This is a followup post to this discussion with Magnus (btw a brilliant guy, hire his services if you can).
I admit that trendblogs should be read, but I stand by my position that their relevance and usefulness is getting rather limited for a planner or marketer in a society of perfect information.
That’s not to say that trend blogs are not interesting. On the contrary, interesting things are in abundance. Planners that constantly have hundreds of unread blog posts from various trend blogs know what I’m talking about.
I do agree that ultimately, it is the brain that should do the added-value work by processing information. But:
creative thinking arises from combinations of different ideas, from conflicting thoughts, so how can we be creative if our background knowledge is the same?
In the end, we are all children of society.
The most pervasive proof of this belief is that, despite all the planner excellence and creative brilliance in the global creative industry, people tend to come up with very similar things (only last week there were two cases in Sweden, and there are even blogs about this). We become unintentional copycats.
The word “original” might be old news in the trend industry, but in the world of advertising it is the holy grail, more than ever. Ideas like the Cadbury ads that break the rules are extremely rare. This shows how hard lateral thinking really is.
Maybe trends have become the mainstream to break out of, instead than being the intended inspiration that’s so much needed?
I don’t think that TED is representative source of the trend industry. The brilliant ideas in this forum are products of “leap-frog” innovation, based on years (or even decades) of cutting-edge dedicated research, thinking or practice. Perhaps their “ideas worth spreading” tagline is a call to action for the trend industry:
not all ideas are worth spreading.
I was wrong: trends are not dead. Their force is stronger than ever, and maybe that’s the real problem?
Recent Comments