the entrepreneur's guidebook

Tomorrow’s forecast

Professional trendspotters can make a fortune with one simple prediction. but there are tricks of the trade that can be learned by even the smallest business entrepreneur.

Trendspotting is not a new business phenomenon. In fact, you might say that the success of many of the world’s largest companies has resulted from their ability to spot a coming consumer trend, be it the automobile or the personal computer, and capitalize on it.

What has changed over the years is the ability of small-business owners to gather and examine trend information that was once only available to large corporations with multimillion-dollar budgets.

Paul Levitan is living proof of the do-it-yourself trendspotting movement becoming prevalent among small business owners. Levitan, a self-proclaimed “serial entrepreneur,” was the cofounder in 1995 of iVillage.com, a popular Web site dedicated to a variety of women’s issues, from health and beauty to parenting and relationships. iVillage became one of the most popular sites for women on the Internet, and Levitan left the company shortly after it went public in 1998.

When it came time to start his latest venture, he decided to put his trendspotting skills to good use. “You can’t build a business today without thinking of where the market will be in six months, a year, five years or further,” says Levitan.

His newest business epiphany came two years ago while hiking New Hampshire’s Mount Washington with his twin brother. Levitan brought his digital camera on the trip and shot more than 80 photos of their mountain ascent, as well as about a dozen short video clips.

Upon returning home, he found that the only way to transfer the 100-megabyte picture and video file to his brother’s computer would be to burn a disc and drop it in the mail; the file was simply too large to be emailed. The lightbulb in his head went off, and Levitan created Pando.com, a New York City–based company producing software that allows people to attach files of any size to emails, and easily open them.

Levitan says that his own needs, while enough to plant the idea, weren’t convincing enough for him to start the business, and it was only after extensive trendspotting that he was willing to jump into the new venture. “Lots of my other friends were having the same problem sending and receiving data,” he notes. Before deciding that Pando was the right solution to capitalize on what he saw as an emerging trend of person-to-person Internet file sharing, Levitan also researched digital camera sales figures, broadband Internet penetration rates, and other components of the problem his business would theoretically solve.

During the six-month test period for the software, more than 700,000 people have already downloaded it, without any advance publicity. Levitan expects that number to jump into the millions in the near future, when the finalized version of the software hits the public.

“A year and a half ago, not everyone believed that people would be sharing media computer to computer,” says Levitan. “But it was frustrating me and people I knew, and every trend starts from a personal place. It has to ring true on a personal level.”

Levitan also hedged his bets by enlisting the help of Richard Laermer, whose 2002 book, Trendspotting: Think Forward, Get Ahead, Cash in on the Future, makes predictions about trends in a variety of businesses, and explains steps every individual can take to become a trendspotter. Laermer now runs RLM, a trendspotting public relations firm with offices in New York and Los Angeles.

“It used to be that people would virtually put their finger in the air,” says Laermer, joking about how past trendspotting methods compare to today’s. “Now, with everyone being so media-centric and having so much at their fingertips thanks to the Internet, it’s pretty easy.”

In fact, Laermer says that trendspotting is no longer a choice, but a necessity for gaining success in modern business. “Businesses are affected by turns of events,” he says. “And with the access we have to resources like the Internet, people shouldn’t be shocked about much anymore. No matter how extreme the event, there are now always people who see it coming.”

Laermer also notes that technology businesses benefit the most from trendspotting. Large or small, anyone involved in the technology industry needs to make a part-time job out of being informed, he says, although businesses as divergent as restaurants and retail are coming to rely increasingly on trendspotting for success. “I couldn’t imagine anyone starting a restaurant today that wasn’t well-thought-out,” Laermer says. He points to a restaurant in New York that caters to people who like peanut butter, saying such a short-sighted idea is doomed from the start. “Businesses can’t be that cute anymore.”

And hiring a firm like Laermer’s isn’t even a requirement for a small business to remain trend-savvy. Levitan had done a large amount of the trendspotting legwork on his own before even approaching Laermer’s company. RLM’s primary service has been to connect Levitan to thought leaders in the industry and help make certain that Pando is a part of future conversations about the technological trend they’re trying to leverage. “It’s not like years ago, when in order to do this kind of research, we had to go to the library and use microfiche,” Laermer says.

Even a casual search of the Internet reveals countless trendspotting Weblogs that focus on everything from home furnishings to food. There are even companies producing free trendwatching reports for public download.

“By no means would we ever advise to outsource one’s trend activities,” says Reinier Evers, the director of Trendwatching.com, an Amsterdam-based “trend firm” that scans the globe looking for new business trends. “Understanding and tracking trends is one of the innovation lifelines for a company, and you want your team to learn by doing, not learn by buying.”

Evers’ four-year-old company releases regular reports on expected trends for free to online visitors. More than 130,000 business and marketing professionals in 120 countries subscribe to Trendwatching’s free monthly briefings. The company uses a network of more than 8,000 global “trend spotters,” who send their ideas to the company’s researchers and editors. Spotters are compensated for their accepted submissions with points that can be used to purchase gifts ranging from iPods to Amazon.-com gift certificates.

The reports are peppered with factoids on every kind of consumer trend imaginable, and Evers’ company has even generated a report on the trend of individual trendspotting, which they have dubbed the “virtual anthropology” trend.

When you consider Trendwatching’s punchy report names, like “InfoLust” and “Hygienia,” you might start to wonder if trendspotting itself really is a viable trend, or simply the new corporate fad. Laermer, for one, sees an obvious distinction between trends and fads. “A fad is something that simply won’t matter after a relatively short period of time,” Laermer says, “while a trend portends widespread change. Trends matter to us for a long time, if not forever.”

Based on that rationale, some of the things that Laermer actually considers fads are surprising, such as the immensely popular SUV (“It’s just new vocabulary, they’re the same thing as old VW trucks, but uglier”); and the things he considers actual trends, such as the much ridiculed Segway scooter (“Vehicles like this are going to make a difference in how we live our lives. New neighborhoods in cities are being designed to accommodate them”).

Evers echoes the sentiment that discerning trends is a key component of how businesses of all sizes need to operate now and in the future. “In an ever more volatile world, understanding what’s happening around you is only getting more important,” says Evers. “Will it be called trendspotting forever? Probably not. Perhaps at [some] point, people will see it as mapping the future of business. Or refer to it as ‘feeding themselves.’ But having a point of view will forever be priceless.”

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kemp powers is a freelance writer based in Los Angeles. Email Kemp at editor@executivetravelmag.com.