Low barriers to entry have flooded many markets with me-too brands, products, promotions, and messaging. This makes it exceptionally difficult for marketers to stand out from a sea of competitive sameness, as well as to reach their inundated customers. However, today’s relative ease of access to technology works in marketers’ favor.
Here, Jeremy Gutsche, founder and CEO of Trendhunter.com, and author of Better and Faster: The Proven Path to Unstoppable Ideas, details the six patterns of opportunity in today’s business world, and why marketers must approach business differently in 2015.
Why do you think marketing, and business in general, is so different these days?
We’re experiencing history’s highest rate of change, but we aren’t really wired for it. People and corporations are wired to repeat and optimize and farm whatever contributed to last year’s harvest. Because of this, you consistently see examples of bright people and businesses missing out on ideas that were so close to their grasp. We saw this with Kodak and the digital camera. We saw this with Blockbuster, which pioneered a lot of online video, and had three opportunities to buy Netflix for $50 million, but didn’t. Smith Corona invented grammar and spell checkers, and the laptop word processor. They got into computing, and retreated out. All of these brands didn’t just miss spotting a trend, they invented entire markets, but then they retreated back to what they were already doing. They went back to farming their existing market.
What does innovation mean in a world like this?
I like to think of innovation as a splash in the water, and that splash creates ripples of opportunity. Let’s say you’re an entrepreneur in 2007, and you’re trying to take on Facebook. If you tried making a bigger, better Facebook, even if you’re Google, it’s too late. Google tried many different ways to market its own product. [It] linked up with Gmail and everything, but Google couldn’t compete with Facebook even with its unlimited marketing budget. But, if you broke down what Facebook was in 2007 you could see lots of opportunity. In 2007, Facebook had 50 million viewers, and it was a site for friends to archive photos of their everyday life. If I diverge from that, I could find an opportunity in a site that’s not for friends, which would now be Twitter or LinkedIn. If you don’t want photos up forever there’s SnapChat, and if you want to recapture the art of photography there’s Instagram. These are examples of divergence, one of the patterns of opportunity discussed in the book.
What are these patterns?
The key to the patterns [is] that you don’t always have to take your competitor head on. In fact, if you try to compete with someone [by] doing the exact thing they’re doing, you’re going to spend more and not get the results you’re looking for. The patterns in the book are based on there being quicker, easier paths to finding opportunity. Over the last seven years we’ve studied more than 250,000 ideas using 100 million visitors. Kind of like a giant innovation focus group. The thing that jumped out was that whatever industry you’re in there seem to be these patterns of opportunity: acceleration, cyclicality, convergence, reduction, redirection, and divergence.
Can you explain these six aspects of opportunity?
Acceleration is the idea that you aren’t trying to make something bigger and better, but you are trying to pinpoint what your customers care about, and then taking that and accelerating it.
Cyclicality is repeating patterns like retro, nostalgia, teen rebellion, etc. The clues for success here are often already present, but to see them, you have to step back and move fast. Too often, [marketers] can see a million different little things happening, but they assume they have more control over the situation, and that the world is going to take a bit longer to adjust. [Marketers] end up taking too long to act and miss out. Convergence is about reimagining the combinations through which your product or service can manifest. That can be things like co-branding. Reduction is simplifying things by removing layers. You see a lot of this in today’s apps and dot-coms. AirBnB is an example. Redirection is rechanneling the momentum of another force or trend. Divergence is viewing outside the mainstream,which could be counter culture, but it’s also status, personalization, and anything that can be about diverging from the mainstream that no one wants to be a part of.
