Trends have hit warp speed. Here’s how leaders keep up

The world was already moving at the speed of light: now it’s hit warp speed. The news cycle churns at a rapid pace, social media microtrends have the lifespan of a butterfly, and artificial intelligence has collapsed the distance between ideation and creation. Customer trends and preferences are shifting faster than ever as a result. But most brands are struggling to keep up.

The battle for relevance in a breakneck world
In the war for customer attention, relevant, zeitgeisty marketing campaigns and products are essential for continued business. This isn’t a new development, but the speed at which customers’ needs and interests evolve is. The words and messaging that get prospective subscribers and customers to click don’t stay static, nor do the products that resonate the most. Trends appear and shift at a dizzying pace, moulding and remoulding consumer preferences with them.

Yet most businesses currently aren’t equipped to keep up. Sluggish internal processes, bloated tech stacks, and laborious market research methods are slowing them down. The marketing team may spot a hot new trend they want to jump on, but by the time research is completed, sign-off achieved, and the campaign launched, it’s too late. Either the market has moved on to the next trend, or the campaign is drowned out by competitors who got there first. It’s why risk-taking new entrants are still able to capture market share by outpacing slower incumbents. 

The penalty for slowness is more than wasted investment or invisibility. Businesses that miss the boat also risk looking out of touch, damaging their image and reputation. All in all, the inability to respond quickly to market trends torpedoes a company’s competitiveness, putting them firmly at the back of the business race and endangering their profits.

Keeping pace and capturing customers 
The good news is that, though trends have hit warp speed, brands have the ability to accelerate their work too. Smart businesses can employ a number of tactics to stay on the pulse and launch timely, topical products, messaging and campaigns that resonate. 

The first involves no further investment and draws on a resource businesses already have: their people. Your workforce contains a vast pool of collective knowledge around the latest trends, messaging that resonates, and the pitfalls that can bring brands down. But too often, this knowledge remains untapped: workers keep their heads down, only sharing such crucial info when it’s relevant to their own teams. Keeping pace with the current speed of trends relies on unlocking this knowledge. With the right organisation, workers across a company can form a ‘spy network’, acting as the business’s ears and eyes on the ground who can spot burgeoning trends and flag them to leaders as soon as they emerge. A business needs a streamlined, fast process in place to enable teams to do this, but it’s a simple and free way to get better insight into what customers really think.

The second tactic involves being very intentional about the technology you use. Out of desperation to leapfrog competitors, too many brands say ‘yes’ to every new tech tool they see. While technology has the ability to transform the way companies work and their business outcomes, too much tech can become a hindrance rather than a help. Information and system overload can snarl up internal processes, as staff are forced to endlessly jump between different platforms and pore over pages of unnecessary information. The solution? Tone down the tech and only invest in genuinely impactful tools.

Finally, it’s high time brands retired the static, slow-moving market research methods of yesterday. Traditional research methods take weeks and aren’t always fit for purpose in a warp-speed world; by the time the results come through, their findings may easily be out of date. What’s needed is a faster way to gain crucial, granular customer insight and to test ideas. 

Ironically, the very thing helping speed up the trend cycle can also play a pivotal role in helping brands do this: artificial intelligence. Tools such as synthetic audience platforms allow companies to model and survey target audiences accurately and get responses, near-instantaneously. This is an example of genuinely dial-moving tech. It allows brands to probe target audiences repeatedly to uncover their latest tastes and preferences in real time, so they can make informed decisions faster and keep pace with the evolving market. Plus, rather than agonising over which projects deserve research budgets and insights teams’ capacity, companies can test and research them all, allowing them to build more aligned products and campaigns across the board that, in turn, drive up revenue.

The pace at which the world is moving has made reaching customers harder for brands. Those who continue to hang their efforts on sluggish research and outdated methods risk wasting resources and tarnishing their reputation. But those who carefully choose tools and processes that match the warp speed of the world can leverage this flux of ideas and trends to reach more customers, enhance their products and bolster their bottom line.