In this document, we describe Anacode’s process for identifying, profiling, and ranking trends that are relevant for specific industries and/or companies. The document is structured into three sections:
The points made in each section will be illustrated with examples and analyses from the Automotive, Aerospace, and AI domains.
In the following paragraphs, we consider a range of trend characteristics that indicate whether a trend is relevant for a company.
By definition, a trend is characterised by an increase in attention. However, a faster increase is not necessarily better than stable, slow growth - it all depends on the stage of your company and the wider industry context. To illustrate this, let’s look at an analogy from stock investing. On the one hand, you can invest into “slow burns” with a steady growth, such as bluechips in established industries, and patiently wait for the desired return. On the other hand, you can speculate on “quick wins” - for example, innovative young companies that promise sudden highs, but whose lows can be just as sudden. In business, fast-growing trends are great for tricks and shortcuts that don’t require substantial investment - for example, spicing up your marketing rhetoric, keeping your brand image “on trend” with the latest styles and colours, or even introducing a cool new feature into a young MVP that is not yet subject to the entropy of a full-blown software system. However, if your business is already more stable and enjoying the company of peers that are just as mature, playing catch-up with every trend and hype will be detrimental, distracting your team and destroying any sense of strategy. Instead, you should be on the lookout for long-term trends that are growing steadily inside a robust semantic field of associated innovations, social trends, and companies. This will give you the time and depth to plan strategically, integrate trends into your roadmap, and continuously keep up with new developments.
Beyond the increase in attention, the overall prominence of a topic can also help you decide whether and when you need to act. Thus, if you miss out on a “mainstream” topic while your competitors are actively working it, this might have a direct negative impact on your image and competitiveness. By contrast, niche topics are not a must, but selecting the topics aligned with your positioning and differentiation and acting on them early can help you reinforce your competitive advantage.
Finally, the trend should be relevant for the industry and peer group to which your company belongs. Let’s start with an obvious example: The trend “Sustainable Aviation Fuel” is highly relevant for air travel companies, but only marginally relevant for automotive companies, and even less interesting for healthcare companies.
Not all trends are as obviously domain-specific, and many social and technological trends span a large number of industries. Social trends often originate with consumers or employees, who propagate them across many different industries. When consumers consume - whether it is buying cars, flying airplanes, dining out, etc. - they require more and more Personalisation and Privacy. In the workplace, white-collar workers in most industries expect their companies to actively ride the Future-of-Work wave, offering flexible models such as Hybrid and Remote Work.
Tech trends such as AI, Blockchain, and Internet-of-Things become universally relevant as traditional industries, such as finance, automotive, and healthcare, are intersecting more and more with the newest hardware and software developments (cf. Software is eating the world by Marc Andreessen). Often, these trends start out in industries with rather obvious use cases as the “low-hanging fruits”. Over time, they carry over to other industries - for example, the concept of autonomous vehicles first appeared in connection with cars before it moved over to industries such as aerospace and shipping.
Finally, most larger companies need to monitor a range of adjacent industries beyond their core industry. For example, an airline needs to consider trends in the Food & Drinks industry in order to keep its food offering up-to-date. A real estate developer needs to closely consider the evolution of Renewable Energy and Cleantech in order to align with the sustainability demands of customers, regulators, and other stakeholders.