Earn loyalty, not sales–If you preorder a book on Amazon. com and the price drops, they will send you a refund, even if it happens to be 17 cents. This consistency of unsolicited follow-up builds intense trust among customers. There are many people who would never preorder a book from anyone else. And each time Amazon proactively sends back a few cents when a price drops, they continue to earn this loyalty. That’s the difference between doing something worthy of loyalty and simply focusing on selling a product once.
Note: This trend was originally published in the 2017 Non-Obvious Trend Report, and is included in this new trend report with revised examples and new insights.
19
INTERSECTION THINKING
How To Apply Trends To Your Business
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“Discovery consists of seeing what everybody has seen
and thinking what nobody has thought.”
ALBERT SZENT-GYÖRGYI, Nobel Prize–winning Physician
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Nearly ten years ago, Tom Maas, a former marketing executive for distiller Jim Beam, finally created his perfect drink. For years, he had been working on developing and promoting a new cream liquor based on the popular traditional milky cinnamon-and-almond beverage from Latin America known as horchata.
His new drink was a mixture of light rum, dairy cream, and spices like cinnamon and vanilla that he christened “RumChata” in honor of the drink that inspired its flavors. Unfortunately, RumChata was not an instant hit.
It was only when some creative sales people first started likening its taste to the milk at the bottom of a bowl of Cinnamon Toast Crunch cereal that RumChata began to gain momentum. Bartenders started using the liquor to create inspired blends, which led to more liquor distributors and retailers ordering it. Inventive promotions like “cereal shooter bowls” also helped encourage bars to serve RumChata-based drinks.
Eventually, this creativity began to translate to higher sales.
By 2014, the drink had taken one-fifth of the market share in the $1 billion U.S. market for cream-based liquors, and even started outselling the longstanding leader, Diageo’s Baileys Irish Cream, in certain regions. By 2017, it is also the most popular spirits brand on social media, with new videos on its YouTube channel routinely getting more than 2 million views.[1]
More importantly, experts described the drink as a crossover game changer due to its popularity as a mixer and as an ingredient for food and baking recipes.
How to Create a Game-Changing Product
RumChata is a perfect example of the type of success that can come from putting the power of observation together with an understanding for the intersection of consumer behavior and the open space in a market.
While Maas may not have been thinking about trend curation when he came up with his product idea, we can still find some lessons in the example.
When you look backward, there are three cultural signals that may explain some of RumChata’s success:
A growing consumer desire for authentic products with interesting backstories;
The rising prevalence of food entertainment programming on television inspiring more creativity in home cooking;
The increased interest across the United States in Hispanic culture and heritage.
In retrospect, these observations support the arrival of a product like RumChata. Of course, putting the dots together looking backward is easy.
The real question is: How can you do this predictably in a way that helps you create your own success in the future?
An Introduction to Intersection Thinking
Trends are big ideas describing the accelerating world around us. Unfortunately, the value of big ideas is not always easily understood when it comes to applying them to real life.
Trend forecaster Chris Sanderson from the Future Laboratory describes trends as “profits waiting to happen.” As tempting as that sounds, achieving those profits takes more than skill at uncovering, curating, and describing a trend. You need to know what to do next.
Trends only have value if you can learn to act on them.
Is a trend telling you to abandon an existing product line? Or to pivot the focus of your business? Or to stay the course in a direction that hasn’t yet paid off? These are the kinds of big questions that leaders often face and they aren’t easy to answer.
Learning to curate trends can help you benefit from an outside perspective and prompt you to think about your business in a way that your competitors aren’t. Doing this always starts with using “intersection thinking.”
Intersection thinking is a method for creating overlap between seemingly disconnected ideas in order to generate new ideas, directions, and strategies for powering your own success.
After helping dozens of organizations and thousands of people learn to curate trends and then apply them, I always start by teaching this skill.
To do it, the analogy I use most often is this one:[2]
Trends can be exactly like pluots: only valuable if you take the time to put multiple things together and experiment with them. This is intersection thinking, and doing it requires you to embrace four mindsets.
4 Mindsets of Intersection Thinking
See the similarities instead of the differences.
Purposely look away from your goal.
Wander into the unfamiliar.
Be persuadable.
Mindset 1 See the Similarities
Paolo Nagari is an intercultural intelligence specialist who teaches expat executives the skills they need to succeed while living and working abroad. Unlike many other experts, however, his model doesn’t rely on teaching the “dos and don’ts” of a given culture. His belief is that succeeding in a culture other than your own takes more than memorizing lists.
Nagari’s first rule for executives is all about learning to focus on the many similarities in cultures instead of the differences. It’s a valuable lesson when considering how to embrace unfamiliar ideas in business as well.
When former Coca-Cola executive Jeff Dunn became president of Bolthouse Farms, for example, he walked into a billion-dollar agricultural company that had literally reinvented the carrot industry by creating “baby carrots.”[3]
By the time Dunn took over, sales of carrots (and baby carrots) were experiencing a slump and he needed a solution, so he turned to advertising agency Crispin Porter + Bogusky (CP+B).
During their preparation, the agency was inspired by a unique idea based on a simple consumer insight: people love snacking on junk food and hate being told to eat healthier.
As CP+B creative director Omid Farhang shares, “the truth about baby carrots is they possess many of the defining characteristics of our favorite junk food. They’re neon orange, they’re crunchy, they’re dippable, they’re kind of addictive.”[4]
Using this insight, CP+B built a new campaign that enticed consumers to “Eat ’Em Like Junk Food,” inspired by the marketing tactics of other consumer packaged goods companies (like Coca-Cola). Baby carrots were packaged and promoted like junk food, including cutting them in a “crinkle cut” style to make them look more like potato chips.
In campaign test markets, sales immediately went up between 10% and 12%, all thanks to a campaign built from seeing the similarities between the marketing tactics for junk food and applying those to marketing baby carrots instead.
Mindset 2 Purposely Look Away from Your Goal
In early 2017, Starbucks founder Howard Schultz finally realized his thirty-four-year-long dream to open a Starbucks location in the place that started it all: Milan.
More than three decades earlier, his now-legendary spark of insight about what Starbucks could become happened on a walk from his hotel to a convention center. He’d been sent to a trade show in Milan to represent Starbucks, which at the time was a supplier of high-end home brewing equipment.
On that trip, he experienced firsthand the dominance of Italian espresso coffee shops on every street corner and how these might offer a “third place” (after work and home). H
e returned and persuaded the owners to create a retail coffee shop. Years later he purchased the brand from the original owners and took it global.
The growth of Starbucks is interesting, but what I found most inspiring about this was how it all started—with a curious walk that had nothing to do with focusing on a trade show or business purpose. Schultz’s story is a perfect illustration of the power of looking away from your main purpose to discover bigger ideas that may be waiting around the corner (literally in his case!).
Mindset 3 Wander into the Unfamiliar
If you happen to be walking the streets of Bangkok around 6:00 p.m. on any day, you’ll see people stop in their tracks for seemingly inexplicable reasons. Ask anyone afterward and you’ll quickly learn that there are two times every day when the Thai national anthem is played (8:00 a.m. and 6:00 p.m.) and all citizens stop what they’re doing and observe a moment of silence out of respect.
Once you see this cultural practice in action, it’s impossible to forget. Travel experiences are like this—whether they happen across the world from your home, or simply during a visit to a nearby yet unfamiliar place. Wandering is a form of exploration that we often think to embrace only when traveling, but it has great value on a more daily basis.
In a world where we have a mobile map in our pocket, ready to assist us with turn-by-turn directions to anywhere, wandering must be a choice. It’s the perfect metaphor for why intersection thinking matters, and why it can be difficult as well.
Sometimes we must choose to leave our maps behind.
Mindset 4 Be Persuadable
In the first edition of this book, this was not one of the original mindsets. I added it this year because it has become more necessary than ever. The world conspires in many ways to encourage each of us to burrow further into the chasms of our own beliefs.[5] Algorithms on social media serve up stories we agree with. Website cookies aim to segment us to predict what we’ll like to see or what we might click on to buy. Polarizing politicians remind us that “truth” comes with the necessity for someone to be wrong so we can be right, and tell us that person should be treated like the enemy. Instead, what if we could be brave enough to change our minds?
What if we could be persuadable—to the point where hearing a compelling argument that we don’t initially agree with might sway us to adapt our beliefs or at least allow for the possibility that someone who sees the world in a way other than ours might not be a complete idiot?
Why Workshops Are So Powerful
A workshop is a gathering or meeting where an individual or a group of people focus their conversation and ideation on solving a challenge or thinking in new, innovative ways.
While it may seem hard or unnecessary to bring the right people together in a room for something like a workshop (and just plain silly if you’re doing it alone or with just one other person), there are several reasons to consider taking a workshop-driven approach to applying trends or any other kind of new ideas.
The first is that workshops can help to focus your attention. We’re all busy and usually don’t have the time to be sitting around thinking about trends all day. To ensure you can have the right focused attention, it’s valuable to block out a set period, even if it happens to be short. Just the act of making sure this time is scheduled and separate from your usual daily activities can help ensure that it feels significant. It will also help you to get the right people in the room, because blocking out a set time ensures they have notice and will not (hopefully) schedule something else for that time.
The second key to effectively using a workshop is to set a clear objective. While you usually don’t need a step-by-step map, it’s always useful to have a purpose or desired outcome defined. There are many ways to engineer the structure of what you do in a workshop. I share four common structures later in this chapter. Whichever you choose, the important thing is, like any good meeting, your workshop has a purpose so participants know what you aim to accomplish.
Finally, you need to be sure to establish accountability. Another critical reason that workshops can be so effective is that they force people to make commitments about what to do next.
5 Keys to Running a Great Trend Workshop
Prepare Like a Pro. Take the time to familiarize yourself with the background of an issue, what has already been tried, what the needs of the group are, and what questions need to be asked in order to push the group toward real change.
Capture First, Critique Later. People say, “there are no bad ideas in a brainstorm.” That’s not true. Unfortunately, it’s impossible to tell good ideas from bad ones in real time. For that reason, encourage all participants to openly share ideas, and don’t waste time and energy trying to immediately critique them. Save that for later.
Adopt a “Yes and” Mindset. Improv actors always talk about the importance of collaborating with others in a scene by going with the flow and building upon one another’s ideas. This additive approach is one of the hallmarks of great and effective workshops as well.
Always Have an Unbiased Facilitator. It’s easy to assume that the person closest to the issue is the best leader, but this is often untrue. Instead, the best workshop facilitators are individuals who can lead a discussion, keep a conversation on track, and ask provocative questions without bias.
Recap and Summarize. It’s the role of the facilitator to summarize the conversation, recap any action items, and ensure that everyone who spent their precious time participating understands what they collectively achieved and what will need to happen next.
4 Models of Trend Workshops
Customer Journey Mapping Trend Workshop.
Building a step-by-step understanding of how your customers interact with you so you can apply trends to each step of the process.
Brand Storytelling Trend Workshop.
Developing a powerful brand story or message designed to resonate with customers, based on understanding and using current trends.
Business Strategy Trend Workshop.
Creating a new go-to-market or product-launch strategy or making changes to a business model or revenue model informed by current trends and new competitive situations.
Company Culture Trend Workshop.
Planning your career or optimizing and improving an internal company culture and team based on current trends.
In the original 2015 hardcover edition of Non-Obvious, each workshop was outlined in detail through four additional chapters. For the sake of brevity, those chapters are not included in this edition. They are still available online completely for free for download at www.nonobviousbook.com/resources.
Note for Small Teams and Solopreneurs
Although most of this chapter and the bonus PDF are specifically written from the point of view of having multiple participants in each type of workshop, many of the lessons in these chapters can be easily applied to small teams (or by individual innovators) as well.
Just because you don’t have a large group of team members doesn’t mean you can’t use the benefits of intersection thinking and workshops to power your business. There’s never a bad time to break from your normal routine and dedicate time through a workshop, to strategize for the future.
20
5 BOOKS ON TRENDS WORTH READING
(and 15 Websites to Bookmark)
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Despite the skepticism with which I often approach trend reports from so-called gurus, there are a handful of valuable, well-written resources for trend forecasting and techniques that I’ve drawn upon heavily over the years. This includes a short list of books and a longer list of websites that I routinely consult for story ideas. While some have already been cited elsewhere in this book, that chapter includes a full list of some of my favorites.
1. Megatrends, by John Naisbitt (1982)
There’s a reason why this book about trends and the future has been a bestseller for the past three decades. Naisbitt paints a fascinating future portrait of the world as he saw it back in the early ’80s. D
espite the many years that have passed since it was first published, Megatrends remains a valuable read both for the prescience of Naisbitt’s ideas and how he manages to capture the spirit of his time while also producing a startlingly accurate vision of the future.
2. The Trend Forecaster’s Handbook, by Martin Raymond (2010)
This full-color, large-format volume is the closest thing you can find to a textbook on how to predict trends. Like most textbooks, it has a hefty price tag (used copies currently go for about $100), but the content is beautifully organized and it includes a dictionary-style compilation of everything you need to know about trend forecasting. From interviews with top futurists to highly useful sidebars (like how to select and interview an expert panel), this book shares so much insight that it belongs on your bookshelf.
3. Trend-Driven Innovation,
by Henry Mason, David Mattin, Maxwell Luthy, and Delia Dumitrescu (2015)
The methodology for this book is based on the work of the team behind Trendwatching.com and features a behind-the-scenes look at some of the trends they have predicted over the years. The book is highly visual, easy to read, and a model for not only learning to see trends, but also how to talk about and present them.
4. Superforecasting, by Philip E. Tetlock & Dan Gardner (2015)
The most mainstream book on the list, Superforecasting was heavily praised when it first came out—named a “Best Book of 2015” by The Economist and “Editor’s Choice” by the New York Times. The book uses powerful stories and years of research into what makes good (and accurate) forecasting to offer a model for how anyone can learn to use better foresight to understand the future.
Non-Obvious 2019- How To Predict Trends and Win The Future Page 19