It seems to me that the future consumer will want to abdicate responsibility to entire areas of their life; for example their wardrobe, transportation or petcare.
They will not want products. They will want solutions.
To support this, businesses would need to tailor their products to the application, and ensure that those products are well embedded into the provisioning process, creating a total solution. That's the easy bit - the real challenge will be the KNOWLEDGE required to support such a business model.
Just think for a second - how much would a business need to know about you to not only fulfil the basic requirement of such an abdication, but do it while minimising or preferably eliminating the interactive overhead (how much interaction is required to delegate the process - it's a useless proposition if you have to manually provide all the data required to support it).
The technology is there; passive collection of data, ability to translate that into knowledge, the subsequent actions required, creation of tailored products and direct provision to the end user.
The challenge is trust, and this is why this presents a massive opportunity for strong brands. Only a highly trusted brand could enable the consumer revolution that such a change would represent.
However, this will require a total re-think of how a brand should be deployed, and what it represents. The timescales become huge - a purchase decision could more closely align to a lifetime of a beloved pet, rather than the regular visit each week to the supermarket.
Given the inevitable lag from brand investment to break even, barriers to entry will rise rapidly, and those with the vision to start building specific consumer knowledge early will inevitably become those who shape the future of their industry.
Alternatively you could buy it from Facebook or Google ;-)
Food for thought anyway.
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