Until marketers and product designers switch their focus from creative marketing to creative aging, they will not find the sweet spot from which flows new products and structures attractive to the valuable senior demographic. Turning from creative marketing to creative aging will entail a real thought shift, focusing on graspable ways to enhance older adults’ quality of life, rather than...

Is your smartphone’s allure too strong? Rosen and other experts recommend a simple treatment:• Assure yourself you can check your phone any time you want. • Turn off your phone and place it face down. • Promise yourself you’ll check your phone in five minutes. • Go away and do something pleasant and non-electronic for those five minutes. Watch clouds...

The versatility, portability and affordability of modern technology have completed a journey into the hands of just about everyone. While anti-technology, pro-human experience movements are picking up some steam, the “walking-dead phenomenon” is fully entrenched. There is no evidence of Amish-like communities springing up as a counterpunch to this reality, nor are new products coming to lessen global dependency on...

Baby boomers may be the last generation primarily stirred by traditional nostalgia, inspired to return home for good, back to an intensely local and small-town lifestyle. The operative nostalgia for younger generations, oversaturated by technology and multimedia, is still being fine-tuned by marketers. While traditional nostalgia trend lines will continue for the population at large, the future of these trends...

On the commercial end of business and social side of life, down-and-out millennials and a stressed-out general public yearn for any port that provides emotional respite from the constant fear-and-hysteria storm that politicians promote and the media sell. They will be tapping in to a new cultural-profit trend with long-term potential. Beyond the speakeasies that now dot city streets, swank, “natural,”...

• US shale oil and gas production will continue to lead the petroleum industry, but investors will closely watch delivery rates, decline curves and global price pressures. The play’s glory days likely are over. New players will find new niche markets in shale gas areas.• New processes will add utility and value to coal, but won’t be able to solve...

Bankism will grow in 2015. For solvency and reputational reasons, central and private banks need, and will collaborate to keep, the cost of money as low as possible. This will keep bond and stock prices propped up on average for the first half of 2015, but with scarier daily swings to the downside. The tide of rising volatility will accelerate...

The government’s deception of the public relies on the public’s self-deception. If this self-deception survives the year 2015, economic collapse and war will be the most likely results.