Hunting For Trends

I read Better and Faster by Jeremey Gutsche this past week. Mitch Joel interviewed him on his podcast. Jeremy is the founder of Trend Hunters, a website/business that consults with companies to help them see patterns and opportunities. What business isn’t hunting for trends to help understand where new opportunities are poking their head out waiting to be noticed? With 60,000,000 monthly views, TrendHunter.com is the world’s largest, most popular trend community. Over 252,000 cutting edge ideas are featured giving you a great place to frame new product development.

What I found most intriguing is that there are six patterns of opportunity often overlooked. They are:

CONVERGENCE: Combining previously unrelated products or categories
DIVERGENCE: Diverging from the mainstream (to achieve status or to customize)
CYCLABILITY: Following cycles that are predictable among generations or that recur in history, fashion or economics.
REDIRECTION: Shifting, repurposing or reposition a concept
REDUCTION: The simplification, specialization or micro-targeting of an idea
ACCELERATION: Identifying a critical feature and dramatically enhancing it.

He writes about a young boy who experiments with origami and becomes an expert whose ideas are used in aerospace, heart surgery and bio industries. He tells the story of an ex-con who applied a learnable pattern to a sleepy industry, creating a $50 million empire. And, the story of a mid-level manager who turns a bad focus group results into a multi-billion dollar industry. You’ll hear about Dave’s Killer Bread that changed the trajectory of a small family bakery. Each real world example helps you understand an approach requiring a pattern-seeking approach to business.

Is your business acting complacent, repetitive and protective of your turf? What can you learn from fashion, technology and that local pop-up retail store selling yoga classes in a renovated school bus? Are you seeing your industry and product just like all your category mates, or can you bring a fresh convergence from something new into the category? This type of thinking aligns well with my own world view of breaking rules from your category so you aren’t drinking the same Kool-Aide as everyone else. Can you pay attention to some small detail where others don’t focus. Are you able to blend two approaches – vending and clothing into something outside the ordinary?

Are you stuck like a farmer with the same cycle of behavior. Plant. Grow. Harvest. Can you disrupt that with an insatiable appetite for a curiously different approach?

Hunting and Farming

Throughout the book, the difference between farmers and hunters is exploited to explain a way of working in business that is quite compelling. Farmers follow the same basic cycle, year after year and generation after generation. Hunters have to learn to adjust and adapt as so much changes. Farmers get planted in their own complacency while hunters tend to be fearless, willing to deconstruct and product or process and curious to an extreme. While businesses need both farmers and hunters, the latter tend to be the ones who attack the convention of a category by bringing a new and refresh approach to the market.

A Thought Experiment

To apply some of Jeremy’s thinking, try these thought experiments for your product or service. These ideas are inspired by the book.

MERGE IN YOUR MIND: Imagine your company merging with different companies. What would UPS, Uber, Apple, Hotel Tonight, Google, Southwest, Red Bull or Dior Perfume do to alter how you focus on what you do? The experiment allows you to start to push the walls of the practical to think with a convergence attitude. A new business cultural filter can help you see your market differently.

STRIP THINGS DOWN TO THE BASICS: Now strip every feature out of your product and reduce it to the absolute simplest feature. Think of what Square did with helping small business use credit cards. How can you apply an extreme simple approach to your work? Remove everything that makes it complicated. This is what GO PRO did. Two buttons and ready to rock. Can you make things so easy, that you reach an audience who craves easy but is only offered complex.

I highly recommend you to pick up a copy of the book or check out the website, www.trendhunter.com It’s trending right now.