Creative Thinking for Sales/Marketing Professionals: Trend Watching

Course Overview

This Masterclass will bring 'trend-fluency' to delegates. Attendees will be able to build an appreciation of how to use these skills as a stimulus for insight, to encourage more 'horizontal' thinking and create 'applied imagination'.

Everyone is looking for the next big idea: to extend the brand, to move into a new market, to steal a march on competitors or simply to break out of the market conventions and surprise the consumer. In this world of 'flux and blur', trendstorming will teach you how to apply trends to achieve these goals.

Audience

This will benefit those who are in charge of brands, NPD and those who wish to effect change. And anyone in need of fresh stimulation.

Skills Gained

With too many marketing people doing the same research and coming up with the same ideas, companies increasingly need to turn to new sources of inspiration from outside their domain. This course will show how to make trend watching not merely 'interesting' but actionable, effective and transformational.

Delegates will be able to have a clearer appreciation of when to use and when not to use research as part of corporate decision-making. They will use this knowledge to not only optimise a research budget, but also enhance the quality of decision-making and effectiveness internally to develop real competitive advantage.

Course Outline

• Identify the difference between a trend and an observation
• Understand the differences between trend analysis and 'cool-hunting' or 'fad-finding'
• Know where to look and how to look for trends
• Use trends as ESIs (wait to discover!)
• Make trends actionable and effective
• Develop skills at deriving marketing and business implications from trends
• Foster new semiotic and communication ideas
• Identify new opportunities and avenues to segmentation

Creative Thinking for Sales/Marketing Professionals: Trend Watching / 0104