(book review) The Next Big thing -William Higham

The next big thing – Spotting and forecasting consumer trends for profit, William Higham

To be fair: originally I bought this book hoping to find loads of new trends affecting consumers. There are a couple indeed, but the book is more about understanding the nature of trends, where they originate from, how they grow and, perhaps more importantly, how to build a process in the company in order to assess these trends and make decisions based on them.

Perfect! I  got much more than I expected !

The book starts with a couple of examples of consumer trends, which Highman often provides with a compelling name: boundary blurring (consumers are active participants in the market), gender blurring, ‘trading up’ (H&M asking Karl Lagerfeld to make a collection, Carlsberg exclusive ‘900’ brand), ‘Come together’, etc.

Highman then develops an argument for a ‘trend marketer’ function within a company (not only responsible for trend spotting, but also decision making and implementation). The idea is appealing, and I’d certainly apply for any such job –although it’s in fact another name for 50% of what I’m doing in my current role.
The main part of the book, however, is dedicated to understanding the nature of trends:

• How they start: pretty much –a bit to my surprise- a matter of  PESTEL factors (Political, Economical; Societal; etc.). I say to my surprise, since I do think that with that the author omits the Psychological factor, though he might argue that this factor is dependent on all the other PASTEL factors. We could argue for years before getting clear with that one…;
• Sorts of trends: behavioral vs. attitudinal; micro vs macro trends; … I’m thinking of developing a classification of trends myself, though Highman gives a good basis, I do think it can do with some more granularity.;
• Where trends occur;
• How to collect trends;
• How trends spread (opinion formers; 6 degrees; etc);
• Mapping trends: Causal analysis / assistance attribute / needs attribute / passive drivers… a very good aid to assess trends!
• How to draw conclusions and decisions based on the work above: ‘trend audits’, innovation workshops and scenario planning..

Though here and there the ideas might feel a bit light (the chapter on ‘how to collect trends’, for instance, doesn’t go much further than basic research), the beauty of this book resides in the fact that all these ideas taken together, they form a pretty solid process with which companies can deal and benefit from the trend-marketer exercise.

Pretty compelling and convincing at the end.

The annex is worth mentioning: Highman explains the full process he himself has gone through (or helped with) in discovering and assessing three major consumer trends: ‘traditionalizing ‘(how people get back to more traditional ways of living); ‘come together’ (where people will increasingly look for ways to meet and share events ‘live’) and ‘the new old’ and ‘the new old’ (changing spending patterns of ageing society –well, after all not changing at all).

All in all a very enriching read.