I've been working on the root trend for two years now. One of the main points of good blogging is also the greatest challenge in my effort to make this trending perspective accessible. How do you create sound bites of trending discussions when the work (the social science) behind it also needs to be explained? The answer is that it must be slowly honed down to easy to use ideas. This is really what these pages are about to me.
The point of a sound bite is to convey useful information in a thought, not to explain the future or be credited for "seeing it" or especially to hammer instructions without offering a thorough understanding. As I've studied the work of many different forecasters I've seen many combine skills and express them in as many varied ways as there are people doing it.
So while I knew most of what I know now two years ago, blogging about it has forced me to get better at articulating it more succinctly and differently. And yes, there is still a way to go but I have a bigger intention in these pages. For now, those of you who are willing, there is a lot to see here of your own business' future needs. This is a unique period of time we have entered as a society and besides seeing valuable insight through this perspective, it is an excellent time to adopt the basic ideas into your business perspective. Besides seeing social contrasts being stronger than usual and in short periods of time, it will lead us to new ideas that are based on sound insight. And while this is a meaningful promise, it'll require more than scanning the pages here.
In the (right column) pages section there was one titled <What is social mood?>. I wrote it two years ago and it is filled with detail that is all true but expressed poorly so I've been rewriting it. That was two years ago. I put it in one paragraph now. The detail I offered previously was not wrong, just TMI.
The definition of social mood: social mood is the aggregated representation of how a society responds to uncertainty. It hinges upon a shared emotional state where people collectively respond to the future's constant uncertainty with a varying sense of either optimism or pessimism. All our rational thinking is filtered through this emotional state and it especially affects us in the social units we belong to. We join together to create businesses and all kinds of social associations exchanging our shared emotive outlooks until the combination becomes a societal moving average known as social mood. When our creations are seen from this perspective and then chunked up, they can be (in many cases) tracked as trends by identifying the behavioral least common denominator. Social trends, imo, reflect some degree of the developing social mood, and in this broad light, business can use this perspective to see markets, supply and demand in them, and business opportunity more purposefully during times of social change. Like right now.
And while this sounds broad and maybe vague, anything that can be tracked like this, and is based upon fundamental impulses in our collective behavior, is a potential source of great knowledge for marketers and business strategists. Yes, you must endure enough of the detail in why and how this exists in order to be able to appreciate it and apply it definitively to your vertical but if you do, it offers a view of the supply and demand in your market that is unique. Why is that important? During times of social change what people collectively value, and how, changes our competitive landscape. This knowledge is fundamental to maintaining and improving profitability. This change happens across society slowly but definitively.
Or you can think of it this way. By taking the time to understand how computer code is ultimately reduced to endless series of of either 'on' or 'off' switches that when combined produce the ability to perform tasks, then in the same light, seeing social mood is the ability to appreciate broadly (one key dynamic) of how we create as social beings and how the polarity of our expectations exerts an repetitive, powerful influence on demand in our markets at all times but, is especially meaningful at times of great social change. Again, like right now.
Take my media vertical discussion as an example. The deeper why's of what is happening there is a fascinating slice of our culture right now. If you simply borrow those conclusions and apply them without explaining them, you will end up like a small noise that disappears into a stiff wind. It is through thorough understanding (or at least an appreciation) that businesses find value and the hope to change how they compete. Innovation requires inspiration. The root trend requires collaboration to look at a vertical's history in order to look forward.
Any formula for long term competitive advantage must be able to define how and why the nature of demand is changing in a vertical. Anything short of that leaves too much to chance. Businesses are never more than tools built to serve the existing demand in markets of people. These Root Trend discussions help you see social mood's impact upon demand in a way not offered to marketers anywhere else. When applied in earnest there are many possible ways to look at challenges to build competitive advantage. Dave
PS.... www.socionomics.net is a great resource if details of this subject interest you. And while it intentionally goes deep on the social science, there's great insight if you are willing. D
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