Rethinking Strategy

CHAPTER 1The trouble with trends

Information must illuminate future discontinuities to deliver strategic value

Businesses love trends.

Trends make life easier for planners, marketers and innovators because they provide the illusion of a safe framework to which they can attach their plans and initiatives. In a sense, trends do the hard yards by defining the domains for exploitation. Once this heavy lifting is done, it’s then up to the skills of the business to exploit the obvious. The trouble is, all of your competitors are likely doing the same thing.

I first became aware of the corporate love for trends when I was appointed Consumer Insights Manager at Foster’s. Charged with the responsibility for assisting marketing decisions including innovation, this role was my first real exposure to consumer and social trends. And I was soon able to see first-hand the influential and often central role that trends play in business decisions.

One of the first jobs in my new role was to develop a set of consumer trends that would act as a guiding framework for marketing and innovation — a corporate version of the ten commandments, if you like. After locking ourselves away for a couple of weeks, my colleagues and I came down from the mountain brandishing a list of trends that would surely take us to the promised land. We beamed with pride at what we thought was the originality of our trends and the creativity with which we had named each one: Keeping it real described the consumer’s desire ...