Trend Watch For 2005 (And Beyond)

January 12, 2005

by Cynthia Ironson

When a business is located in the heart of New York City, it’s easy to stay on top of trends. Just ask distributor Focus Merchandising, which is based in the Big Apple. Owner Allison Rao-LaVigna knows what products are hot right now (Lance Armstrong bracelets and iPods, she says). Poker playing is the activity of the moment, she notes, adding that she has created translucent cards for clients.

Many salespeople in the promotional products industry sell clients campaigns and products that tap into consumer trends. Knowing what consumers are doing, feeling, talking about and buying is important for any business. Sometimes trends open up new markets, or expand existing markets, for promotional products. Seeking out information about trends will help you understand the business climate your client, or your prospect, is operating in, and help you develop promotional strategies that meet their goals.

What’s best of all is that in this day and age the media and technology like the Internet and e-mail have made it so easy for distributors located anywhere to acquire knowledge about trends. And many times, all you have to do is be aware of what’s around you. Rao-LaVigna pages through magazines, looks at storefronts and watches people. Clients also keep her on her toes. “Being in New York always is an advantage, because we are right in the heart of the fashion industry,” she says. “So if you ask me where I find it … I live in it.”

The Tools

Newspapers, magazines, Web sites and other media can teach you about trends. Market research is also available, though certainly not inexpensive.

Sometimes, a neighbor or friend will tell you something that gets you thinking about new markets and uses for promotional products. Joseph G. Scott, MAS, vice president of Scott & Associates Inc., says a neighbor who works for General Mills recently showed him a presentation that summarized an important, far-reaching consumer trend. “The conclusion that [General Mills] came to is that people are now focusing more on what they’re doing and their homes, more so than just buying stuff to look cool,” he says.

That means people are focusing more on life experiences like out-of-the-ordinary travel. They’re also doing more socializing close to home and entertaining at their houses. The emphasis has come off owning the status-symbol car, Scott notes. In light of this, businesses and products related to travel experiences, home entertainment and home improvement should promote heavily now.

The emphasis on life experiences over material gratification plays into two trends explained on Trendwatching.com, an Amsterdam-based independent trend agency that scans the globe for the most promising consumer trends, insights and related hands-on business ideas. The two trends are labeled “Life-Caching” and “No-Frills Chic.” Learning about each of these trends may get you thinking about where you could prospect for new business and how to help your existing clients capitalize on them. It may also make you keep an eye out for products that tap into these trends.

Trendwatching.com summarizes Life-Caching: “Human beings (fueled by a need for self-worth, validation, control, vanity, even immortality) love to collect and store possessions, memories, experiences, in order to create personal histories, mementoes of their lives, or just to keep track for practical reasons. And with the experience still gaining ground – with consumers more often favoring the intangible over the tangible – collecting, storing and displaying experiences is ready for its big moment.”

The Web site explains that Life-Caching is enabled by technology – from blogging software to memory sticks to high-definition camera phones with plenty of storage space. The technology is affordable and can store massive amounts of material to help people “catch every second of their existence.” Trendwatching.com points out that understanding the consumer’s gradual move toward collecting and storing experiences is vital to every business; not just those in the high tech industry, but also companies that make things like cars and handbags.

“No-Frills Chic” is simple to explain, too: low-cost products, services and experiences that have style. Trendwatching.com demonstrates how the trend reaches into many sectors: supermarkets, air travel, homeware goods, magazine publishing, clothing, the hospitality industry, cosmetics and more.

“With consumers caring less about certain status symbols, the low-cost revolution is here to stay, yet so is the need for aesthetic pleasure and experience,” the Web site explains. It also warns that frugal consumers will get used to having a “chic” experience at low prices, and may dump no-chic low-cost offerings. Another warning some of your clients should heed: “Old-Style, ‘luxury’ consumers” may give up more expensive, traditional products and services, Trendwatching.com says.

The Problem Of Time

Another trend Scott talks about is “the problem of time,” and how it affects the travel industry. “Since people have less time to vacation, they tend to want more interesting experiences and higher value,” he notes. For example, people short on time who are taking a vacation may fly first class and stay at first-class accommodations, which is very profitable business for travel agents. With a trip to Europe, for example, these time-crunched travelers may visit more than one country, only spending a few days at each destination, but go in style – with a first-class Eurail pass. “These people have zero tolerance for anything that is not perfect,” he notes.

Some people are so pressed for time they can’t travel at all. Rosalie Marcus, the PromoBizCoach, says that problem is creating a huge trend – day spas. “Because we’re working constantly, a lot of people don’t have time to take an extended vacation … What you are going to see is day spas that have cosmetic surgery, the quick procedures like Botox and Restalin,” she notes. The idea behind the day spa is you can go in and come out looking good in eight hours – relaxed with less wrinkles, whiter teeth, etc. “People will need to promote it heavily because it’s a competitive market, and you’re going to see more and more of these springing up,” she notes.

The problem of time may eventually redirect a portion of the promotional products industry, Scott believes. “We’re finding that more and more people have less and less time to implement their marketing strategies. Businesspeople are running into the same thing in their professional lives as they are in their business lives. They don’t have enough time; they want someone to just handle it,” he explains.

Scott thinks salespeople in the promotional products industry will be acting more like gophers for clients. “Basically, you go in and find out what they need, and then you make it happen,” he says. “Maybe you make it happen, or you subcontract it to someone else. So there’s no selling at all.” Scott has already made this transition in his business. For a client who invented a product but had no marketing savvy at all, Scott helped him exhibit at a trade show, coordinating everything from booth color schemes to the company’s brochure to the embroidered shirts for the booth personnel and logoed director’s chairs to use at the show. And Scott is actually working in the booth at the show, too – not the traditional role of a promotional products salesperson. “In the old way of doing things,” he says, “we would have just sold them some embroidered shirts.”

Trendwatching.com also has it’s eye on the problem of time: “Consumers love to complain about their busy lives, yet many indicators reveal that they actually enjoy doing everything at the same time, from simultaneously watching TV and surfing the Net, to conducting meetings over the phone while in the bathroom, to having coffee and lunch ‘on the go,’ if not at one’s desk.” The site says multi-tasking is “morphing” into the extreme, and called the trend “Hypertasking.”

One example is the success of the Campbell Soup product Soup at Hand. The ad shows a woman sipping her soup (in its red cylinder) with one hand, while the other juggles several symbols of the tasks that demand her time – a soccer ball, a clock, a grocery bag, a cell phone and a computer. Responding to trends that show that more and more meals are rushed, carried to work or school or eaten on the run, Campbell took the opportunity to change the reputation of soup as an at-home meal into a “meal solution for all occasions, even on the go while doing other things,” says Trendwatching.com. The site claims it was one of the company’s most successful product introductions in its history.

Reinier Evers, founder of Trendwatching.com, says that traditional advertising media will increasingly come under fire from what his organization coined “Empathy Marketing,” where brands provide solutions and experiences to consumers who are on the go, or spending time online. “All this will enhance brand loyalty in real ways: Think P&G sponsoring diaper-changing areas in airports and shops, Verizon offering cell phone battery chargers in the streets of New York, Target introducing temporary, seasonal Pop-up stores when it makes sense; their summer store in the Hamptons was a great example,” he notes. He urges marketers to “make it all more relevant, and rely more on word of mouth. The only person a consumer will believe in the future is a fellow consumer.”

 

 

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