The Process on how to spot trends.

Information Exposure

Information sources are key. Exposing yourself to relevant information sources in whatever space you are trying to spot
a trend is the first step in seeing a swell develop. And they need to be numerous. Vast in fact.

Sources of information not only contain opinion formers inherent in them and therefore dictate which trends form, but
they also disseminate to large enough relevant groups to let those trends flourish.

In my eclair example. A large department store was promoting a small book on the Secret of Eclairs. Someone
somewhere was trying to push this as a trend.

Whilst I’m sharing embarrassing admissions, this from the ‘Devil Wears Prada’ probably best illustrates my point:

Image for post

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0458352/quotes

2. People exposure

This leads me on to people and networks. I covered this a little here. Networks provide exposure to more ideas. Ideas
that have been processed by people and spat out with more value. So in short the more relevant people you’re
connected to the greater the likelihood that you will be exposed to trends earlier.

That’s why the power of places like Silicon Valley are now so hard to displace. There you have hundreds of thousands of
people mining ideas and innovations, arriving at viewing points of ideas before anyone else and sharing them within
their networks. From afar they appear like visionaries. From near they are simply connecting dots that they are faced
with everyday.

This is perhaps one of the hardest things to do in a new industry. How do you connect with the right people so as to be
exposed to the most cutting edge ideas. That’s often why incumbents in industries continue to spot trends far ahead of
others; like our friends in the Devil Wears Prada.

However, one of the ironies of this is that the naive newcomer can disrupt an industry from a different angle. He just
happens to view the whole process differently. It’s a much more challenging process though.

So you’re now flooded with information. What next?

3. Connecting the Dots and Repetition

New information is disseminated everyday. And that doesn’t make it a trend. So how do you tell the difference between
a swell that is becoming a giant wave and one that won’t amount anything?

Simple. You look for patterns. You look for repetition. You look to see where certain bits of information are being
repeated. If that information is being digested and appearing in new forms from different angles with the same central
theme you know you’re likely on to something. Conversely, if that information is being regurgitated verbatim from the
same angle, it’s unlikely it will get enough traction.

Back to eclairs. Within a month of seeing that book in the department store. I had discovered two mini-eclair shops had
opened in Paris. Boom. So here we go. Another group of people unconnected with the first piece of information were
approaching the same theme. Then boom again. The Financial Times, that bastion of cool writes a feature on eclairs.
Trend well and truly uriously to catch the trend.

4. Space to Grow

But still all trends don’t grow to be waves. And as evidenced from my disastrous t-shirt business some are far too early
and peter out. One of the reasons for this is lack of space to grow into or more familiarly lack of a market.

For a trend to be well and truly adopted the timing needs to be right, market conditions need to be such that they can
accelerate the trend and make it viable commercially or otherwise.

Back to eclairs. A 2010 Daily Mail article predicting that eclairs would be big. But in 2010 and 2011 they weren’t.
Cupcakes were. So why is this time different. Because the cupcake market had moved on and proved the validity of such
a concept. Other people had started building their own shops suggesting a market did exist. This was a secondary larger
wave and a wiser time to step in to the market; arguably.

In short, without the right market conditions it’s wiser to just sit back and observe rather than aim to ride it.

5. Validating the Trend

So this is great. You’ve spotted something that seems to be picking up steam. But how do you know for sure that this
something is going to become a monster wave.

Simply. You don’t. But validation starts to come in more and more forms the more powerful the trend. The article above
was printed in a leading London daily. A mainstream paper with a mainstream readership. By this stage if you haven’t
already started exploiting the trend, then you’ve missed it. But its great validation if you’ve already started. And its akin
to feeling the waves at your feet, you start feeling the push of the wave and you’re paddling to always stay ahead of it.

Exploiting the Trend

One of the things that sets apart some of the most impressive and most-loved entrepreneurs is their ability to almost
predict the future and then exploit its likely happening.

A key feature of an upcoming trend is that the infrastructure to its exploitation doesn’t exist. When that book was
written or those shops were setup the world wasn’t setup to manufacture eclairs at scale. But that’s the value that was
created.

This is where a lot of people slip-up hoping to ride trend-waves. They assume that once they’ve spotted a trend the rest
is easy. But evidently it’s not. This is where you need to create and connect existing processes to reinvent new ones.
More about this another time.

https://medium.com/@ankurshah/the-5-step-guide-to-spotting-trends-daf63a31d3a1