How do you tell which trends are real, which are fads and which fit someone's agenda?

October is here and with it comes the avalanche of 2025 trends from industry experts, companies, consultants and so on. You name it. How do we know which are real trends and which are fads?

 All of the experts try to make you feel like they have their own secret knowledge and promising you an exclusive glimpse into the future. So how to know which of them are really having industry data that can support their predictions and their trends for 2025?

There's a process I use to really dig deep into trends and decide if to invest time and resources to it. There's also a list of things I always look out for when reading these kind of industry trends to really decide if there's something behind them that might be not tied to reality.

So some things that I always look out for are number one, bias and subjectivity. Does the trend suit the author? This is a common issue. Companies that offer certain services produce trend lists that benefit them directly or indirectly. So watch out for these. Usually this is quite easy to find on their website, on their brochures, in any sales materials. You will see that there is a common connection with the trends that they are trying to promote.

Number two, regional and category variations. Does the trend suit every company in every region? Not necessarily. And what might work in US might not have the same impact in Europe or other markets. So always try to see if something will catch on in your market and in your niche.

Number three, short-term hype. Is the trend sustainable? This happens often, so watch out for that. You might be early on and ride the wave, but also these trends can disappear quite quickly. Look at Apple Vision Pro or Metaverse. It's quite clear that both of those projects are not up to the forecasts that were promised.

To make things even more structured, let's begin with a definition of a trend. Let me read it to you so it's going to make it clear for us later on when we will discuss how to approach those kind of trends.

A trend is a general direction in which something is moving or evolving over time, often seen as a pattern or shift in behavior, preferences or values within a specific area like fashion, technology or culture. Trends might be temporary or might lead to long-term changes depending on how widely they are adopted.

So as you can see, a trend is a development of something which should have some kind of data in the past or in the current times. So based on that, it is quite easy to say that 2025 will be the year of change. It will be the year of AI and authenticity. We read it already before, but what about the rest? What about some other trends that might be useful for us?

I have an approach which I use in the past and helped me jump onto trends which we stayed for quite long and we use them for our benefit for the company. So this is the list. Let's go.

Number one, industry data. I look at the big moves and investments made by the category leaders and look what infrastructure they are building and what they are investing in. This is not always a guarantee that something will stay, but at least you see commitment from the big guys. You see commitment from the leaders of the category and of a technology.

Number two, user base. I try to see if growth is consistent and usage is stable. I try to see that there are no rapid increases that would suggest artificial inflation, for example.

Number three, relevance is the most important one for me, at least. So the question is, is the trend relevant to what we are doing? Does it make sense to try it? Does it somehow help us delivering value to our customer base? This is crucial and I see it too many times. Companies that believe a trend is cool, try to get on it. And even though it doesn't make sense for them, they try to somehow act on it. And you see many, many examples of how companies lose a lot of resources jumping on a trend that was not going to work for them from the beginning.

In the best case scenario, at the end of the day, it's all about the cost of entry into a particular technology and experimenting with it. If you see that something in this is interesting and relevant to your company, I suggest to secure a small part of the budget dedicated to experimenting into a certain technology, seeing what might work and what will not work. And even if something doesn't catch on, you will still benefit from the lessons that were learned during that process. And then you can use it in future experimentations.

I hope this will help you in going through all the coming lists, because I'm pretty sure that in the next few weeks, we will see a lot of them coming from different website blogs and experts. So it always makes sense to look at them with critical eye and really make your research on your own as well. And really see if there's something that is interesting for your category. Sometimes, of course, there's a lot of luck, intuition and some things can be predicted. But at least with this list and with this approach, you can prepare and try to have the best chances to get on a trend that is relevant and useful for your company. And I wish you all that.

So that's it for this episode. And thanks for joining. And I see you soon. As a reminder, new episodes come every Tuesday and Friday. If you have any inputs, questions or suggestions, please send them to me. I'll be more than happy to answer them here on the podcast. Make sure to subscribe. If you need more information, visit ebpod.co. That's ebpod.co for show notes and more information. Until the next one, take care.