Riding the Trend Wave
Trends help determine new ways to add value
A couple of years ago, I heard Chip Wilson, founder of Lululemon Athletica, talk about the importance to him of keeping up with the latest trends. He spends a significant amount of time scanning magazines, newsletters, news sources and talking with people just to keep up with what the next social trends are that will affect his company.
As a franchisor or CEO, knowing what is coming brings up opportunities and highlights potential threats, and may give you new ideas for what your customers will be looking for. Continually finding new ways to add value is an important part of entrepreneurial innovation.
Managing the Information
Technology changes fast, business changes fast, and consumer patterns shift and change. There’s a lot of information to keep up with, and no time to do it (whose to-do list gets shorter each day instead of longer?).
I manage the information flow in two ways; first, keep a general eye on what’s going on and use resources that send me summaries and synopses that I can skim, and second, ruthlessly jetisson anything that doesn’t fit with my top priorities at the moment. I used to be afraid that I wouldn’t find something again if I needed it, but now I only pay attention to the information that is relevant to what I’m working on. Send me a great article on clean energy trends, and I’m afraid that after the initial skimming it gets rapidlly dropped. But send me a good article on franchise growth by building stronger relationships with franchisors, and I will read it carefully, follow up on any links, see whether it would be useful to my customers, and then keep it on file as a great business resource. The key is not what’s new and exciting, but what may affect my business, my customers, my industry. To know that, I have to see what is happening that’s new and exciting. Fortunately, there are lots of great tools and sites that will send me this information regularly in a nicely condensed format.
Great Trend Watching Time Saving Resources
Trendwatching – http://trendwatching.com/ - sign up for their regular monthly newsletter and get briefs on the latest trends sent to your inbox.
Springwise – http://www.springwise.com/ - trends by industry and offers a regular weekly newsletter about interesting trends
Trend Spotting – http://www.trendsspotting.com/blog
Google trends – http://www.google.com/trends/hottrends - see what people are searching for on a daily basis
Google alerts - get information related to new information online about what matters to your business.
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