Is trend watching a self-fulfilling prophecy?
Every now and then, mostly around December and January I come across listicles like ‘Trends to watch out for in 2019’. They certainly give me a strong designer FOMO (fear of missing out) that I’m not working with the coolest and newest topics. But I also wonder to which extent these predictions come true and hold their value later.
Some of the predictions certainly seem well-researched. Other articles of this kind turn out to be more of a clickbait, rather than thought-through analysis.
When the trends do not stick around
When product teams follow a trend for the sake of staying cool, the ultimate value for the users can be unclear.
- ‘Same product, but with a subscription!’
Some quirky examples are black socks subscription, pickle subscription, catnip for your cat subscription, female hygiene products subscription (there’s more than one of those). There’s a place for everything on the internet.
These examples sound fun, mostly useful or targeted to niche audiences. But is there really a need to make all these products subscription based?
- ‘Same product, but on a blockchain!’
Reptile breeding coin; disrupting the parenting industry in order to make it safer, more convenient, and more transparent for everyone involved; the ultimate cryptocurrency to exchange all the garbage dumped in your wallet into a single token which can be traded in exchanges…
- ‘Airbnb/uber/facebook of [insert your industry]!’ … You get the point.
Besides failing to add value to the client and wasting money developing an undesired product, going all-in on such trends has another risk. Companies tend to underestimate what the ‘hot’ technology actually can do. The promise of the new tech-innovation-driven-product sometimes does not match with what the technology can deliver:
- Tesla relied too much on the power of automation,
- many Kinect games do not take into account how twitchy the body recognition is,
- the image quality and processing power of AR glasses is still too shaky to be viable for the consumer market.
Not that the companies should be wary of pushing the tech boundaries, they definitely should. It is important to keep in mind that even the big players sometimes fail to deliver quality products when using new technology.
Trend reviews and predictions should definitely not be viewed by businesses as a to do list for the next year to stay afloat by businesses.
Trends translate the current state of our society and technologies and into visions of what it could mean for consumers the coming year(s). The value of these predictions is that they are, if used right, a powerful tool for speculating about the future. It makes businesses envision the bigger picture and where their company could go.
Visa, Ford Pepsi and NATO even hired science fiction writers to help them envision the future and called it ‘corporate visioning’. This helps them to explore what the future would be like, and prepare for what their business should do to stay relevant in the future.
Sharing and showing crazy ideas of the future inspires other industries, it forms our collective idea of what future looks like. Technology today might have looked completely differently, without the ideas of the sci-fi writers: cell phones, Quicktime, credit cards, video calls, tablets, electric cars, and even the world wide web were inspired by science fiction.
A lot of innovations stem from our previous ideas about the future. But these ideas are an extrapolation of the present. By extrapolating the present, we reinforce our ideas of what future should look like, and more eagerly follow the trend to be ‘relevant’ and ‘forward’. Classical chicken-and-egg situation: trend watching is a self-fulfilling prophecy.
As long as we do not forget to put the customer in the center of our business, these prophecies work out just all right.
