Why it’s important?

Every company wants to know the future: to stay on track with a possible sharp turn around the corner or to be the first to catch an uprising opportunity.

What is trend?

Emerging shift in peoples’ beliefs or behaviour. Not all shifts are important, so trendwatching is usually cares about fundamental ones. Read more: Instant Trend Expert by TrendWatching.com

What is not?

Beware of fads. Fads come and go. Trends emerge and evolve.

Lifecycle

From audience perspective, Innovators are the first to try new things. Early Adopters follow them quickly. Early Majority and Late Majority come next. Laggards are the last. Read more: Diffusion of innovations on Wikipedia.

Innovation Adoption Curve
There is another way to look at this. Usually, every trend starts with a trigger (e.g. new technology) . With today’s mania for everything new, trend could quickly become a hype and achieve Peak of Inflated Expectations. This is always followed by Through of Disillusionment. If a trend is fad, it could disappear in a chasm. If not, from this moment it will evolve via Slope of Enlightenment to Plateau of Productivity. Read more: Hype Cycle by Gartner

Gartner Hype Cycle

Reports

Annually starting around October, biggest analytics companies publish their trend reports for the upcoming year, predicting what shifts will make the biggest impact.

This project

Each year, I’m gathering most influencing trend reports in one place. This helps me to see the bigger picture and reveal the trends beyond trends.