actual fitness facilities, restaurants, and retail stores had to be flexible to stay in the game, in some cases repurposing parking lots into drive-in movie theaters, rooftops into yoga studios, and sidewalks and streets into dining venues.
The value of versatility and flexible multi-use spaces has been noted by architects and interior designers, and will likely be incorporated into plans devised for homes, office buildings, hotels, day spas, and more going forward. In hotel design, guest rooms have become multi-use, too—from working and resting to eating and exercising.
When it comes to meeting spaces, expect indoor/outdoor areas, “Zoom Rooms” with digital interfaces for virtual meetings, and big spreads that can easily be converted into smaller spaces. Hotels have already begun to offer co-working spaces beyond the lobby, just as some converted guest rooms into daytime use offices during the pandemic.
Work from Hyatt includes private use of guest room “offices” from 7am - 7pm daily, with options for extended workcations as well.
Travel planning has experienced a sea change in terms of flexibility. Booking windows have shortened as people wait for news of the latest border openings or closures. As destinations, cruise lines, hotels and airlines scramble for business (and revenue), cancellation policies have become more flexible.
“Flexibility has never been a more pronounced need.”
— Glenn Hollister, Vice President of sales strategy and effectiveness at United, the first US legacy airline to permanently eliminate change fees in 2020 while enabling customers to fly same-day standby for free.
Of course, we wish such policies would become permanent, but more likely they will fade once business is on the upswing. That said, Paul Tumpowsky, CEO of Skylark, a hybrid offline/online travel agency, believes that as airlines largely dependent on business travel experience low demand, generous no-fee change policies may stick around longer than in the hotel space.
Local
From checking on neighbors to supporting local businesses, the pandemic heightened the importance of community. Picking up on lessons learned during 2020, hotels are likely to become more integrated into their neighborhoods, offering locals space for exercise, entertaining, working, relaxing, and even business.
In addition to supporting the local community, these partnerships helped increase hotel foot traffic, opening up the possibility of increasing F&B revenues, while introducing neighbors to the potential of staycations.
Food for Thought
Hyatt Hotels’ national Hyatt Loves Local initiative saw Hyatt Regency Baltimore Inner Harbor offer kitchen space to the city’s first female and Black-owned oyster bar The Urban Oyster, which had shuttered its brick-and-mortar location in July, enabling the restaurant to continue its delivery and pick-up business.
Hyatt Regency Atlanta has been providing complimentary kitchen space to Anna Bell's Kitchen Mac & Cheese shop, a minority-owned business that previously prepped in commercial kitchens and sold at farmers markets.
When California barred barbershops from opening during the pandemic, Andaz West Hollywood came to the rescue, loaning its outdoor terrace to Barcode, a popular barbershop.
“As the country begins to reopen, hotels will be the hubs that welcome their communities. [Post-pandemic], we can expect hotels to embrace an even stronger sense of social responsibility.”
Such partnerships, along with a reinvigorated focus on local social issues, have led to the development of a different type of loyalty community, made up largely of neighbors.
Loyalty members aren’t traveling 338 days per year. [This is] an ample opportunity to engage with members on their home turf.
Rewards added to the Kempinski Discover Loyalty Programme include priority access to private spaces like pools, cabanas and fitness centers, executive lounge passes, and surprise staycations. Elder also suggested hotel companies should consider sharing loyalty databases with aligned local businesses to show support.
Touchless
Is the handshake over? Are elbow bumps and “air hugs” the new business greetings? Maybe so.
According to a December 2020 Harris Poll conducted for Fast Company, 30 percent of respondents said they’d like to shake hands less often in the future, and 26 percent wouldn’t want to do it at all. Overall, 54 percent agreed with the statement, “I would be happy to never shake someone’s hand again.”
Being touchless is about more than just avoiding human-to-human contact; it is also about avoiding contact with stuff, and thanks to technology and automation that has been ramping up during the past decade, it’s becoming ubiquitous.
Projected spending on touchless technology by 2025.
Touchless tech has been on the rise for years, afterall. Expect that number to be even larger with the impact of COVID: Market Research Future reported “increasing hygiene concerns are contributing substantially to the growth of [the] touchless sensing market” as well as improved user experiences.
Touchless keys, elevator buttons and check-ins are becoming familiar to most travelers. At home, we are relying more on touchless interfaces, including voice-controlled assistants like Google Nest and Amazon Echo that can control smart home devices, turn on lights, play music or set an alarm.
The National Kitchen and Bath Association reports that residential demand for touchless faucets in 2020 was up 50% from 2019. And 2020 ushered in the concept of voice-activated faucets capable of pouring precise amounts of water on request. A reliance on touchless sensing interfaces, including gesture control apps, facial recognition biometrics, movement sensors and smart phone apps, will all become standard across residential, retail, office, healthcare and hospitality.
In 2021, safety will be paramount, and simple touchless tech solutions could be the nudge to get people exploring again. In a recent survey by Censuswide for Amadeus, 42 percent said contactless payments (e.g. Google Pay, Apple Pay, PayPal, Venmo) would increase their confidence to travel in the next 12 months.
surveyed said biometrics that enable check-in, pass-through security, and contactless boarding would make them more likely to travel.
Touchless check-in and check-out were becoming norms at hotels before the pandemic. Now, additional in-room touchless technology options are being tested, from motion-sensor lighting to systems for operating remote controls from smartphones.
A hospitality application of Google Nest Hub was rolled out this year at the Gansevoort Meatpacking Hotel, The Fairmont Scottsdale Princess, and the Viceroy in DC. Amazon has a similar offering, giving guests options to control lights, blinds and thermostats by voice command.
At Carillon Miami Wellness Resort, hands-off wellness services include a quantum harmonic sound therapy table combining music, sound waves, and vibration to induce relaxation; deep red light therapy to accelerate recovery; and halotherapy booths to detox the skin and boost respiratory health.
The ABCs of QR Codes and OCR
COVID-19 has forced all business sectors to embrace a touch-free, QR Code-powered future. In retail, QR Code return kiosks are increasingly popular. At restaurants, physical menus have been replaced with mobile menus powered by QR Codes. The result is a safer experience for guests and staff that also saves on printing expenses.
QR Codes are likely to play a big part in the development of digital health passports, too. Singapore Airlines has taken a first step, issuing digital or paper certificates with a QR Code for easy health verification to passengers who have completed COVID testing in select clinics. Airport check-in staff and immigration can verify authenticity via secure mobile app, expediting these processes at record speed.
At hotels, QR Codes can allow for contactless room access and check-out. Park Lane Hotel in New York City is using QR Codes in ads to encourage direct bookings. With a simple hover over the QR code, users arrive at the hotel’s website and receive a 25 percent discount on booking.
We can also expect the travel industry to adopt optical character recognition (OCR), which allows a physical document, like a passport or ID card, to be scanned with any mobile device and have the information immediately digitized and ready for use.
This technology can allow passengers to scan their passports on smartphones while checking in via mobile apps, and enable hotel guests to use contactless ID verification technology to bypass the front desk.
“[The adoption of OCR will be] a timely innovation for the massive influx of international travel that will take place later this year and into the future.”
— Marc Babin, Anyline
Challenging times always inspire transformation. In the business world, 2020 required many sectors to reimagine, with new conceptualizations going beyond blips on the radar to revolutions in the way such sectors will thrive going forward. Two key transformations that we expect to be permanent are in the restaurant and business travel arenas.
Reimagining Restaurants
The early 2000s saw the rise of the food truck, initially inspired by hipsters in Southern California and Austin, Texas. In the 2010s, there was growth in food halls, which allowed up-and-coming chefs to start businesses in incubator spaces. Perhaps due to COVID, the 2020s will be the decade of the virtual restaurant.
During the eerie year just past, “ghost kitchens” made their mainstream debut, with fully stocked and staffed commissary-style kitchens and mobile food trailers strategically parked near urban hot spots to pump out delivery-only orders for Uber Eats and other apps. Among the virtues of ghost kitchens are less risk for eatery operators (long-term leases are not required), reduced staffing costs, and cheaper operations.
Projected global market for ghost kitchens by 2030
The rise of ghost kitchens and delivery apps go hand in hand. According to Euromonitor, between 2014 and 2019, global delivery sales more than doubled, and growth spiked in 2020. Uber Eats revenue was up more than double in 2020, while Grubhub’s revenues rose by more than 40 percent.
Fast Company says curbside pickup and delivery will weather the seasons, with 26 percent of those recently polled saying they would likely order out more often, and nearly a third more saying they’d keep ordering out about the same amount.
Transformation
Hybrid Events as the New Normal
Bill Gates says the coronavirus will fundamentally alter the way people travel for and conduct business after the pandemic. The general public agrees. Certainly, one-on-one meetings will take a huge hit, as people discover that video chats provide similar benefits for significantly less time, money and environmental impact. The bigger question is what will happen to the meetings and convention sector?
50% of business travel will go away.
— Bill Gates
40% of business travelers want to travel less, or never again.
51% say they’d likely travel only a few times a year.
The concept of hybrid meetings, which allow for in-person and online sessions concurrently, will be the wave of the immediate future, serving as a bridge back to “normal times.” But even when that proverbial new normal comes to be, hybrid meetings will likely continue, having discovered the virtues of virtual events in 2020.
On the other hand, after more than a year of staring at our screens, virtual meeting fatigue has set in. Other downsides include unreliable Wifi connections, time zone scheduling issues, and inability to really replicate the fun parts of conventions, like networking happy hours.
So, people will convene again.
“It should not be a question of ‘if’ a meeting is going to happen, it’s how.
— American Express, 2021 Global Meetings and Events Forecast
The “how” is that meeting hybrid, combining elements of IRL and virtual. To meet this demand, convention centers around the world are adding hybrid-meetings studios and updating event space with necessary technologies to stream meetings to attendees all over the world.
According to Steve Enselein, senior vice president of events, Hyatt is already working on two events for large companies, one looking to book 45 locations and another eyeing a 120-location meeting.
Closing Thoughts
So, there you have it, our TrendHawk Lexicon for 2021. Now let’s all bid adieu to those pesky words of 2020 like “pivot,” “pods,” “quarantine,” “lockdown,” and “bubbles,” and instead pop some (more) bubbly to toast 2021.
Oh, and one more thing: We’d love to help you navigate the year ahead. Interested in PR, digital strategy, social media, influencer relations, even paid media? Want in on Clubhouse, too? We’ve got you covered.
Contributions
Thank you to all of our contributors, team members, and well-connected friends who have added their knowledge to this living, breathing document, including:
Laura Powell | Neal Santelmann | Marc Babin, Anyline | Firecracker Marketing | Paul Tumpowsky, CEO of Skylark | Patrick Merryman | Alexis Murray-Merriman | Jamie Goldstein | Amy Draheim | Hanna Frankel | Amanda Clark | Valerie Vaillancourt | Catherine Colford