Finding, Timing, Applying Trends

When they say that timing is everything, the best you can hope for is that your product becomes necessary once it hits the market. How confident are you in your launch date? If your answer is “not really,” let’s back up and fill in the blanks a bit.

Your end goal is to convince another person to part with their resources to buy what you are selling. Paramount to this is understanding your users in the deepest sense possible (preferably not by way of Cambridge Analytica). Once you are well on your way through ethnographic studies, interviews with lead users, surveys, and even becoming a user yourself, you will need to concern yourself with timing. Develop a product too early and you do not have enough adopters. You might not even be perceived as the original if your competitor finds outsized success down the road. Develop a product too late, and the users may have already been satisfied by your competitors. Worse still, you risk having to lower your margins while you sell to late adopters who may not be willing to pay for the reduced emotional payoff of your passé product.

Timing a product launch is both art and science. We will talk through the science portion below. The art portion is your ability to sense which trends will sustain given the current and future climates. Some trends are more flash-in-the-pan than others, especially aesthetics. Focusing on long term realities that involve culture, money, and recently released tech will lend you to more success. Test where the trend is in its lifecycle with a variety of user cohort representatives to make sure that it’s still there over time. Right now, let’s explore them in the realm of physical product development.

Social - Economic - Technological: SET Factors

A key factor to your product launch is that it conform with future norms. You must time your launch to capitalize on a future fervor feeding the market’s appetite. The speed of your product delivery should be based on stable macro trends, so don’t rely on relatively micro, potentially fickle trends unless you believe that they are going to grow in popularity for your target market. Knowing which is which is to be a fortune teller, even if you have the data to back it up via trend reports or your own research. Further, knowing where a trend is in its cycle (whether on the rise or a fizzle) falls in the same boat.

Before diving into trends, you should have already created an understanding of what groups your target market consists of. Stay-at-home dads with high-salary wives? College-age students who work full time and get their degrees via MOOC? White collar Gen-X urban commuters? Some social and economic trends will apply to some user groups and not others. It is likely that tech trends will apply more broadly as long as users find value in it. Let’s define what we are talking about:

Social Trends - These are cultural forces present in the market you are targeting and vice-versa: a trend pointing to the particular target market. These can be specific to a region, demographic group, sub-culture, or any other categorization of people. Current social trends include the post-#metoo movement, planned technology timeouts, body positivity, parents guiding kids in social media use…

Economic Trends - The monetary realities for that market. High student loan debt for millennials, trade wars, cost of daycare, fixed-income retiree, low reported unemployment in the US, rising cost of a specific material (e.g. helium).

Technological Trends - Changes in technology in a segment. Perhaps the cost of a previously expensive component has reduced so it can be used in a different application. Or university trials of a physical process means it is ready for commercialization. Or consider instant macro-to-micro delivery (UberEats or Amazon Prime).

Finding trends

Trends come from observations. Either you are taking in the raw data / examples and showing a positive trajectory of instances over time, or you are outsourcing that effort. Macro trends can be found for cheap or free, but target market trends require specific research. You will sense which macro trends intersect well with your group’s area of expertise, which could require outside help, and which do not fit your current/future product lines. We are not diving into what it takes to be a market trend analyst. Rather here are some free sites that offer macro trends:

If you have any more recommendations here, feel free to send me a link.

I could argue that new plumbing product could fit in with the following macro trends, found on the above free sites:

	Trend	Relevance to Plumbing
Social	Inclusive Design	Rather than designing a bathroom with simply meeting ADA compliance, create the whole experience to target people with limited mobility. Extended reach, decorative lavatory carriers, rather than long ADA-style lavs. Stalls that open and lock at the bottom with wheelchair leg supports. Dyson-style hand dryers that open horizontally at wheelchair height.
	Reframing masculinity, #MeToo, 4th-wave feminism	Shift marketing language and support orgs that can help attract <35yo's and women to participate in plumbing. Embed into the corporate culture from the top a recognition and commitment to diversity, supportive behavior, and consequences to the contrary.
	Minimizing plastic waste	Do not use thermoset plastics in design. Create products with modules that can be easily broken down and recycled when decommissioned.
Economic	Social commerce	Pivoting from Instagram stores, anything with a screen and network connection can be a point of purchase. Order more air filters using your smart thermostat. Schedule maintenance in your Building Automation Control network with predefined contractors.
	Anti-excess commercialism	Make the industrial designs timeless to incentivize purchasing products to be installed for the life of the building.
Technological	Real-Time Tech	Perform room-specific temperature adjustments to rooms by connecting local temp & presence sensors & history-of-use monitoring with hydronic balancing valves, articulating vent registers, gas-forced air vent limiters, and the central building automation system.
	Silence	There already are decibel requirements in Europe for buildings. Create products that limit noise when in use through different orifice geometries and surfaces when interacting with various water flows.
	Text commerce	Rather than relying on an app, the plumbing system has a chat bot that is able to let you know status updates. Good for gov't/military employees where phone security is critical and the cost and timing of creating an approved phone app may be prohibitive.

Lead Users

Picture in your mind someone you consider cool. Cooler than thou. There are people whose qualities you aspire to have, you might be attracted to them physically, they are someone you want to introduce to your friends, and you hear their stories and want to be on their journey. They are just a human like you, yet their being is a reconstituted reflection of the most interesting of their many, many observations. That lady who listens to amazing music has also listened to a great deal of crap. That fellow who dresses well understands what being well-dressed looks like, pours over fashion instagrams, and spends the time in consignments and boutiques. They are open. They follow people's recommendations that they trust. They love it. And they do a lot of work. These are lead users.

Lead users are experts who are likely to be on the cusp of a trend as they are often the first to understand the limitations of current practice and create their own workarounds. They are likely frustrated with what is available and are willing to pay for a new and improved method. They also may be able to articulate a more casual user’s unarticulated functional needs. Understand their value set and discover differences with what you perceive to be the norm. Understand their assumptions. Not only do the products they use line up with current and future trends, but specific features that they point to bring them delight, and will bring your customers delight too.

Each industry has its lead users. You need to make yourself an expert of your micro market, and one way is by interviewing this group and deeply understanding their needs. Use those conversations to test your understanding of a trend with them. They will quickly let you know if it has passed its prime, if they think that it’s key to their future delight, or if you hit on something they were not even aware of. Develop a relationship and come back with ideas and prototypes, while respecting their time and insights with a little bit of compensation.

If you are looking for more assistance and a deeper look into how to choose and discover gaps, seek out Product Design and Development or Creating Breakthrough Products. Happy developing!

-Con