Introducing Cultural Forces: A Look Ahead at 2024

Welcome to Klick’s latest series that explores the cultural forces and trends shaping our world in 2024.

Imagine this: You’re working on your brand and you’ve spent months analyzing performance metrics and market share, you’ve done positioning work and message-testing research, but things aren’t going as well as you know they could. Most of our time is spent looking at research that looks back. We need to incorporate research that helps us predict the future.

What if you could connect your brand to what’s coming next instead of only reacting to what’s already happened?

In pharma and healthcare, it’s important to understand the industry-specific trends and changes. It’s also essential to recognize the larger forces impacting the broader culture. Our industry isn’t immune from these cultural forces—patients, HCPs, payers, care partners, and everyone else—we all participate in the wider culture. By understanding these cultural forces, we can predict challenges and identify opportunities early. Trying to fight culture is expensive and mostly ineffective. Leaning into cultural forces allows us to engage our audiences more deeply around the things they care about—making our campaigns and messages work harder.

Klick has been actively monitoring and reporting on the most prominent cultural forces driving change in health and pharma for our clients. Now, we are excited to share it more widely.

Understanding these cultural forces at a general, societal level gives us a competitive advantage, but the real advantage comes when we can make the implications specific to your brand challenges. When we combine this thinking with rich data about the past and present, we start to be able to develop future-thinking scenarios that allow brands to shape the future and not just go along for the ride.

What to expect

Each year, Klick Health identifies a set of cultural forces that represent our take on what will drive cultural change in the following 12 months and beyond. Cultural forces identify a way to make sense of our complex world and help our teams and clients anticipate what’s next.

Over the next few weeks, we will delve into five key cultural forces shaping our world and the health and pharma industry in 2024. Each force will include our analysis and examples of the force coming to life, plus predictions for 2024 and the impact on patients, HCPs, and other stakeholders.

Cultural Force 1: Questioning Reality. The impact of GenAI and misinformation on trust and confidence

Cultural Force 2: Collective Alienation. How loneliness and extreme self-focus are alienating many from their community and support

Cultural Force 3: Value vs. Values. Why brand values are even more important during times of economic pressure

Cultural Force 4: Reinventing Success. Traditional markers of adulthood and success are less relevant than ever before, leaving many struggling to understand their future

Cultural Force 5: Friction Aversion. Years of emphasis on smooth online experiences have left many people less equipped to cope with the friction of day-to-day life

How we do it

We approach predictions of cultural forces in two different ways:

Klick Health’s cultural forces and predictions are developed based on this research. Unlike other trend reports, we always bring a health and pharma lens to our work, ensuring that the identified cultural forces are relevant to our industry (although not exclusively about our industry). We develop implications and thought-starters for our specific audiences.

The Model

We use the following model to help us make sense of the chaotic set of trends that make up culture.

Leaves

In our model, the signals that are easiest to see are the “leaves.” These signals and fads represent a moment in time. They may disappear quickly, but they tell us something important about what’s happening in culture. Trend-hunting organizations often report on these signals, and sometimes, a fad rises to mass-media attention—a TikTok format like GRWM (Get Ready with Me) or a trend like collecting Stanley Cups in every color. Our team observes, tracks, and catalogs these trends and fads throughout the year to help us see the larger patterns that emerge.

Branches

At Klick, we define cultural forces as the patterns moving in culture, identified by the accumulation of trends and rooted in larger global changes. Most often, these forces have been building and shifting for years before we name them; they take on different faces and impact our lives differently. In our model, these are the “branches.” They don’t disappear as quickly as the leaves. The branches are our focus when it comes to identifying cultural forces.

Roots

All cultural forces are rooted in larger human needs and global events.

Key examples of “roots” include the following:

*Urbanization * The world is becoming increasingly urbanized as people leave rural areas to find employment and community

Demographic Shifts Many countries are seeing shifts, including the aging population of Japan and the youth movement in the Global South

Climate Change The realities and fears around global climate change are impacting day-to-day life in countless ways

Global events, which are changing culture and slower-moving, are monitored by organizations like the UN and various US government agencies who produce annual reports detailing the most recent implications and making predictions about what’s to come.

We are excited to share Klick Health’s cultural forces over the coming weeks. These reports are the culmination of a full year of observation, research, analysis, and discussion from strategists steeped in pharma and health. Understanding how culture shifts and changes is critical to predicting what comes next for us and our industry.

Be sure to follow Meredydd on LinkedIn to see new articles as soon as they are posted.

Happy 2024!