2025: The insights that caught your attention
We’ve been publishing Insights here for nearly two decades. Which posts in our deep archive caught your attention this year – and which of this year’s insights grabbed you?
As the year winds down, we here at NEXT Insights like to kick back with a mug of something spicy and warming, dive into our site analytics, and look back at the posts from our ever-growing archive that caught your attention over the last year. Which perennial topics are still drawing you in? Which are the emerging topics that have grabbed people’s eyes?
Let’s count down the top 10 insights by traffic, in reverse order…
10: Ludic looping, all day long
Adam Tinworth, 2017
We’re called NEXT Insights for a reason: we’re always trying to look into the future, and explore the trends that will shape your business in five to 10 years’ time. Nine years ago, I was exploring the idea that digital design was tending towards a slot-machine model, where we get trapped in a cycle of refreshing in the hope of a dopamine hit.
As the global pushback against the addictive qualities of digital devices grows – just look at the news from Australia — this key piece from our archives explores just how we got here.
Key quote
Here’s an interesting question: could a compelling service offering of the future help us achieve tasks without trapping us in a ludic loop? It would require a different model of monetisation from the current attention-based models – but could it work?
9: Up and across: vertical and horizontal integration
Martin Recke, 2021
Companies which integrate both vertically and horizontally have been a subject of some obsession in the first half of the 2020s. This isn’t the only piece on the topic from Martin that’s in the top ten this year…
Key quote
Now retailers find themselves in a delicate position between their suppliers going direct and new horizontally integrated competitors (i.e. platforms, aggregators, and marketplaces). The old department store model – selling anything to anyone – has expired and been superseded by Amazon. Retailers face a tough choice between vertical and horizontal integration – or indeed both.
8: Branding love brands
Elisabeth Göbl, Alain Sama, Sandra Graggaber, Isabel Neumann & Lilli von Pressentin, 2025
Over the past year, we’ve introduced more insights from our colleagues across Accenture. These pieces have clearly resonated with you, as this isn’t the only example in the top 10 most-read pieces this year. Here, a plethora of experts address a timeless challenge: keeping a beloved brand that inspires passion relevant as the culture around it shifts. With practical advice and real-world examples, this caught people’s eyes.
Key quote
For love brands, the stakes are even higher. Their deep emotional connection with customers makes change risky: too much evolution can alienate loyal fans, while too little can lead to stagnation. Balancing tradition with innovation is key to ensuring love brands remain both timeless and relevant.
7: Playful biological computers
Martin Recke, 2024
Martin and I have long discussed the fact that sometimes the pieces we write today will become most relevant in five to 10 years (see the next post in the top 10 for a good example). Here’s a candidate for future relevance. While we’re all very obsessed with AI right now, researchers are hard at work looking at building biological computers that more accurately mimic the way we think. In this piece, Martin rounded up some of the innovations we’d then explore on stage in the 2024 conference. Beyond digital, beyond AI, lies biological computing. And we’re preparing you for it…
Key quote
Organic neural networks are way more powerful than machine learning algorithms. Instead of building artificial general intelligence with loads of hardware, energy, and algorithms, the DishBrain approach utilises organic intelligence, shaped by millions of years of evolution.
6: We’re still figuring out what post-digital is…
Adam Tinworth, 2012
The first piece I wrote for the NEXT blog (as we called it back then), as a curtain raiser for the 2012 conference motto: Post-Digital. Little did I suspect that nearly 14 years later, people would still be trying to get their heads around the idea of what the world looks like when digital is no longer something remarkable, but something so commonplace as to no longer be noteworthy. That’s the world we live in, but sometimes our thinking has yet to catch up.
Key quote
In that sense what Post Digital actually is is the end of the beginning. It marks the transition from the era where we’re excited by the shiny new digital toys that we have, and start to become excited by the changes that these shiny not-so-new toys are making in the way we live, in the objects we have around us.
5: The year of whole life rewilding
Adam Tinworth, 2024
In a piece inspired in equal measure by the Accenture Life Trends report, and my own personal passions, I explored how the concept of rewilding could be expanded far beyond nature restoration into the way we live in the light of the continued march of digital. These ideas will become ever more urgent with the rise of AI. In the year since this was written, I’ve had the chance to visit some of the schemes mentioned, and grabbed the stork photo above at the rewilding project at Knepp.
Key Quote
The first five years of this decade taught which experience could be digitised. Now, we’re deciding which ones should be digitised. We won’t give up our phones — but equally, we’ll use them to find real-world, social experiences to enjoy.
4: Finding the future in the details of the present
Adam Tinworth, 2024
How can you plan for the future, when you don’t even understand the present? This NEXT Show interview with design ethnographer Paula Zuccotti explored how we can find the seeds of the emergent future by paying detailed attention to the realities of the present. It’s a lesson we clearly need to keep learning again and again.
This is my highest spot in 2025’s top 10. But my colleague Martin doesn’t have the whole of the top 3 to himself…
Key Quote
But sometimes design ethnography briefs that are formed as insights about the future, actually become “present” briefs, a need to understand how things are now, so you can work forward from there. Understanding how the present looks from multiple perspectives actually gives you tools to see the path forward, she argues.
3: Branded Customer Experience impact
Isabelle Ette & Jakob Krämer, 2025
As AI shifts the dynamics of marketing faster than we can keep up, this helpful piece explored how an existing, but under-utilised, connection could help reclaim space in customers’ mindshare. And plenty of people clearly found it useful…
This is the highest-placed post published this year. The top two spots are claimed by the past…
Key Quote:
Yet, if all brands engage in personalised messaging – ideally based on first-party data – all brands act with the same, “seamless” CX that is on offer everywhere. Brand interactions fall flat. A still underused approach to make CX stand out is Branded Customer Experience (BCX).
2: Getting horizontal (and vertical) with Amazon
Martin Recke, 2021
A regular fixture in our most-read list since it was published, Martin’s analysis of how Amazon operates and what it could mean for other businesses still resonates.
Key quote:
As the digital revolution did, the sustainability revolution will probably bring forth a new breed of companies that will change the world. Sooner or later, these companies will climb to the top of the global economy, competing with today’s big tech companies. Ecosystems as the upcoming economic paradigm will be a powerful driving force, bringing vertical and horizontal integration to a whole different level.
1: The uncertain future of the office
Martin Recke, 2023
For the past five years – since the pandemic exploded all our assumptions about the office – we’ve been exploring what the workspaces of the future might look like. Two years ago, Martin pointed out what now seems self-evident: that the office is in mid-shift. It might be years before a consistent new model emerges.
Key quote:
Essentially, what we’re running now is still a large-scale experiment. It’s not as if we could go to the drawing board and design the office of the future in one fell swoop. This requires trial and error. Employee behaviour is constantly shifting, and so are office environments. If offices are energetic places, employees will feel a need to be there. If not, well… They may still be compelled to attend.
Photo by AI
