What If We’re Asking the Wrong Questions About 2027?
New research from Foresight Factory challenges marketers to reconsider what consumers want from brands—and what authenticity, value, and independence really mean.
For years, marketers have been encouraged to make their brands more authentic. Be real. Be transparent. Be human.
But what if authenticity isn’t quite the foolproof positioning strategy we’ve come to believe?
That is one of the provocations emerging from Control Shift, Foresight Factory’s look toward 2027. Drawing on consumer research across 27 markets, the report challenges some of marketing’s most familiar assumptions—not by suggesting that consumers have abandoned their values, but by showing how the circumstances in which those values matter are changing.
At the heart of the research is a growing desire for control. In a world shaped by uncertainty, financial pressure, and rapidly evolving technology, people are looking for ways to exercise greater choice over their experiences, resources, and futures.
For marketers, that creates an interesting challenge. Perhaps the most useful question isn’t simply what consumers will want next, but whether brands are still asking the right questions about what people value.
When Authenticity Becomes Conditional
Consider authenticity …
Consumers may demand evidence, transparency, and genuine accountability when making decisions that affect their health, finances, or personal well-being. Yet those same people may enthusiastically embrace artificial experiences, synthetic creativity, or digitally constructed entertainment.
Foresight Factory calls this Conditional Authenticity.
The distinction is important. Artificiality is not necessarily the opposite of value, just as authenticity is not automatically a guarantee of trust. A synthetic experience can be imaginative, entertaining, or emotionally rewarding. An apparently authentic brand message can still feel calculated or unconvincing.
The question becomes less about whether something is real and more about whether it delivers what people expect from it.
For brands, that demands greater sensitivity to context. Where does credibility require proof? Where does imagination create possibility? And where might a familiar claim of authenticity no longer be enough to differentiate?
The Changing Meaning of Value
A similar reconsideration is emerging around what consumers consider worthwhile.
When household budgets are stretched, marketers might reasonably assume that practicality, price, and functional benefits will dominate purchasing decisions.
But Foresight Factory’s concept of Emotional ROI suggests a more complicated picture. People may be financially cautious while still placing considerable importance on enjoyment, indulgence, connection, and experiences that make life feel rewarding.
Value, in other words, is not always a calculation of utility divided by cost. An experience that creates joy or strengthens a relationship may feel worthwhile even when it cannot be justified through conventional measures of efficiency.
For marketers, the implication isn’t to abandon rational value propositions. It’s to recognize that emotional rewards are part of how consumers determine value in the first place.
The more interesting question may be whether brands understand what people are actually trying to gain from an experience—not simply what they’re prepared to pay for it.
When Empowerment Becomes the Offering
The third shift may be the most consequential over time.
Foresight Factory describes a growing Capability Culture, in which people seek greater independence through learning, making, repairing, creating, and developing skills that give them more control over their lives.
Rather than relying exclusively on organizations to provide finished solutions, consumers may increasingly value the ability to do more for themselves. That creates an intriguing challenge for brands traditionally built around convenience and dependency. What happens when helping customers become more capable becomes as valuable as selling them another product or service?
A brand might provide the tools, knowledge, confidence, or connections that enable people to achieve something independently. The relationship changes. The brand is no longer simply the provider of an answer: It becomes an enabler of possibility.
And that may create a different kind of loyalty—one built not on dependence, but on the value of being helped to succeed.
Better Questions for a Changing World
These three shifts do not suggest that authenticity, value, or convenience have become irrelevant. Quite the opposite. They suggest that familiar concepts are acquiring new meanings as consumers adapt to changing circumstances.
Authenticity may matter most where truth and trust are essential. Value may be increasingly defined by emotional as well as functional rewards. And convenience may sometimes give way to a desire for greater capability and independence.
For marketers looking toward 2027, the challenge is not simply to recognize these developments or add them to another list of trends. It is to reconsider the assumptions that shape business decisions.
What do consumers need to trust? What makes an experience genuinely worthwhile? Where do people want brands to simplify their lives—and where would they rather be empowered to do more themselves?
The answers will differ by category, market, and circumstance. But perhaps the most important shift is in the questions themselves.
Because anticipating what comes next begins with recognizing when the questions we’ve always asked are no longer enough.
