The Trend Forecaster´s Handbook

Trend forecast is important as Team Royal Mess has to deal with future banking in our group´s project with Aktia. This makes it necessary to gather for insights into techniques which help to perceive new trends. The Trend Forecaster´s Handbook by Martin Raymond should deliver these insights. Investment into new trends is risky and therefore has to be well reflected. Companies lost billions of Dollars in the fight for superstition in the market, for example between the VHS and Betamax in the 90´s or just a few years ago when the question appeared whether to endorse the Blu-Ray Disc or HD DVD.

This piece of literature sophistically provides much knowledge, many examples, case studies, stories from successful trend forecasters and how they work as well as a guideline for all phases of trend forecasting from detection to the actual product development.

Information is power - Multi-field research has to be done in trend forecasting ranging from neuro-psychology and complexity theory over behavioral economics up to network science as well as ethnography. You have to know your sector, your products, your company and brand as well as the target group very thoroughly.

Methods of trend detection

Martin Raymond provides many advices how to behave during the working process and what essential points should be regarded and covered. These methods will definitely be used by the project group in order to answer the crucial questions of a trend forecaster: "what", "why", "how", "where" and "when" does something happen.

This book thoughtfully lays down the different forms of intuition, well reflected by providing the advantages as well as the disadvantages. The author clearly states, that intuitive trend perception may be right and useful, but it is hard to be illustrated to a customer, who aims for a data-driven explanation about the whole working process. In order to solve this challenge this piece of literature promotes different cutting-edge methods to map your thoughts and to refine them, namely gut intuition, expert intuition and strategic intuition. Furthermore there is a red string through the whole book guiding you from the first perception up to the last step, the actual product development.

Cultural Brailing, kind of hyper-observation, is one of the methods to detect trends. It consists basically out of observation and asking the right questions about the perceived objects or habits. Since this should happen without prejudgment, suspension of logic is sometimes crucial. The human brain automatically associates new sights to known stuff, but this lets you create only the same stuff over and over again, but nothing new. Logic hinders creativity!

Many new thoughts are not logic but make sense later. The motto Think of the Unthinkable has led to many ideas which revolutionized the world. Open your mind!

Many brains have more power than one does. In order to work together to find a trend they have to be connected which happens via a network. The author examines the different types of networks, from the hierarchical over the collaborative to the distributive network, and shows the pros and cons of using them. Networks are everywhere today, yes you are already using a distributive network by reading this blog post!

App-lication

Now cutting down trend forecasting to the banking sector and Aktia, what are the crucial points in the future of banking? An issue to discuss will be definitely the developing story of the NFC technology. Further there has to be analyzed in which extend online banking will grow and additionally what role face-to-face service at the counter will play in the future. Finally and most importantly: what are the trends no one anticipates today?

Questions over questions which have to be thoroughly researched to draw scenarios and make conclusions out of them in order to respond quickly and effectively to future trends.

Fin.

Matthäus