During your CTR discussions, it will pay particular dividends to note when a trend that you feel is important is either: [i] not reflected in any of your established goals or aims, or [ii] is a trend that your current capabilities make it very hard or impossible to apply.

To understand this race to the top—and to prosper inside it—it pays to appreciate the forces driving customer expectations of quality: Transparency Triumph and the survival of the best. Creative Destruction and the many benefits it brings people. Easy Experimentation and a tendency toward greater access to—and trust of—the new.

Trend maturity: how are the customer expectations that inform this trend playing out now? [2] Locality: how are the customer expectations that inform this trend playing out in my target locality? [3] Industry: how are the customer expectations that inform this trend playing out in my industry?

about customer expectations—that they transfer between customers and across industry and other boundaries—and it becomes clear that the emergence of a Post-Demographic consumer arena is about expectation transfer, too. Post-Demographic Consumerism is really about saying that the world is now too complex, ideas too available, people too networked, a

Rather than setting their sights on the traditional, broad segments, smart brands will target narrower demographic tribes of shared taste, interest, and sensibility. Psychographics—close study of customer lifestyles, interests, attitudes, and more—is nothing new. And of course, it's received wisdom now that the Internet has made it possible to iden

The challenge to being ahead of the trend—which I have been for most of my life—is to find a way to start a dialogue with the consumer. Perhaps you want to provide a solution to a problem they don't yet know exists. So you need to ask: how does this problem touch their lives and what they care about? Solving that problem can be difficult, time-cons

Innovations: how are examples of this trend across industries both serving and setting customer expectation? What underlying lessons can I draw from examples outside my industry?

But all resolved meaningful tensions and set new customer expectations (which then created new points of tension for their competitors' customers).

Spotting vs. Creating and why, when it comes to trends, spotting is creating. Revolution from Evolution and how innovation-led insights can inspire radical progress.