By Frank Pagano
I believe I share the thoughts of many in my age group (those in their forties or fifties, and beyond) when I say I’m too old to understand trends, all lost in a sea of TikTok micro-videos and jargon that changes every month.
In reality, I’ve never been “young” or cool, and in tune with the pulse of today. Never. My world was one of concentrated media and distribution, which gave an illusion of power and control. I belong to the Mad Men, those who practiced marketing in the old-fashioned way.
My twenty-five-plus years as a business professional have been filled with great effort and many mistakes in reading the present. I’d like to boast, in front of the readers, about memorable epiphanies through which my teams would end up discovering new trends and products able to speak to the hearts of entire generations of consumers. It didn’t happen. Not without time, method, and discipline. It didn’t happen without countless failures. There was never that immediate and definitive enlightenment that often accompanies the stories of inventors and Nobel laureates. No, business and marketing that truly work are built differently.
I would have loved to have the manual written by Raffaele Bifulco and Anna Paterlini, and their NEWU team, to properly learn how to conjugate the present. To understand what then becomes the near or distant past, and what is destined to shape all our futures. Like grammar, their work is essential for reading our reality and writing the future pages of one’s business. For this reason, it’s a book that can lighten the burdens of senior professionals and prepare budding marketers for tomorrow’s challenges.
When I worked in food, both in Italy and abroad, in a private company and then in an American public company, we struggled quite a bit to understand how proteins, the desire for longevity—more than the physical and emotional satisfaction typical of Generation X—and a more functional approach to food would change tastes and consumption. Who would have ever thought to put proteins in drinks, yogurt, pasta, and snacks? Who would have ever thought that selling less of our products back then was, in fact, the right thing to do in a world where digital and new lifestyles would accelerate the incidence of obesity among the population and especially the young, reaching worrying and critical levels for the survival of strategic sectors like public health? People wanted something else, from us and our competitors. Their lives demanded something more complex, in line with an agenda much more varied than that of the managers of their favorite brands. My world was static and predictable. We didn’t have a methodology to understand the context, the strong and weak signals, and to help us redefine our company and products along with changing customs and society. We had, and I’m exaggerating, only our market share. Ours. We never looked beyond our own category. What need was there to understand the world out there? We were selling food, weren’t we?
The same thing happened in the world of fashion and accessories. I entered a market of logos and elegance, where form was everything, only to find myself in a world made of humans, asking for more comfort and versatile solutions suitable for the many facets of a fragmented and global physical and digital life. No one wore sneakers, smart devices and soft pants when I started. No one wore anything else when I left the industry. How did we fail to notice it? The signals were in plain sight. We ignored them.
Working in recent years on technology and alternative finance, it has become clear that there is a centripetal movement that is making payments and money commodities, bypassing banks and traditional financial institutions. An entire sector, in suits and ties, is seeing its fortress under attack from new banks, where the cost of money is zero, and where people want to decide instantly about their own money, without unnecessary filters, duties, and tolls. Technology is always liberating and distributes responsibilities and rewards more equitably than in the past.
If it’s my body, if it’s my life, if it’s my way of using fashion and accessories to express myself and if it’s my money, I need products and services that help me increase the value of what I do, for myself and within my network of friends, colleagues, and followers. I need solutions that increase my social currency, not that of the company I chose for a certain product or service.
Understanding the present, systematically, professionally, and deeply catching its trends will become increasingly vital for any company or entrepreneur. The work of Bifulco, Paterlini & Co. is not just an essential reading, but it’s culture and a ritual of thought and action, to keep up with the world and serve people in their everyday lives.
Technologies, like artificial intelligence, will certainly help. But you need, above all, a compass, to use the jargon of this book, to navigate today. I feel a bit younger after reading it, not because the world has become less complicated, but because my instincts are activated and I’m given tools to transform a business into a service and put people and their stories at the center of what I do.
