Trends in Trend Spotting: Importance on the Rise

The accelerating speed of business and the relentless churn of consumer trends can create nightmares for marketers and their ad agencies. By the time clients and creative directors realize that hemlines are going down, they may actually be rising again. Some agencies are responding by honing their trend-spotting skills.

Trend-spotting is driven in part by ad agencies’ fear that their traditional core business - making television ads - is threatened as new technology lets viewers skip advertisements or even choose ad-free programming. Instead of simply producing ads, agencies now want to be seen as creative consultancies, helping clients develop marketing strategies or even new products.

At the same time, trend-spotting has grown in importance as marketers express frustration with some of the traditional tools of market research. Technology, particularly on the Internet, allows marketers to track consumers’ behavior much more effectively than ever before. But that erodes the value of focus groups and other consumer-oriented techniques that have long been popular among marketers seeking to gauge how audiences react to existing or proposed products. If you can track what consumers actually do, why bother with what they say?