Changing Lives - The half-day guide to the UK consumer February 1, 2008

"Can brands resolve the paradoxes and dilemmas facing the modern consumer-citizen - and still make margins / build pro-active loyalty?

[We need] to re-interrogate ourselves about those factors which actually hold consumers’ presence in particular markets and which mobilise choice in favour of particular ideas, offers and brands. It is a good time for such a task also because of expected changes in the structural setting for consumption in time ahead: a weaker property market, thinner economic growth, tightening green regulation, possible electoral activity… The resilience of established trends has to be tested as the economy and society change. [The Future Foundation's] latest nVision research does just that.

As we look forward into the medium-term, our goal is as always to help deliver competitive advantage for our clients by brokering into strategic play the best, most creative thinking about the marketplace trends, for private and public sectors alike, which matter most.

And so, our programme here is built, fittingly we believe, on the theme of paradox: those contradictions that find expression in both the choices made by individuals and in the wider debates (about how we ought to live now) audible within society at large."

Official Website: http://www.futurefoundation.net/changinglivesuk2008