2022 Consumer Trend Insights

004 Authors
008 Preface

Ten Keywords
015 Transition into a Nano Society
043 Incoming! Money Rush
069 Gotcha Power
099 Escaping the Concrete Jungle - ‘Rustic Life’
125 Revelers in Health - ‘Healthy Pleasure’
149 Opening the X-Files on the ‘X-teen’ Generation
177 Routinize Yourself
201 Connecting Together through Extended Presence
223 Actualizing Consumer Power - ‘Like Commerce’
247 Tell Me Your Narrative

As previously outlined, 2022 looks to become Year One of a post-pandemic paradigm. What we should focus on is not reverting to what was but rather looking straight ahead, hoping for a fast recovery. The market and its consumers have learned and familiarized themselves with new techniques during the past two years. And no doubt they will face challenges in learning new ways to become more comfortable in a more unfamiliar territory. The key to survival in the post-COVID-19 era will depend upon how quickly we respond to new trends and how appropriate those responses will be.

“Today’s trend is that you cannot define my trend,”
This best sums up Korea’s latest trend. “Trends,” which used to be defined as a majority collective opinion that has a certain duration, are now showing signs of fundamental change. The scope of a trend’s following has grown narrower as the trend’s duration has shortened. People no longer “go with the flow” of a popular trend – they wait for a trend to branch out into smaller offshoots and spinoffs, like tributaries of a main river. As the sense of “we,” traditionally based on one’s peers and reference groups, is quickly being restructured into one based on tastes and preferences, in a Nano Society trends are becoming even more multilateral and diverse, changing at a whirlwind pace.

Recent spending trends have been unusual, to say the least. Fortune magazine coined the term “HENRY,” or “high earners, not rich yet,” almost two decades ago in 2003 to describe a subgroup of consumers with modest resources and luxurious tastes. These relatively young folk are usually highly educated with a great job that pays a substantial salary and yet often find themselves strapped for cash or unable to save up due to their extravagant lifestyles and student loan payments. This term best describes the quandary that many millennials face as they work ceaselessly, as if going round and round on a hamster wheel to maintain a certain standard of living. If they were to give up their jobs, it would mean a cease in their immediate source of income, and they would be left without any savings to fall back on.