How can companies shape and sense consumers' rapidly evolving modes of engagement—with retailers and with each other—to support future growth?.

Overview:

What a difference 30, 20, or even 10 years makes when it comes to consumer behavior.

Go back 30 years to 1983. 24×7 shopping means mail-order catalogs and telemarketing. Commercial access to the Internet will take another 12 years, and AOL's online service, based on a proprietary dial-up network, has yet to launch.

Self-service means you go to a supermarket and fill your cart before going to a cashier who rings you up and bags your groceries.

You may belong to newly launched loyalty programs from an airline or a hotel, and carry a retailer-specific credit card in your wallet. Call centers are starting to implement interactive voice response capabilities, but you shudder when you encounter them because they seem so unnatural.

Move forward 10 years to 1993. You have more and different shopping alternatives. Cable channels, such as Home Shopping Network, and "big box" stores are the rage. AOL's signature greeting, "You've got mail," will be featured in a movie starring Tom Hanks. Amazon will soon ship its first product, and consumers will have widespread access to the Internet.

One more leap forward, this time to 2003. Although the iPhone and iPad have yet to appear, Apple has opened its first retail stores, which will soon generate the highest sales per square foot of any retailer in the country. Self-service and 24×7 gain new meaning with a broad array of Internet-based shopping alternatives and proliferating self-service options, ranging from automated ticketing machines in airports to self-checkout in supermarkets. Mobile phone use is high, with the shift from 2G to 3G and smartphones. While Mark Zuckerberg is still a Harvard student, the launch of MySpace signifies the arrival of social networks.

Now back to today. Your 2013 shopping choices include real-time price checking, daily deals, self-designed rewards programs, mobile phone-based payment systems, ubiquitous rating sites, and more than a billion people and companies you can "friend" via social media.

What happened? Clearly, there has been an astonishing stream of innovations in retail, as well as in health care, financial services, and other consumer-oriented sectors. But are changes in consumer shopping behavior simply the inevitable response to innovation? Or are there other factors that help explain the seismic shifts in consumer behavior that have taken place?

What's driving this trend?

Through extensive research, Michael Merzenich and other neuroscientists have observed that the human brain is incredibly plastic, even in adulthood, constantly adapting to shifts in our circumstances and experiences.

Although the research originally described how brains adapt to trauma, scientists now believe that it has broader applications.

"We have learned that neuroplasticity is not only possible but that it is constantly in action," writes Mark Hallett, head of the Medical Neurology Branch of the National Institutes of Health. "That is the way we adapt to changing conditions, the way we learn new facts, and the way we develop skills."  "Plasticity," says Alvaro Pascual-Leone, a Harvard Medical School researcher, is "the normal ongoing state of the nervous system throughout the life span. Our brains are constantly changing in response to our experiences and our behavior, reworking their circuitry with each sensory input, motor act, association, reward signal, action plan, or [shift of] awareness."

If smartphones, tablets, and social media were not part of the discussion 10 years ago, how can we plan for what's on the horizon in the next two or three years, let alone the next decade? Are there factors other than technology that contribute to these radical shifts in behavior that we need to understand, as well? There are indeed.

Get the full Business Trends 2013 report HERE