Missing a trend is one of the worst mistakes any company can make. Share this call for a “heads up” alert across the organization to avoid it.

Can you think of any brand name that had been dominating its market for years, but now you’ve stopped using its products or never even hear its name anymore? Most likely, that company made the worst mistake it could make: overlooking a trend. Such a mistake is the worst to make because it may have severe strategic implications, which take a long time to correct. Meanwhile, both sales and margins will drop and no cost efficiencies will suffice to compensate that adverse effect. That will be your problem, too. So, is it possible that your company is overlooking a significant trend as we speak?

Important trends to respond to may relate to emerging customer preferences, emerging technologies that can be integrated with the type of services or products offered, advanced ways of delivering services, or manufacturing products, or shipping products to customers. This list doesn’t end and it is only limited by your level of alert toward change and ability to translate such change into a business context. The reward is great if you manage to do this: such an effect gets to be generated by strategic turnarounds only, which are more difficult to achieve when compared to operational turnarounds (Hofer 1980). You can definitely do it, but in case you can’t, these posts planned for the next few weeks will take you there.

The challenge about emerging trends is that they can be difficult to track in real time, and such a “real time” period can be fairly long. By the time you start to respond, other players may introduce their advanced offering to the market and your clients will love them instead. The only way of avoiding such a situation is to proactively search for the next trend as a part of your business routine. In addition, identifying that next trend is too critical for reliance on your marketing or business development departments alone. Extend the group of stakeholders that can pay attention to the trends in the market and make them feel comfortable about speaking their mind. 

Good luck!