Sometimes, less is more. This is certainly the case for the book The Trendmaster’s Guide : Get a Jump on What Your Customer Wants Next by Robyn Waters, the woman whom Seth Godin described as the woman responsible for revolutionizing the products of Target and help turn it into one of US largest retailers.

Robyn Waters

What prompted me to pick up the book and flip page after page is the word “Trend” or fondly known as the “next big thing”. Given the entrepreneur-wanna-be spirit in me, I felt the urge to constantly stay on top of the game and manoeuvre way faster than my competitors.

Waters organized the book in a fairly simple manner. She prepared a list of 26 trendspotting techniques, where she cleverly assigned each technique to an alphabet. Here is a list of her trend-spotting technique:

A - Antennae

B - Big Picture

C - Connect the Dots

D – Design

E - Edit

F - Fusion

G - Grace and Guts

H - Head, Handbag, and Heart

I - Instinct and Institution

J - Just for Me

K - Keep it Simple

L - Lighten Up

M - Magic Button

N - No Secret

O - Observation

P - Passion and Possibilities

Q - Quintessence

R - Resonate

S - Soul

T - Translate

U - Unabashed Enthusiasm

V - Voracious Appetite for Knowledge

W - Walk in Other Worlds

X - (E)Xaggerate

Y - Yum, Yuck, and Yawn

Z - Zen

Some of her trend-spotting techniques were rather a matter of common sense. You know, the kind that makes everyone go like, “duh”. A for Antennae, is the epitome of this common sense. Basically Antennae suggest that trend can be spotted as long as we stretch our antennae and be on the look out for information from all sorts of channels, be it the small screen, or the internet. For instance, we are now aware that blogs are the next big thing. Because our own observations tells us that it is emerging from various corners of the world wide web, and our friends and families each has one. O for Observation pretty much explains the same thing. Same goes to V for Voracious Appetite for Knowledge.

Some of my personal favourites are D for Design, E for Edit, F for Fusion, G for Grace and Gut, J for Just for Me, K for Keep it Simple, and U for Unabashed Enthusiasm.

D for Design is an interesting one. Everything that is worth buying is now aesthetically appealing. Waters quoted Professor Robert Hayes of the Harvard Business School, who said, “Fifteen years ago companies competed on price. Today it’s quality. Tomorrow, it’s design.”

She also cited a perfect example of how Apple’s computer gain fans and evangelist worldwide, where people do not mind queuing up early in the morning outside an Apple store just to be the first to own Apple’s new product. Apparently, when Steve Jobs hired a guy with the name Jonathan Ives to design the new iMac, he told Ives not to think about a computer as a machine, but as an extension of the person using it. The result is of course a futuristic design for Apple’s computer, completely seceding from that usual rectangular screen plus the big boxy CPU underneath which does not look at all appealing to my eyes.

An iMac or a PC?

I also love G for Grade and Guts. It is about radically proposing ideas, with guts and grace. As she puts it so aptly, “it takes guts to be first, to be different”. She cited an example on the challenges that Frank Gehry (one of favourite architects of all time) faced when he proposed his brave new design for the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao. Many people thought it wouldn’t be possible for a musuem so futuristic to be situated in Bilbao, as Bilbao was then a decaying and sleepy town.

Today the Guggenheim museum stands majestically in the town of Bilbao in Spain. It is an architectural wonder that inspires envy and emulations from every corner of the world.