Marketing Trends: How to Think Differently and Predict the Future

Do you want to stay on top of the latest marketing trends?

Looking to tap into the next big trend?

To explore marketing trends, I interview Rohit Bhargava.
More About This Show
The Social Media Marketing podcast is an on-demand talk radio show from Social Media Examiner. It's designed to help busy marketers and business owners discover what works with social media marketing.

In this episode I interview Rohit Bhargava, the author of Personality Not Included and Likeonomics. He's also the founder and CEO of the Influential Marketing Group. His latest book is Non-Obvious: How to Think Different, Curate Ideas and Predict the Future.

In this episode Rohit explores why trends matter to marketers and reveals a few trends.

You'll discover what makes something a trend.

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Here are some of the things you'll discover in this show:
Marketing Trends
How Rohit became interested in trends

Rohit spent many years working at marketing agencies and frequently crossed industries. For example, he'd work for a toothbrush brand in the morning and an enterprise data client in the afternoon. This is how he started making connections among industries and began thinking about trends. Rohit started writing trend reports in 2011.

Rohit's experience includes working with Leo Burnett in Australia and Ogilvy in the United States. He did digital strategy and even worked on Intel's first social media guidelines.

One of the biggest problems, Rohit explains, is a lot of trends are self-serving. "Imagine I have a company that sells hammers, and then I declare 2015 the year of hammers," he laughs. "How convenient is that?"

People declare trends based on whatever they sell so it helps them, but what they point to isn't actually a trend.

Rohit considers a trend to be an observation about the accelerating present. That means there are signs of something already happening that will become more important. A trend will either change the way consumers make decisions or change the way companies structure their business models or how they do business.

Listen to the show to discover one of the biggest mistakes many trend writers make.

Why marketers should care about trends

The biggest benefit to knowing about trends, Rohit explains, is to know when to pivot. The term pivot is frequently used improperly. For example, if someone sells bicycles and then becomes a coffee shop, it's not a pivot, it's a completely new business.

An actual pivot was seen when BMW, in addition to making cars, decided to start a program called DriveNow in which they rent electric cars. They're tapping into the trend of the sharing and collaborative economy, and experimenting with their business model. BMW is saying we still make super high-quality cars, but we now distribute them in different ways: we sell, lease and rent them.

That's smart, Rohit says. It's the way to look at something that's happening in the marketplace and see how it affects your business.

Marketers need to be on the lookout for trends and pivot accordingly, but also understand trends that are already happening.

Listen to the show to learn about Rohit's haystack method and the difference between trend curating and trendspotting.

Glanceable content

The trend of glanceable content is a reaction to our shrinking attention spans, Rohit explains. There's material out there, like BuzzFeed headlines, that tantalize us so much we can't help clicking on them.

But that alone doesn't make it a trend.

This idea of the shrinking attention span leads to innovation in unexpected places. There's a team of MIT researchers working on studies of glance behavior: how fast can we read something in a situation when we need to consume it quickly? For example,