The 2023 consumer expects organizations to innovate constantly. Before the internet and social media age, formal market research was one of the only ways companies could tap into customers’ needs or wants. Then came platforms like Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook, new tools organizations could leverage to hear from customers in real time. From there, social listening tools broke through the cacophony of noise to turn Tweets and comments into tangible takeaways for companies about what’s popular at that moment.
For me personally, this shift happened the day that the head of consumer insights at Taco Bell came to tell me that food had moved from simply “fuel” to “an experience.” It wasn’t a complete surprise when you consider that nearly 50% of Instagram posts were of food and beverages. I think this was a seismic shift in food’s role in people’s lives. Because Taco Bell was able to see that change earlier than our competitors, it gave us at least a 2-year head start on turning Taco Bell into a lifestyle brand, which the company still benefits from today.
While the listening work that Taco Bell did at that time was groundbreaking and gave us a competitive advantage, it has a fundamental limitation. Listening tools and practices can tell you what’s happening in a given day, week, or month. But it’s always a reaction to something that has already happened. The true Holy Grail is to predict what’s coming before it happens and untangle the trends from the passing fads. With new tools like generative AI, it’s now possible for organizations to predict future market shifts and see what the next trend or fad is coming so they can gain a competitive edge.
The value of predicting: Identifying the light at the end of the tunnel or the oncoming train
Prediction is essential from an opportunity perspective (i.e., what roads you could go down) and a contingency-planning perspective (i.e., what to do when you see the train barreling toward you). In the old days, we often would find ourselves in a situation where the train hit us, and we had to work together to fix the pieces. The beauty of predicting offers both a reactive and proactive prediction of things: opportunities for your business to take advantage of and identify things that could damage your business.
Perhaps if Budweiser hadn’t partnered with transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney for an Instagram ad for Bud Light (a decision I personally support), they wouldn’t have faced a very public and nasty backlash from their conservative audience, leading to two executives taking a leave of absence and almost $400m in lost revenue. Predicting vs. listening could have identified this country’s increasing trend of deep political division. Perhaps Budweiser would have second-guessed if they wanted to capitalize on this. Was it worth it? If you ask distributors, the company may never recover.
Trends vs. fads and market relevance
The difference between a fad and a trend is time: fads are often short-term, and trends often last for the long haul. The Bud Light story of 2023 is a cautionary tale on how important it is for organizations to differentiate between trends versus fads and develop clear guidelines for what they will capitalize on and why.
The strongest organizations always consider the relevance of a specific trend or fad to their company by identifying one key element: cultural relevance. Cultural relevance is made up of two parts: what’s happening in the greater society and what’s happening culturally within the organization. When a trend or a fad has cultural relevance to what’s happening in the world and relevance to the organization and its values, then it’s a natural fit. What happened to Budweiser was their lack of understanding of the societal shift within the U.S. market and their customer base. Perhaps if they recognized this shift, they would have recognized that it didn’t match their organizational culture or their customers’ context and would have made a different choice.
Why company values matter most
To decide what trend or fad your organization will strategically capitalize on, you must be able to connect that trend or fad to your company’s values. Without that clear connection, it’s wise to pass. In 1996, during a boxing match for the WBA heavyweight championship, Mike Tyson bit off a chunk of opponent Evander Holyfield’s right ear. At the time, the Taco Bell marketing team came to me and said, “We should run a campaign saying, ‘take a bit out of this, not this.’” The first ‘this’ refers to the taco since its shape resembles a human ear. Sure, we could have hopped on this cultural fad and gained some publicity, but we ultimately decided not to pursue it because it didn’t align with Taco Bell’s values.
One of Taco Bell’s core values is everything has to be innovating and elevating. At that time, Mike Tyson had just been released from prison for rape, and we knew that there was nothing we could have done with Tyson that was elevating. We chose not to act upon a fad and used our company values to govern our decision-making process.
Even with access to powerful predictive AI tools, organizations have to make these decisions based on their core values, personal wisdom, and experience. If we let technology make these fad and trend decisions on our behalf, we can end up in a situation like Bud Light found itself in earlier this year. In the case of “take a bite out of this, not this,” mindlessly following an AI-driven tool’s fad-driven recommendation without considering if it was the right fit for Taco Bell’s values, the campaign could have been disastrous. AI tools like this should be another data point to consider in any company’s marketing decision process, not the driver of the decision itself.
Our windshield is getting larger
It has always been easier for businesses to tell a story about the past than predict what’s next. Think about what you see when you’re driving a car. The rearview mirror is tiny, allowing you to see what’s behind you. While the windshield is huge, giving you a clear view of what’s coming up the road. But in business, traditionally, it’s been the other way around; we had proportionally little information about what’s coming up on the road ahead of us and a larger view into where we’ve already been.
Thanks to technological advances with generative AI, we’re moving into a new moment with a much wider windshield; we can see more of what’s next. This technology enables organizations to better align resources to the things that will drive growth. The businesses that prioritize predicting trends and fads, along with listening and leveraging this technology as an element of their decision-making process, will have more opportunities to see what’s coming and be agile enough to adjust their business strategies to win.
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