Trends can be a product manager’s best friend. They can propel products, increasing adoption by customers, or if misread, they may have costly consequences of wasted resources, too much inventory, and lost opportunities.

Product managers know about the importance of trends, but are often already overwhelmed and don’t make time to study trends. Are there ways to make trend identification easier? To find out and learn about identifying and using trends, I contacted Max Luthy.

He is the Director of Trends & Insights at TrendWatching, a company that scans the globe identifying emerging consumer trends and changes in trends. He is also the co-author of the book Trend-Driven Innovation.

In the interview, you will learn the steps to apply trend-driven innovation…

1. Scan,
2. Focus,
3. Generate,
4. Execute, and
5. Culture.

 

Practices and Ideas for Product Managers and Innovators

Summary of questions discussed:

• Let’s start with why trends are important – how do trends impact innovation and new product management? We all know things are constantly changing. As a result, what your customer expects from your products, from your services, from your marketing, from your customer service, from your logistics, from your supply chain — all of the expectations around your brand and your product — are changing constantly. Tracking trends is really about seeing these changes happen and evolving your strategy to stay ahead of them.

• How is watching businesses important for learning about consumer trends and how do you do this?  This is a counterintuitive secret. It would be very easy to think  to understand the consumer, the best thing you can do is ask them. Instead, the reason we’re looking to businesses to better understand customers is because it is the innovations from businesses across industries and around the world that create new expectations and lead to the emergence of new trends. It is a less expensive and more effective means of identifying consumer trends.

• What is the process for spotting trends? I’ll go through each, but the steps are Scan, Focus, Generate, Execute, and Culture.

• What is Scan? Absorbing information through readily available sources such as newsletters. One recommendation is the Quartz Daily brief at http://qz.com/daily-brief/. Trends should be tracked in a logical manner and tools like Evernote can make this easy.

• Next is Focus. This means to focus on what’s relevant for you. Assess the trends you spotted when scanning and determine how is it relevant for your company in terms of the maturity of the trend, the locality you’re in, and our industry.

• Then on to Generate. You need to come up with new products, new services, new marketing, that tap into the emerging insights at the heart of the trend. If you’re just tracking the trends and you’re not acting on the insights, it’s a complete waste of time.

• That takes us to Execute. This involves all the actions to get new products and services to the market. It is the culmination of your work acting on a trend and identifying a product or service to capitalize on your observations.

• What do you mean by Culture? This is the bonus stage of trend-driven innovation. It means to keep doing these four steps to create innovative products and services, you have to build a culture that understands that change is happening, the rate of change is accelerating, and the need for everyone in the company to be watching out for change, looking out for emerging expectations, and responding within their own work.

 

Useful links:

• Trend Driven Innovation book
• The Consumer Trend Canvas
• The Consumer Trend Radar Tool
• Never miss a trend – subscribe to trend newsletter

Innovation Quote

“Treat different people differently.” –Seth Godin

 

Listen Now to the Interview

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Raw Transcript

TEI083

 

Thanks!

Thank you for being an Everyday Innovator and learning with me from the successes and failures of product innovators, managers, and developers. If you enjoyed the discussion, help out a fellow product manager by sharing it using the social media buttons you see below.