Posted By Allison Logano on July 17, 2024
What is a trend if not an indicator of social shifts? As new trends emerge, keeping your business current requires responding and adapting accordingly. Whether we’re talking about wide-leg jeans or news industry layoffs, engaging with trends empowers us to understand where culture is moving.
Spotting them before they’re mainstream can be a huge advantage for businesses who strive to show their audiences that they’re attentive and engaging in cultural conversation. By identifying a trend that’s on the upswing, brands can set themselves up as a leader rather than a follower who’s jumped on a trend after the fact. Trendspotting requires agility and a keen eye for identifying meaningful patterns. Mastering trendspotting takes time and practice, but a few key processes can get you headed in the right direction.
Pay Close Attention
The most important thing you can do to spot a trend is to always be listening. Listen to what people are talking about and how they’re talking about it. Keep your eyes and ears on social media, podcasts, your morning newsletters, and nightly news broadcasts. Listen to your customers, your competitors, thought leaders, influencers. Listen to your peers, families, and coworkers. People will always be an informative source of relevant and timely information.
When you’re listening, you’re looking for ideas that keep appearing. But when you notice a concept that keeps coming, how does each new mention differ? How is the conversation around it changing? How are consumers reacting to it, or businesses? What are their new expectations? What is changing socially, culturally, technologically?
When you see that shift — in business and technology investment, in conversations and consumer expectations, and in social opinion — that’s when you move past listening and pay attention. You’ve just spotted a trend.
And don’t be afraid to cast a wide net. Listen to conversations outside your field and your comfort zone. Changes in one space can spur changes in others, so keep your eyes, ears, social media, and news outlets open.
Don’t Get Distracted
As you’re listening, don’t let yourself get preoccupied by fads: small-scale social moments, like viral challenges or memes. Fads can be indicative of a larger trend, but they will come and go quickly.
You can think of fads as tactics, something you can use to stay top-of-mind and raise brand awareness. But fads don’t last, and they don’t create a larger change.
Move Quickly
Once you’re confident you’ve identified a meaningful trend for your brand, don’t wait to act on it. It can be tempting to give your listening a little more time, but remember: Your goal is to be ahead of the trends becoming mainstream. By the time you see popular media coverage of a trend, you may have missed your opportunity to be a part of the conversation.
Meet with your teams to discuss the trend you’ve identified and use your listening data to support your findings. They will likely be able to contribute additional context to your ideas. This conversation is helpful to round out your understanding of a trend in a few ways:
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- Are colleagues from multiple demographics like age, race, or geographic location also seeing this trend?
- Are your coworkers able to provide personal context to this trend that you were unaware of?
- What are their opinions on the trend? Do they find it troubling, exciting, relatable?
Follow Through
The crucial part of trendspotting isn’t the trend itself, but what you do with it. When you listen for trends, always keep in mind how you can connect it to your business or brand. Maybe you can create a thought leadership resource with a blog post or webinar on the trend.
Consider sharing your commentary with the media, or offering your company’s subject-matter experts as resources. Or you can craft your next marketing campaign around it. Perhaps the trend is something important your business needs to take a stance on. Maybe the trend is so big it will transform the way you do business. It’s not always about being the first to spot a trend, or even what the trend is — it’s knowing how to use it.
We use trendspotting to identify thought leadership and media opportunities for our clients. Once we're able to confidently assess and identify a trend, we're able to partner with our clients on developing an agile insight program that monitors the news conversation closely, observing timely changes and securing media opportunities to showcase their knowledge and expertise.
Keep Listening
When you’re confident that you’ve identified a trend before it’s reached its peak, don’t stop listening. If the topic continues to receive significant media attention, you can use these articles and clips as opportunities to emphasize your thought leadership.
Find ways to remind your audience that you were ahead of the trend. To go further, your company could conduct original research to develop a unique point of view. For example, consider creating a survey for your industry’s consumer base about their experiences with or sentiment toward the trend. (And consider designing a compelling infographic to tell the story of your survey results.) With fresh, relevant data, you’ll be well-equipped to approach media opportunities not just with personal commentary, but with researched context surrounding the topic.
Stay Agile
Trendspotting will keep your content relevant and your messaging resonant with your audience, creating meaningful, useful, and authentic connections with your brand. But to be a trendspotter, you must remain agile. By keeping your eyes and ears alert and being ready to act, your brand can stay one step ahead of the next big thing.
Learn how Tier One can help you make trends work harder for your business.
