2026 Trends To Consider To Promote Your Business
Rory Sutherland talks about bees perform a waggle dance to tell other bees where to go for the best nectar. 80% of the bees follow the advice. 20% do not. (Interesting that bees have heard of Pareto. I thought you had to go to University to learn about that!) The 20% that do not follow the instructions go off and do their own thing. Turns out this is very useful because when the rich source of nectar dries up those who have been exploring elsewhere can share their knowledge. Consequently, the hive maximises honey production.
If you think this is of absolutely no relevance to me because I am not a bee, or I do not like honey. Read on. In the early days of Google when it cared more about great ideas and less about shareholders in the short term it allowed its employees 20% free time to explore whatever they wanted. No constraints. This lead to most of the innovations at the company. It was incredibly successful. Now Google is a large bureaucracy dedicated to maximising shareholder value in the short term the 20% project time is withering.
The point is that devoting some time each week / month to ideas which might seem a bit abstract can lead to innovation, and new approaches to problems.
Ironically many of the “innovations” might actually be very obvious – but just because something is obvious does not mean people will do it. Rory Sutherland in an interview suggested that “David Ogilvy’s favourite books was – Obvious Adams, originally published in 1916.”
Now out of copyright this is a link to the book. https://archive.org/details/obviousadamsstor00upderich/page/n7/mode/2up?ref=ol
You can buy it if you want to.
I think this book will go over the heads of most people, which is an irony.
Most people look for complicated solutions to simple problems.
A giant example is the NHS in the UK. Many peoples’ health could and would be fixed if people went back to a 1960/70s diet and lifestyle. Meaning cook your own food and walk a lot more. (Obviously not the cigarettes.)
A smaller example in Birmingham would be, declare war on litter and potholes, both of which blight the city, that would make the city much more attractive to any prospective investors.
However, most organisations prefer expensive management consultants who put forward grandiose schemes which go nowhere.
Petrol stations have large signs and are in prominent places. EV electric charging points are often in hidden locations their existence know only to a handful of eagle-eyed explorers.
Many issues only require simple solutions – but it turns out simple solutions are not always obvious.
In 2026 and going forward whilst many people search with Google, search has become a critical component of many websites.
- Bluesky
- ChatGPT – some websites which I see the stats for are already receiving visitors via this source.
- Flickr
- Quora
- TikTok
- Tumblr
- X
- YouTube
In a perfect world a business would be visible on all these platforms potentially. In reality for smaller businesses that is too many, however expanding your visibility from just a website to some sort of presence on some of these other social media platforms is recommended now, and in the future.
Why The Video?
The flood – no more complicated than a blocked drain. The drain had been blocked for years. Tied in with the Obvious Adams story.
Secondly the video was created using the newish Google Video creation tool called Vids which if you have a paid version of Gmail might very well be in your options / dashboard.
AI makes creating video content even easier than before. Expect an explosion of video in 2026 and beyond. 7Realms.uk opening video made on a phone using AI totally insane.
20% Time A Waste Or A Breakthrough Opportunity?
One day a client asked if I could sort out his wife’s website which a relative had created.
It had all the usual things wrong with it. I fixed the site and ran it for a few years, until she announced she was going to retire.
One last thing, “Could I create a screenshot of each page and send her that so one day she could show her grand-children?” I had some software which could do this but it was really annoying and a real pain to use.
I spent some time researching and found a solution which worked very well.
I went back and suggested that to fulfil the request would be a couple of hours work and that would have to be chargeable. “Well in that case I am not interested,” was the reply.
At that moment in time the irony crossed my mind, she charged patients for her time, but did not feel it was necessary for me to charge her, for my time. Anyway the solution I found for easily capturing a whole website page in one go – I have used that virtually every day since then, sometimes multiple times per day. It has proven very useful. Time spent doing something on non-core, can turn out to be very productive.
GoFullPage – Full Page Screen Capture
Not the biggest secret in the world with 9 million users and rated 4.9/5.
This is a free Chrome Extension which is easily installed if you use Google Chrome as your browser.