several articles all talking about how social experiments were creating a new category of media stories. Putting “experiment” together with “media” works because the prefix of “experiment” remains unchanged, and a new ending creates a word that engages people’s curiosity while still being clear enough that you could guess the meaning.
Obsessive Productivity (2014). As the life-hacking movement generated more and more stories of how to make every moment more productive, I started to feel that these tools and advice about helping each of us optimize every moment were bordering on an obsession. The naming of this trend was easy, but to me it worked because it combined a word most people associate as negative (“obsessive”) with one that is usually discussed as a positive (“productivity”). I used the same principle to name “Fierce Femininity” in 2017.
While there are many ways inspiration can strike as you name your own ideas, the following tips and tricks share a few of the techniques that I tend to use most often in naming and branding the trends in my reports.
Tips & Tricks: How to Name Your Ideas Powerfully
Mashup. Mashups take two different words or concepts and put them together in a meaningful way. Likeonomics is a mashup between likeability and economics. Shoptimization is a mashup between shopping and optimization. Using this technique can make an idea immediately memorable and ownable, but can also feel forced and artificial if not done artfully. There is a reason I didn’t call my book Trustonomics. The best mashups are easy to pronounce and are as close to sounding like the original words as possible.
Alliteration. When naming a brand, this technique is commonly used and the virtues are obvious: think Coca-Cola and Krispy Kreme. The idea of using two words beginning with the same consonant is one I have used for trends such as “Reverse Retail” and “Disruptive Distribution.” Like mashups, it can feel forced if you put two words together that don’t belong, but the technique can lead you toward a great trend name.
Twist. The technique involves taking a common idea or obvious phrase and inserting a small change to make it different. The name should employ a term that’s already commonly used and then twisted a bit to help it stand out. One of my favorite examples was a trend from 2015 called “Small Data” to counter all the discussion about Big Data. The “Unperfection” trend, which was first published in 2015, used a similar method—just enough of a twist on the actual word “imperfection” to feel new and different.
Step 5—Proving
Proving is the final step where you evaluate your ideas, seek
out more research where needed and make a case for why an
idea describes the accelerating present.
Photo Credit: Tech.co (Tech Cocktail Sessions DC)
Though my Haystack Method relies heavily on analyzing stories and ideas that have been published, there is also a consistent thread of conversations, speeches, and interviews that inform the trend spotting process. I’m lucky to be able to speak at fifty or so events every year, and my team and I routinely deliver dozens of workshops at companies in almost every industry.
The result of these interactions is a consistent stream of ideas as well as the opportunity to interview the visionary keynote speakers I’m sharing the stage with, which allows me to test new trend ideas and approaches with some of these groups before publishing the new trends..
I believe that trends are curated based on observing behavior, identifying patterns, and assembling the pieces of a puzzle. You can’t make a puzzle by showing someone a piece and surveying them about what they think the rest of the puzzle might be.
I don’t mean to discount the value of focus groups or surveys as input. The truth is, the more analytical or scientific your stakeholders and audience, the more likely it is you’ll need some of this type of data to support your curated trends. But I’m neither a behavioral psychologist nor a market researcher. There are people who are excellent at this, and I would much rather read that research and have a conversation with them—and then use those insights to inform my curation of trends and help to prove them in this final phase of the Haystack Method.
The framework my team and I use, and teach our clients to use, to prove ideas is based on a formula of looking at three critical elements: idea, impact, and acceleration.
3 ELEMENTS OF TRENDS
1 Idea. Great trend ideas are unique descriptions of a shift in culture, business, or behavior in a concise enough way to be meaningful without being oversimplified.
2 Impact. Impact comes when people start changing behavior or companies start to adapt what they are selling or how they are selling it.
3 Acceleration. The last critical element is how quickly a trend is affecting business and consumer behavior and whether that’s likely to grow.
Since we started publishing our trend research, this is the central filter my team and I have used to measure trend concepts and whether they are provable. To do this, one technique we use is to consistently ask five questions as we finalize our trend list.
Proving Questions: How to Quantify a Trend
1 Is the trend idea unique enough to stand out?
2 Has anyone published research related to this trend idea?
3 Is the media starting to uncover examples or focus on it?
4 Are there enough examples across industries?
5 Is the trend likely to continue into the foreseeable future?
In your own efforts to curate trends, when you go through this list of questions—it’s possible you’ll find that some of the trend ideas that you’ve curated, analyzed, elevated, and even created names for may not satisfy all these criteria.
Unfortunately, you have now reached the toughest step in the Haystack Method: leaving behind trends that you cannot prove. Abandoning ideas is brutal—especially after you have become attached to them. It probably won’t help that in this chapter I’ve already advised you to name them before you prove them—which seems logically wrong. You never name something you’re going to leave behind, right?
Well, as true as that may be, the problem is that you need to name the trends before you can assess its importance. The process of naming helps you understand what a trend is and how you might prove it, but it doesn’t mean you’re finished.
This is the phase of the process where I find discipline. It forces me to go back and either do more research and sometimes even change the original concept of the trend to be broader or narrower.
Grading all the past identified trends (see Appendix) was eye opening when my team and I first decided to add it in the 2016 edition of the book. It was clear that the trends where we had more discipline in the proving phase were the ones that fared better over time. Those were the best ideas, and the ones that you can and should aspire to have, too.
Tips & Tricks: How to Prove Your Trend Ideas
Focus on Diversity. One of the biggest mistakes people make in trend curation is only seeking out examples in a single industry, category, or situation. If a trend is going to have a large impact on how business is done or how consumers behave, it should be supported by examples or cases in other industries.
Watch Your Biases. Nothing will cloud your judgment more quickly than finding a trend that somehow helps your own industry, product, or career. This is a tricky subject because part of the intention of curating your own trends may specifically be to support