Foresight key for understanding trends, panel hears

The Trends Summit, run by Social Intelligence Labs, heard from a series of professionals about the future of foresight and the important role it plays within brand decision-making.

Speaking on a panel at the conference on Thursday ( 25th April), Alberto Romano, global futures and consumer planning at Diageo, said that it was important to differentiate between fads and trends in consumer attitudes and behaviour.

For example, he said that the example of caring for the environment was a trend in which many different factors become more prominent at any given time, such as focuses on plastic straws and the ozone layer, to pick two examples.

“The expressions, signals and fads are all dependent on that core insight,” Romano added.

He said that it was not merely examining what was happening at the moment in popular culture, but combining that with analysis of past trends and using internal knowledge about the market in which a brand operates that could make foresight very potent.

“You can only truly move the needle when you are aligned to your internal core values, when you have your positioning and purpose in line, and that drives your intuition,” Romano explained.

“It is not thinking what could be right, it is the collective of the company, the brand and of the model you are sitting under, connecting it to the outside and finding that spark to make things go boom.”

As a result, he argued that foresights and prediction systems “gives you the right building blocks to build the future”, adding that “instead of being a passive observer of how things might shift or how things might change, I have the right cards under my sleeve, or the brand has, to say this is the right time to go after this – it is a mindset shift”.

Romano concluded: “Try, learn, fail, repeat. You never know when you will hit the goldmine. Stay curious, translate and learn is what has made this adventure even more fun.”

Joe Aphinyanaphongs, senior manager, trends and innovation at Mars Petcare, told the panel that with many products needing long gestation periods, it was difficult to simply jump onto a fad or trend.

“Trends and fads are things you can only see with hindsight,” he explained. “In hindsight everything is 20/20, but what you can trust is that you have an industry exposure which means you have a lot of past experience.

“I believe past experience can help you mitigate and sort what can be a trend or a fad. In order to continue moving the market, sometimes you have to go with your gut, do you consumer testing and speak to consumers, because sometimes you don’t really know until it has already been launched – that’s the nature of the work.”

He added that predictions work could not adequately prepare for all real world events that could impact whether a product launch will work or not.

“Once it is out in the wild, there are so many other factors that come into play,” said Aphinyanaphongs. “But it doesn’t mean our jobs are meaningless, it just means the work is around mitigating and hoping it will succeed.

“Often organisations want to treat innovation like it is an efficient process. I have found in my experience it is having things juggling at all times, and some will make it to market and some won’t.”

Kristina Kosutova, social intelligence lead, consumer and market insights at Nestle, said that fads can be “more fun, fresh, just temporary and related to some novelty”, but if you look at historical data, “you can really understand what is a trend, as it will have an impact on the market, on the consumer demand and will grow interest of customers – that’s the key difference between the trend and the fad.”

Kosutova added that to win around colleagues within organisations to foresight as a discipline needed demonstrations of its power, adding : “As long as you prove the power of it and how it can benefit them, it is a green light for everything.”