A PHILOSOPHY OF TREND STRATEGY

Making sense of trend overload

Trends are trending, as you’ve probably noticed. Personally, I find this fascinating, but also overwhelming. The sudden overabundance of trends, often without any real strategic perspective, both dilutes their value and increases the difficulty of making sense of what actually matters. Amidst this trend overload, I believe that structural frameworks and relational mapping can help us discern meaning. By considering trends within the context of our larger cultural landscape, we can unlock their potential and understand how they can be strategically leveraged to inspire product design & innovation or build cultural relevance via brand marketing & communications. I’m referring to this approach as ‘trend strategy’ — it’s closer-in than than foresight strategy, but ideally more future-facing than conventional brand and creative strategy.

While I hesitate to add to the noise with yet another newsletter, I hope that my approach will offer something unique. At the very least, I’ll be using this format as an accountability tool to maintain my own practice of trend synthesis and analysis.

From my perspective, there seems to be two key archetypes when it comes to the current trend newsletter landscape:

• Daily or weekly curations of the latest microtrends, aesthetics, and brand activity

• Thoughtful essays diving deeper into poignant cultural shifts and deeper trends

This newsletter aims to land somewhere in the middle. The ambition is for each issue to provide:¹

• Focus: Delve into one of four key driver spaces: Human, Social, Nature, Technology (further details on this mapping framework & methodology below)

• Synthesis: Curate a cluster of cultural signals that relate to each other and that, seen together, may offer insight into emerging or evolving trends

• Action: Offer strategic thoughtstarters exploring how this insight could be potentially leveraged to inspire creative concepts and/or build brand relevance

Framework & Methodology

As mentioned, everything shared in this newsletter will be situated within my own strategic framework of cultural macrotrends, which I’ve slowly developed and adjusted over several years. It’s nothing groundbreaking, but synthesizes several of the methods and perspectives out there already to create a simple and straightforward trend mapping system.

The foundation of most foresight methodologies is rooted in ‘drivers of change’ - these are ongoing macro shifts in global culture. The most commonly used framework to analyze drivers originates as PEST (Political, Economic, Sociocultural, Technological), now often evolved to STEEP (adding Environmental) and more recently STEEPW (adding Wellbeing). Almost every trend service and foresight consultancy uses their own proprietary variation — WGSN now calls it STEPIC, for instance. I’m partial to simplicity and prefer how OvN outlines four broad driver spaces: Human, Social, Nature, Technology. Below is an example of how some key drivers of change can be mapped across these spaces:

These drivers, and their intersections, are what influence the emergence of cultural macrotrends, or significant energy shifts. Almost all ‘trends’ that you might find in those popular annual trend reports can be mapped across the four driver spaces above, summarized as follows:

HUMAN :: wellbeing, emotion, expression

SOCIAL :: connection, belonging, community

NATURE :: sustainability, climate, survival

TECH :: digital, innovation, security

I performed this trend mapping exercise using annual reports from several leading trends & foresight resources, including Future Laboratory and WGSN, synthesizing and drawing connections to land on my own framework of 12 key cultural macrotrends - 3 per each of the above driver spaces. It’s a somewhat similar conceptual approach to Matt Klein’s incredible Meta-Trends, but this version much more subjective and simplified. Here’s a quick visualization of my process:

Developed by Anu Lingala

When distilling these 12 macrotrends back in 2021, my priority was to ensure that each has wide-ranging relevance and application potential across several outputs (visual identity, product innovation, marketing communications) and industries (fashion & beauty, architecture & interiors, food & beverage). My macrotrends do not usually change annually - the overarching themes will often remain relevant for several years, and I don’t believe in constantly renaming them for the sake of newness. But, they are continuously evolving spaces, within which new specificities and microtrends will consistently emerge to push boundaries. Functionally, my macrotrend framework² provides a simple structural foundation upon which to map incoming cultural signals:

Developed by Anu Lingala

As described earlier, each issue of this newsletter will focus on curating a cluster of incoming cultural signals specific to one of the four key driver spaces. By mapping these signal clusters within the above framework, relational analysis enables us to quickly and easily understand the significance of a potential emerging microtrend within the context of our larger cultural landscape. Essentially, helping to making sense of the trend overload we’re all experiencing.

I’m excited to share this iterative process in an open forum for the first time and look forward to seeing how things evolve!

1. Ambition may not always be achievable! The format of this newsletter is subject to change.

2. If you choose to use or build upon my macrotrend framework, please include appropriate credit / citation of my work.