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Thursday, December 23, 2010

Saul Kaplan, BIF

I’m the least trendy person on the planet. I’m the last one to recognize a trend and the first one to move away from a trend if I stumble upon one. I know that sounds weird coming for a guy who has spent most of his career in marketing but it’s true. I’m far more interested in recognizing patterns and catalyzing new trends than jumping on existing trends. I’m perpetually leery of data suggesting trends and allergic to anyone claiming to be a trendsetter. So you can imagine my surprise when I received an offer from Jeremy Gutsche , founder of Trend Hunter, to receive and share a sneak peek of the top 20 trends from their 2011 Trend Report.

Trend Hunter claims to be the world’s largest crowd sourced trend network with 40,000 trend hunters who have identified 100,000 micro trends. The trends are then crowd filtered to identify the most popular nougats and made available to Trend Hunter customers. As a student of crowd sourcing platforms and a believer in the value of filters to help make sense of the daily fire hose of content we receive, I was curious to check out the platform and output from Trend Hunter.

While I would stack my Twitter network up against any trend seeking and filtering platform I have to admit the Trend Hunter platform and top 20 ideas are interesting. Here are five that caught my attention:

Next Besting: Consumers bypass traditional brands for the ‘next best alternative’.

Democratic Selling: Vote-based selling is gaining momentum in the world of online retail.

Perpetual Adaptation: Obsessed with aesthetics, society embarks on the eternal makeover

Discreet Consumerism: Stealth advertising and anti-branding lure the logo-averse.

Modern Cubism: Square geometry in design coincides with preference to reduce clutter.

Nothing earth shattering but thought provoking none-the-less. I will leave it to you to reach your own conclusions. You can download a sneak peek of the top 20 trends from the Trend Hunter 2011 report here. Happy trendsetting.

Saul Kaplan is the Founder and Chief Catalyst of the Business Innovation Factory (BIF). Saul shares innovation musings on his blog at It’s Saul Connected and on Twitter at @skap5