This Autumn, it will be 10 years since the Future Foundation launched our nVision service.
We started with a serious ambition: to build, with the fullest support and engagement from our clients, the richest possible exploration of the socio-economic trends shaping market opportunities across all consumer-facing sectors. And though over the years that ambition has widened and deepened in many ways, we have never lost sight of it and, I sincerely hope, we have never lost the disciplines - intellectual, analytical, presentational - which it implies.
The reason I write to you now is primarily to thank you on behalf of the entire nVision team for being our client.
Many companies, agencies and organisations have been with us right from the start; we are never complacent in our respect for that kind of loyalty.
Many have joined along the way and more recently; each deserves our strongest commitment to constantly renewed quality and originality within trends-monitoring.
Many of our clients from over the years knew us first as researchers and account managers; and many in turn are now marketing and communications directors, senior strategists all over the public and voluntary sectors, commercial brand-leaders of all kinds. And still with us!
And no birthday should pass without a celebration or two. So, in the near future, my team will be inviting you to various fun-based events. The Future Foundation leadership team, Account Directors, analysts, support staff..... all look forward to saying hello.
And a time for anticipating the challenges to come...
Our motto inside nVision is continuous internal renewal. That is how we think about our current provision and for the years to come - even in the context of ongoing macroeconomic turbulence when it is really hard to see tomorrow clearly never mind the longer term.
Over the decade, for example, we widened our market research base out from the UK to include Western Europe; and then, in the wake of subsequent EU enlargements, we embraced the new member states, including those of Eastern Europe. As I do hope you will have noticed, we now gather our own proprietary public research data from the United States - a client service in its own right and a standing compare-and-contrast resource for European trends-monitoring.
For all our sectors (leisure and travel, food and drink, financial products, media, IT, retail, telecommunications, government and regulatory...) and for all their multiple planning agendas, we believe that this store of research, enriched as it is from year to year, bestows unique, real-life, market-place advantages onto our clients. nVision has an information archive which no other trends-focused company can replicate or rival. And this feeds our ability to execute high quality consultancy projects, either for individual clients or in consortia.
In the recent past too, we have set out to make nVision online ever more accessible and ever more digestible, packaging our facts, views and recommendations in a variety of ways to suit client goals, needs, pressures.
The regular theme-by-theme Analyses and Key Trends, for instance, are still there for the UK and Europe, buttressed by our new Central Scenario - the basic philosophical proposition by which the Future Foundation understands how trends form in a modern market economy.
We have also developed lighter, buzzier platforms such as TrendExpress and QuantExpress which capture core facts before they are commonplace and soon-to-be-potent trends before they take shape. These now sit alongside the twice-yearly, clients-only Changing Lives conferences which have long since become the platform for those trend-ideas which matter most and which we believe our clients need to see in colour and in focus.
We believe that these features enhance the readability of our content while retaining all the analytical disciplines and the commercial realisms with which we first launched nVision back in 1998.
And we keep our eye on the practical side of life too. Soon, the web-site will receive a facelift, again enhancing speed and ease of use. The Account Directors - always ready to take your call, by the way - are also busy updating service contracts, ensuring that they are totally responsive to client interests, budgets and expectations.
And we are planning many more events and seminars to extend our commitment to individual business sectors within the general flow of nVision trend-themes. Our new Quarterly Briefing Pack offer - tailored trend reviews for specific clients facing specific business issues - will be part of that process.
And a time for re-committing to your better self...
Finally, a personal word.
Forecasting is bloody hard work. It would be dead easy to "make" trends by re-arranging yesterday's newspaper cuttings or by reporting what you saw people do in clubs during your summer holidays or by reading a book and claiming an instant expertise as a result. A good deal of what the nVision team actually produces is winnowed out onto the cutting-room floor - because either a) we do not feel that in the end we can justify a particular speculation or b) the market research findings are not conclusive enough to form a pattern or a prediction or c) something feels, whatever the headlines of the day, transient and superficial rather than scene-changingly profound. Hard work, vigorous arguments, tough decisions - the same street where our clients live.
I am very proud to be the Future Foundation's Managing Director and very proud of my nVision team. Living in a highly competitive environment, we know that, such as they have been, we cannot prosper from past successes alone. Can I tell you that I personally welcome all calls, emails, texts, letters… telling me what you think of how nVision is doing (now that we are well on our way to adolescence) - giving us tips, letting us know if you think we are underperforming in any field, offering a pat on the back or a nudge in the charts, applauding our latest idea and telling us how it helped take your business-plan forward, showing us how/where we can improve the whole service for you... Whatever!
Thank you for investing in us. We hope to reward that investment ever more fruitfully in the future - in fact, over the next ten years, whatever they bring.
Sincerely,
Christophe Jouan
