Just how useful are marketing trends? Does it belong in the same category as other indicators in situation analysis?
Trends are lagging indicators and often happen or identified after the fact. Hoping on to the trend bandwagon have at times been shown to be a bad move.
If anyone recall Sony’s Minidisc product line of Minidiscs and MD players. It was an up and coming product until boom, digital took over and my friends were selling their relatively new MD players for Mp3 players instead.
There was another such episode of the “Pet Rock”, it was advertised as the pet who never disobeys and just sits there waiting for your love. It was literally a rock and received much attention. But no other such products followed or if they did, wasn’t successful. As it died down very shortly as rocks were soon realized to be unable to replace the adorable puppies.
I think there is a distinction between trends and fads, the latter of which the 2 examples above fall into.