Trend-Driven Innovation

[1] New Normal: how can we celebrate and cater to non-traditional lifestyles and identities? [2] Heritage Heresy: what should our brand never do? What would it look like if we did just that? [3] Cross-Demographic Fertilization: what entirely new demographic groups can we take inspiration from and cater to? [4] Hyper-Demographic Targeting: what new

Business Model Is the trend unlocking whole new business models? Marketing How are brands reflecting the trend in their marketing and campaigns? How are consumers responding?

Find clusters of multiple and diverse innovations, extract the underlying customer-centered insight, and look beyond the success or failure of a single innovation.

The reality for many brands today is that the needs and wants of customers—who are constructing new, diverse, and more personally meaningful lifestyles—simply don't align with the narrative that brands have labored to build. For rising numbers of those customers, brand heritage and story have become at best irrelevant, and at worst an active barrie

But now, deep-running social, technological, and customer shifts mean that around the world people are no longer living the lives determined for them by their demographics. Liberated from traditional ideas about the lives they “should” live given their age, gender, income bracket, and more, these people are instead constructing lifestyles and ident

“Our job is to figure out what they're going to want before they do. . . . People don't know what they want until you show it to them. That's why I never rely on market research. Our task is to read things that are not yet on the page.” – Steve Jobs

Spotting the innovations that are exciting customers and analyzing them using the fundamental elements of trends is also disruptively faster and cheaper than deep ethnographic fieldwork.

customers' expectations are frequently raised without them having even personally experienced “the best,” but merely through knowing what standard the “best” represents.

Triggers are more immediate changes that drive the emergence of a trend. These can include specific technologies, political events, economic shocks, environmental incidents, and more. For example, the Snowden/NSA revelations caused many to re-evaluate the trade-offs they were making when sharing their personal data with “free” online services.