Same, Revisited
This is our annual reminder that you’ll start seeing—if you haven’t already—a lot of trend reports. You can skip them.
At best, maybe, skim them.
Your category, your customer, your marketing channels… they all will be more similar to the 2022 versions of themselves than different. And, if we’re wrong about that, it will be for a reason none of the reports prognosticated.
So, trend reports aren’t as helpful as they are distracting.
We’ll admit that some distractions are enjoyable, but this type is somewhat harmful: trend reports often place an emphasis on encouraging you to shape your plans and efforts to the purported market developments, which distracts from doing the foundational and unsexy work that moves a brand and business forward.
In a recent conversation with Dan Frommer of The New Consumer, Graza CEO Andrew Benin was pretty direct on this subject:
“Our aisle … is dead,” he explains, speaking of the olive oil section. “There is no innovation. Just another bottle of glass-obscured, dark green olive oil with the prettiest label ever is not going to work at all. AT ALL.”
And:
“Who the F-CK cares if you can get to a million dollars in revenue online? Who gives a sh-t? Do you, right now in time, have a supply chain that can scale up to $30 million? Because if you don’t, you’re going to get f-cked.”
Perhaps we’re reading what we want in these quotes, but our takeaways are pretty straightforward: if you want to launch like Graza, execution matters, yes. But if you want to sustain that launch momentum and grow healthily, the other stuff matters just as much: innate understanding of category, positioning, operations.
You usually don’t find that information in trend reports. You find it in doing the hard work of building your brand and building your business.
In “Playing To Win,” a strategy book co-written by former P&G CEO A.G. Lafley, these foundational elements are explored through two main questions: “where to play” and “how to win.”
If you find a trend report released around this time of year that helps you answer those questions, skim it. You probably won’t. So, skip ‘em.
You’ll have more time for the work that matters.