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The Blogosphere's Love of Novelty
Now to counter all these walled garden trends services and their costs is to avoid these costs is to scan the blogs each day. And there's a hell of a lot of information out there for you to gather (or get your ad agency's intern to gather) - and a lot can be learned from the right analysis and pattern recognition. The problem with the blogosphere is that it's too distracted by novelty. And novelty can kill innovation. Consider how far the idea behind the rolling-bench dispersed. I mean, it’s a bench with a seat that can be rolled round so that your backside can always be dry. It's not innovation. It's not a manifestation of a trend. It's novelty and picked up because it's different, not because it's a good idea or could even work. And even if you're a little more discerning, you're still in trouble because trends newsletters are famous for spreading novelty, not real ideas.
The Trends Industry's Love of Novelty
Ok, ok - it's not only the blogs. It's the industry too. The love of novelty can probably be summed up by this image about 'Atmosfear' on the BrainReserve's site.
The Ad Agencies Make Their Play
And then you get the services from the ad agencies. And sure, they're all fun and funky and well designed and all but at the end of the day, ad agencies really are in the game to make ads - not help your business innovate.
Using Consumer Research to Identify Trends
There are also a lot of Market Research companies that shouldn't be in the trends and innovation business. There's a misunderstanding in the market that consumer research will help you innovate. Consumer research helps you optimize, not innovate. Consumers can help you understand how to improve now, but they can't help you with the tomorrow.
Lack of Organizational Change
While one could argue that the fact that existing trends services significantly reduces creativity, differentiation and innovation -these issues combined aren't as problematic as this one: companies don't know how to use trend data to create organizational change.
The frustration for executives in drink companies who buy these services is that they are either understaffed or ill-equipped to use the data to make change. It doesn't really matter how good or bad trend data is. Companies accept that they need to be future forward but many just don't know how to work in a way that allows this. There's a major issue here that stops companies from making things better.
In summary, the trends business is a walled business that uses smoke and mirrors to protect it. It preaches from on high what the trends are without much transparency about what their recommendations were based on. In an era of Google-inspired freedom of information, these businesses surely can't continue to hide data that is already in the public domain. There's an opportunity to really be open in the trends business, to bring in new players that want to work together to force the old players to change their ways; and also work collaboratively with drinks companies. If they don’t find a way together to create and share a tool for organizational change that is strategic in process, transparent in delivery yet flexible enough to be inspired by trends data every single day, it might not be as valuable for the beverage maker as one might think – or pay for.