Trends glossary

Cohorts - Analysis of present/future customers in terms of how particular age groups were formed by their experiences of earlier eras.

Confidence, knowledge, interest - Customers will bring different amounts of these three things to different future markets (compare aspirin with digital TVs, or buying a holiday with buying a mortgage).

Continuity and discontinuity - If there is one continuity carried through, like a red thread, through the past decade of forecasting and forecasters, it is that we can all expect little else but radical discontinuities. How much this view is really justified and how much based on exaggerated perceptions of change is a very moot point.

Cool-hunters - Employed by major corporations, people whose job it is to catch youth trends (particularly trends in black culture), and bring those trends back for brands to adapt.

Customer buying systems - The widely differing 'moments of truth' which surround hearing about or seeing the product/service for the first time, the decision to purchase, the customer's process of product/service research and comparison, the purchase transaction, and installation and service.

Delphi panels - Groups of experts who are asked questions, individually and iteratively, about the future, and about the levels of confidence that they attach to their forecasts.

Demographics and geodemographics - Analysis of present/future customers by gender, age, lifestage, ethnicity, spending and location.

Early adopters and early adapters - Early adopters, the few who first buy a new product/service, are not necessarily the same people as the many who adapt it to the precise pattern of use it finally acquires.

Disruptive technologies - phrase pioneered by Harvard professor and ceramics entrepreneur Clayton Christensen (The innovator’s dilemma, 1997). In Christensen’s framework, it refers quite specifically to technologies that lead to products which are cheap, simple, convenient, small and portable, even if they are low in performance, and initially seem appealing only to niche markets.  For less distinguished commentators than Christensen, however, ‘disruptive’ technologies are merely those that are non-incremental, and thus particularly worthy.

First movers - Corporations that decide they would rather 'bet the company' on their forecasts, new ideas, technologies, business models and designs. By contrast, 'fast follower' companies are merely imitators.

Futurology - Popular and rather derisive term used to refer to forecasting.

Hierarchies of needs - Both present and future needs can be conscious and latent, as well as met and unmet. It's useful to estimate how hierarchies of needs will change in the future. It’s also useful actually to have read, in a critical spirit, the American psychologist Abraham H Maslow (1908-1970) and his original wartime article on ‘basic’ and ‘higher’ needs. There it is argued not that human beings are designers and makers, but rather that 'Man is a perpetually wanting animal'.

Impact of use - People will be shaped, in part, by the artefacts they buy and use. Everyone approaches new products/services with mental maps based on their previous experiences.

Lifestyle - 1980s term to describe, but rarely explain, the conduct of consumer behaviour. Easily neglects the fact that developments in the domain of work are often an important cause of changes in the domain of consumption. Has now given way, in the pantheon of marketing, to the assessment of consumers in terms of values (see below)

Market forecasting - Covers the future of business and consumer markets by volume, value, channel, segment, and by competitor and regulator behaviour.

Modes of behaviour - Tomorrow's purchase and use of a new product or service will depend on the surrounding physical environment, social situation,  and, on the part of the purchaser/user, on the 'mental set'.

Mood boards - Analysis of visual trends, made by designers. Too often, people do this kind of trends research simply by cutting up design and style magazines. Indeed, too many of the world’s designers cut up the same trendy magazines.

Producer talents - The skills, experiences, physical prowess and cultural development which people are able to take advantage of when using a design to its maximum potential.

Quantifying the value of new product/service concepts - Reviewing the likely frequency and duration of use of a new product/service, the gravity of the need it fulfills, and the value for money it offers compared with future competitor offerings.

Scenario planning - Thinking about the future by developing several possible versions of it. It's important to revisit scenarios regularly to check them. They allow situations to be recognised early on, and so enable prepared responses to be deployed quickly.

Socio-economic forecasting - Looks at how global and national economic and political forces inspire different kinds of responses among different social groups.

Statistics – an indispensable tool wielded by all serious forecasters. Especially in the analysis of risk, one of the problems with statistics today is that people tend to focus on absolute numbers, or increases, without situating them as relative proportions. The figure £1 billion, for example, sounds like a lot of money – but it amounts to less than 0.1 per cent of UK GDP.

Technology forecasting and technological determinism  - Technology is part of the future, but only a part. Its likely evolution demands research, but should not be taken as the sole or even the dominant force shaping the future.

Time use - The changing composition of people's work, transport, leisure and family life, in hours and minutes a day, at nights or over weekends.

Trends - Are more than identifiable patterns of events. Rather, trends consistently inform those patterns because they are deeply rooted in society - even if they are not always registered at the time.

Values – catch-all and now officially repeated mantra, first pioneered by Max Weber (1864–1920). Today the term is often used to distract attention from the realities of government and corporate conduct or consumer incomes, debt and household structure. Values are reputed to change much less slowly than other consumer trends. Yet a value (or supposedly ‘basic’ Maslowian need) such as physical security, which many analysts felt had been transcended in prosperous post-war America, has now made a conspicuous return.

Zeitgeist - Literally, the spirit of the times. A partial mosaic of the future zeitgeist can be built from gathering data on forthcoming anniversaries, elections, sports fixtures, films, television specials etc. Perhaps the dominating aspect of the Zeitgeist, today and tomorrow, is fear of risk and the inflated desire for security that follows from that.