By Bambos Neophytou.

Stay one step ahead with these predictions and tips for 2012. Are we heading for a world without Apple?

Detail goes into 'pretail'

Despite the ever evolving ways that agencies and clients use digital technology to enhance and encourage retail experiences, the realisation will come that digital is at its most effective prior to the point-of-puchase, and that’s where efforts and budgets will be spent.

Friendship groups are the new target audiences

The combining trends of social-commerce and powerfully accurate user-data will enable highly targeted exclusives for socially connected audiences or small groups of friends.

Big bold brand entertainment

Amid the doom and gloom or global economic meltdown, there is a huge appetite for big, bold, fresh live entertainment experiences. There will be a resurgence of brands putting on big events and experiences (as Nokia did at Millbank), and with activity building around Jubilee and Olympics. If the experience is impressive enough, products will act as souvenirs that people will want to take away from the live event.

Nokia Lumia projection event at London's Millbank tower

The beginning of the end for Apple

The shine starts to fade,  Andoid’s 70% market share starts to erode the iPhone’s perceived dominance, and their share of computer sales still does not exceed 5% of the market =  Apple’s leadership credentials without Steve Jobs start to look considerably more shaky.

Designed in China, made in Europe

As the East moves further west, Chinese brands will start to enter mainstream awareness, and the current designed/manufactured duality will begin an irrevocable reversal.

Splendid isolation

In its pursuit of an increasingly impossible tightrope act, the UK (distancing itself from Europe, yet being unavoidably drawn in to its economic vortex) will invite all the world in for the Olympics, but behave is an unusually insular and self-regarding way, initiated by the spectacle of the Queen’s Jubilee.

The revenge of heritage formats

Analogue trumps digital, as new media gurus espouse the value of print media and paper books (cf. Clay Shirky). The tangible, multisensory experience of using cassette tapes, vinyl, old printing presses provides a thrill which proves irresistible to those who did not grow up with them.

Initiatives like Record Store Day reflect the rise in popularity of traditional media formats.

Death of despicable brands

Only the fittest and most necessary brands will survive. The new logic of necessity will obliterate a host of familiar brands that have no (functional, emotional, experiential) reason to exist, whether old school badly integrated retailers, or fmcg dinosaurs that have no visibility.

An eruption of niche business models

Youtube is revenue sharing with users for popular uploads, other brands are involving ordinary folk in monetising their consumer generated ideas and content, there are no boundaries to the kinds of new business models that brands and consumers can co-create. Co-creating content with no revenue stream is so 2009.

Bambos Neophytou, Head of Strategy at Inferno, specializes in retail, environmental issues, cognitive science and author of Guilt Trip: From Fear to Guilt on the Green Bandwagon.