Understanding Trends

CULTURES AND COUNTERCULTURES 

The direction of novelties is not anymore up to down. Traditionally were the elites those who settled the new paths that years after, and in a decaffeinated way, lower economic classes would follow after.

Decades ago this system would go upside down and now there is a continuous tension among culture and counterculture. We understand culture as a set of knowledges, beliefs and behaviour patterns of a social group. That would include the material resources that its members use in order to communicate and satisfy their needs. Counterculture is an organized movement that proposes a series of values and social ways opposed to those established in a certain society.

A counterculture is “the boheme” initiated in XIX century lasting until today, or the beat generation of the 50s in the United States, the hippie movement born in the 60s also in the United States or the punk that started in 1970.

Counterculture includes two senses: first, as an attack against the dominant culture; and second it is a “culture against” that remains outside the market and the mass media (at least in an initial stage). It belongs to the “underground”. Nowadays countercultures are not as outsiders as they used to. They come together hand in hand with a new way of consuming, supplied by companies with “underground” brand cultures who empathize with the followers of these movements.

GLOBAL TRENDS 

Global trends are changes in the motivations and ways of understanding life that embed our life and spread new patterns regarding our thought, living and consumption styles. Global trends influence values and mindsets that have been with us for many years. They change these established mindsets and will stay for a long period of time in our contemporary society.

CONSUMPTION UNIVERSES 

Consist of stages inhabited by characters. They are useful for wearing the hat of the customer and analyze what moves them, what do they look for, how do they live, what do they buy, where and how so we can align the brand offer to the user.

WITNESS CASE 

A witness case is a real example that depicts a trend. It is a product, business or model that answers to the motivations and way of living linked to this trend and represents the trend in a practical way.

HUB AND HOTSPOT 

Hubs and Hotspots are big cities considered gravity centers worldwide in terms of trends in different creative fields such as fashion, architecture, art etc. In those urban environments we are not interested in great movements but in emerging details that are not visible to everyone and that would point out the beginning of changes.

Hubs are power centers, considered “world capital cities”. They are vibrant cities were very diverse communities coexist providing character. In them new movements generate, and these may be adopted by broader audiences afterwards. Creative professionals and culture play an important role in them and they have the capacity to extend their influence worldwide.

A Hub can lose its title as such but it will require time. The main four cities considered hubs currently are Paris, New York, London and Tokyo. Although they seem to be far away geographically, they have points in common. For example all of them have been modernity or postmodernity capitals. Furthermore they all have been able to reinvent themselves using architecture as a powerful element

On the other way around Hotspots are cities where tons of novelties occur, but they are not always applicable to the rest of the world. This is the main difference with a Hub city regarding trends. They may include two extremes: rich cities or highly sumptuous led by new high social classes, and unequal cities of emerging countries where creativity can raise whether from up or from down. Among the current Hotspots we have: Abu Dhabi, Amsterdam, Copenhague, Milán, Moscú, Río de Janeiro, São Paulo, Shanghai.

In these cities the analyst must distribute the space depending on clues such as: the creative community movements, news about gentrification and its consequences, new urban plans that may influence the city… Later on the analyst will visit those zones gathering data, analyze the concepts where these new movements are grouped in, identify new businesses, new social activities and will come to the “landing” stage. At this point the analyst must group the information in conceptual and behavioural segments.

HYPES 

We talk about a fashion that appears very fast and many people join, or at least a great group of people knows about it. It doesn’t mean that all of these people adopt it but they are aware and feel sympathy for it. Sometimes hypes mature and become a trend but in general they are just a fad. It can be a very profitable business but its career is short and it needs to be substituted by other business in order to keep the rhythm and profitability. They have become more and more popular and actually this business model is followed by many companies nowadays. It is specially common in the internet centred businesses. We are not interested in hypes, we want to detect evidences of emerging trends with a nice career ahead in the medium or long term. The approach of our observatory is to answer the companies needs of information when they have a long term vision. We meet the needs of companies that want to consider trends but don’t refuse to a certain degree of identity.

TRENDSPOTTER 

Is a “trend hunter”. Somebody who watches a certain territory and a series of target industries with the aim of detecting changes in the people behaviour, in society, the city … and find and register cases of product/service/spaces that reflect that change in the way of living or in the society mindsets. It differs from the cool-hunter because a trendspotter would discard short terms movements or fashions and would focus on medium long term evolutions. A trendspotter would concentrate on evolving lifestyles (consumption universes) and not only in momentaneous impulses. We can better understand the difference between cool-hunter and trendspotter reading the definition of the first:

Coolhunting definition according to Trendhunting.com:

Cool-hunting and Trend-hunting is not the search for the popular thing. It it the search for what is not popular, yet. In fact cool hunters and industry professionals refers to cool as the NEXT BIG THING. Once trends become mainstream, novelty and attractiveness are lost. Therefore, you must find the inspiration in the alternative. This means to expose yourself to the extremes of luxury, bizarre and excess. Microtrends have lower probability to turn into mainstream. However, the purpose is to build a compound of trends for the inspiration.

Coolhunting is linked to see the future in a very particular way, in a limited sense consciously. It is the hunt of what will become popular, before it is popular.

Trendspotting approach is wider than cool-hunting. It is about trends research and the way they develop and affect society. Cool-hunting will explicitly look for the cool and avant garde; the trendspotter usually follows less cool issues, including subtle changes such as the way babies are taken care of, how surfaces are cleaned, or people spend the time in parks. A trendspotter should monitor influential changes through the whole spectrum of the human activity (from the coolest to the less cool).