trends

Great brands don’t follow – they lead. That’s why they tend to ignore existing trends and advance their own cultural movements instead.

“Great brands ignore trends” is one of the principles in my new book, What Great Brands Do, that has consistently been coming up in the interviews I’ve been doing about the book. It’s just so counter-intuitive. In fact, just last Friday, Jim Blasingame of The Small Business Advocate show, asked me about it in his radio broadcast that is nationally syndicated by The Small Business Network. (Listen to a part of our conversation here.)

By now you probably got the memo that the population in Europe is growing older. That the opening of borders is causing people to migrate. That consumers are using the internet and their mobile phones to make sure they get the best deal possible.

We’ve seen a variety of disastrous web design trends over the years. Remember splash pages? All-Flash sites? Frames? We may be on the cusp of a new trend: unstyled ugliness.

Can you believe how quickly this year has gone by? And that it's time to start thinking about what the focus will be in 2014?

The crazy thing is, as I look back at what I proposed as challenges for 2013, I wonder how many of them have actually been addressed or executed? I think companies still have their work cut out for them, but as the world turns, so arrives 2014. And with the new year come new trends that companies must try to keep up with.

The best part of my job is that I get to talk to people; lots and lots of people. I talk to so many people about the same subjects (in this case Customer Service) that I start to see patterns and trends emerge (I was told when I first started working at Gartner that two data points make a pattern and three make a trend – I’d like to think that it takes more than that, but you get the overall idea of how it works).

Originally published in Harvard Business Review.

It's that time of year again — time to take a stab at what's going to matter in the year ahead as technology continues to influence how we work and live. In previous years, I've looked at trends under the "social media" lens because that has been the major disruptive force, creating both opportunities and threats. This year, I'm using the umbrella term "social-digital" to broaden the focus. First, a quick re-cap from last year:

This chart published over on The Atlantic shows how out of kilter the US is in not requiring companies to give their staff paid annual leave. Almost worse than that is the fact that, according to a JetBlue/Harris Interactive study, no less than 57% of Americans ended up not using all the holiday time they were actually given in 2011.