your organization's goals, capabilities, resources, and more—using the questions on the previous page to help—you're ready to plot it on the CTR. Using the conclusions you generated during your discussion, you must now address the CTR's three dimensions: [1] Innovation Target: in which area of my business will we apply this trend? [2] Priority: whe

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.

look to complement them with customer insights generated from watching trends and innovations.

Trends arise when external change unlocks new ways to serve fundamental human needs.

Understanding change—in people's behaviors, attitudes, and expectations—better places you to deliver what they want, not only now but in the future, too.

Rather than setting their sights on the traditional, broad segments, smart brands will target narrower demographic tribes of shared taste, interest, and sensibility. Psychographics—close study of customer lifestyles, interests, attitudes, and more—is nothing new. And of course, it's received wisdom now that the Internet has made it possible to iden

“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

Customer-led cultures are reactive and too self-consciously explicit about putting the customer first. Customer-centered cultures, on the other hand, are grounded in a deeply empathetic understanding of customer needs and wants, but also grant an organization the freedom to make the unexpected and often unasked-for leaps forward that will lead to l

how to answer that question by evaluating a trend against three key axes of adaptation: trend maturity, locality, and industry. Evaluating