Trends

This is a primer. A related note is This is not a trend report.

In our rush to identify the “next big thing,“ we often throw around the word “trend” without much precision. I’ve sat through countless presentations where everything from quarterly sales figures to generational shifts gets labeled as a trend, creating what I call “trend inflation” – the devaluation of analytical clarity through imprecise terminology.

What Are Trends?

Trends are observable, directional changes in behavior, technology adoption, cultural expression, or social organization that operate on shorter temporal scales (seasons to years) than cultural undercurrents. They’re the conscious, measurable signals through which deeper structural patterns manifest when encountering specific technological, economic, or social conditions.

For me, trends function as hypotheses about change – pattern recognition exercises that suggest potential trajectories while remaining open to alternative futures rather than claiming inevitability. They’re not the currents themselves but the visible friction points where different temporal scales intersect.

The Analysis Framework

To distinguish legitimate trends from noise, I use six tests:

1. The Signal Consistency Test: Can you identify multiple, independent signals pointing in the same direction across different contexts? Real trends show up in diverse, unconnected sources.

2. The Temporal Persistence Test: Has this pattern sustained for at least 2-3 cycles (seasons, quarters, product generations)? Temporary spikes aren’t trends – they’re events.

3. The Adaptation Test: Are people, organizations, or systems actively adapting their behavior in response to this change? Trends create adaptive responses.

4. The Resistance Test: What counter-trends or resistance patterns are emerging? Significant trends always generate opposing forces.

5. The Trajectory Test: Can you articulate multiple plausible future scenarios for how this might develop? True trends open up possibility spaces rather than determining single outcomes.

6. The Context Test: How does this trend connect to deeper patterns? Trends that link to broader currents tend to be more significant than isolated changes.

Examples in Practice

Creator Economy Trend: Passes all six tests – multiple signals (platform revenue sharing, creator earnings, brand partnerships), sustained over multiple years, clear adaptations (educational programs, new tools), resistance patterns (platform control debates), multiple scenarios (further decentralization vs. consolidation), and connects to deeper phenomena around work identity transformation.

Wellness Technology Trend: Observable through device sales, app downloads, and healthcare integration. Represents multiple cycles of product generations, creates adaptive behaviors in daily routines, faces resistance around data privacy, and signals the broader cultural phenomenon of quantified self-optimization.

Micro-Mobility Trend: Evidence spans bike-shares, e-scooters, and infrastructure investment. Shows persistence across seasons and cities, generates both adoption and regulatory resistance, opens scenarios from car replacement to last-mile solutions, and expresses deeper urban sustainability currents.

Theoretical Grounding

Building on Fernand Braudel’s temporal framework,¹ trends operate at the level of événements – observable events on the scale of seasons to years. Unlike Charles Taylor’s unconscious social imaginaries, trends are consciously observable changes. As Raymond Williams noted,² they emerge in the friction between the “residual” (declining), “dominant” (established), and “emergent” (forming) – the intersection points where deeper cultural phenomena encounter immediate pressures.

Key Characteristics

Observable and measurable: Unlike cultural phenomena, trends generate quantifiable indicators – sales data, adoption rates, search volumes, behavioral metrics. This measurability is both their strength and their limitation.

Directional but not deterministic: Trends suggest direction of change without guaranteeing specific outcomes. They’re hypotheses about emerging patterns, not predictions about inevitable futures.

Context-dependent: The same technological or social innovation can generate completely different trends in different cultural contexts. Trends are always locally expressed even when globally influenced.

Interaction effects: Trends rarely operate in isolation – they intersect, amplify, or inhibit each other. Understanding these interactions is often more valuable than tracking individual trends.

Cyclical and reactive: Many trends represent cyclical responses to previous changes or counter-reactions to dominant patterns. What goes viral often goes away; what persists usually reflects deeper needs.

Contemporary Challenges in Trend Analysis

Digital transformation has fundamentally altered how trends emerge and circulate. What Terry Nguyen calls the “death of trends” reflects a shift from organic cultural evolution to manufactured viral phenomena. Traditional subcultures with shared practices and values have given way to “aesthetic submarkets” – visually coherent but culturally shallow groupings reduced to purchasable “starter packs” rather than lived experiences ³⁴.

The Acceleration Problem: Debord’s “recuperation” – the commodification of subcultural ideas – now operates at algorithmic speed. Products begin as unbranded commodities and acquire manufactured cultural meaning through influencers and content creators, compressing what once took years into weeks. There’s now “as much reporting as there is trend manufacturing,” creating fundamental uncertainty about whether patterns represent genuine shifts or artificially constructed viral moments.³

The Meta-Awareness Trap: Contemporary culture suffers from what W. David Marx identifies as excessive cultural literacy: “We have been cursed to understand the mechanisms of culture too well, making earnest taste nearly impossible”.⁵ This creates recursive loops where discussion about trends becomes more significant than the phenomena themselves – “trends about trends” as Rebecca Jennings notes, where trendwatching itself becomes the trend.⁶

The Collapse of Linear Narratives: Traditional trend analysis assumed predictable progression – emergence, mainstream adoption, decline. But as Cam Wolf observes, this sequencing has broken down. Multiple contradictory trends now coexist on different temporal scales, creating a lack of “ordering” that conventional frameworks can’t accommodate.⁵ Media pressure to identify trends early has led to “preemptive analysis” – coverage of trends that haven’t even happened yet, corrupting the signal-recognition process fundamental to legitimate analysis.

Relationship to Cultural Undercurrents

Trends and cultural undercurrents exist in dynamic relationship. Trends function as symptoms – surface manifestations of deeper phenomena (plant-based foods reflecting recalibrated nature relationships). They act as catalysts when accumulating trends create conditions for cultural transformation (remote work trends crystallizing new place-productivity relationships). They express resistance through counter-trends signaling tension with emerging phenomena (analog revival versus digital acceleration). And they serve as translation mechanisms, expressing global patterns through local interpretations.

Methodological Considerations and Limitations

The Measurement Trap: The fact that trends can be measured doesn’t mean they should be reduced to metrics. Over-quantification can obscure the qualitative dimensions that make trends culturally significant.

Temporal Myopia: The shorter timescales of trends can create false urgency or cause analysts to miss slower but more significant patterns. Always ask: What deeper currents might this trend represent or obscure?

Cherry-Picking Risk: It’s easy to find signals that confirm predetermined trend hypotheses. Robust trend analysis actively seeks disconfirming evidence and alternative explanations.

Context Collapse: Trends that appear global often have highly specific local expressions. What works as a trend in Berlin may fail completely in Bangkok or Boston.

The Novelty Bias: New and unusual changes are more likely to be labeled as trends, but often the most significant trends represent acceleration or mainstream adoption of previously marginal practices.

Practical Applications and Limitations

Strategic Use: I use trends as early warning systems for opportunities and challenges, but ground decisions in understanding underlying patterns rather than simple extrapolation. Trends reveal innovation spaces where existing solutions no longer fit emerging needs – the most valuable innovations emerge from trend intersections.

Analytical Limits: Most commercial trend reports fail by treating trends as predictions rather than hypotheses. They cherry-pick supporting signals, ignore contradictions, and assume linear continuation. As my trend report note explains, many function as fictional expectations – performative attempts to make specific futures seem inevitable.

Temporal Constraints: By definition, trends look backward at existing signals to hypothesize forward. They can identify emerging patterns but struggle with discontinuous change or paradigm shifts operating outside existing frameworks. This is why Critical Futures Studies examines not just what trends are identified, but who identifies them and why.

Related Concepts

• Cultural Undercurrents – The deeper currents that trends often symptomize or catalyze
• Pattern Recognition – The cognitive practice essential for distinguishing trends from noise
• Megatrend – How marketing-oriented trend analysis often conflates trends with deeper phenomena
• Trend Report – The problems with superficial trend analysis and commercial trend reporting
• Future Imaginaries – How trend analysis intersects with collective visions of possible futures
• Fictional Expectations – The performative dimension of trend identification and communication
• Critical Futures Studies – Frameworks for analyzing trends within broader power structures and meaning systems

Note: This framework emerged from observing how “trend analysis” is misused in consulting and developing more rigorous approaches through [[ Follow the Rabbit ]] and Critical Futures Studies practice.