trend-watching

Trend studies have been on the rise since the late 90s. Accidental guru’s such as Malcolm Gladwell, Watts Wacker, Seth Godin, and Duncan J. Watts have all given a shot at explaining the birth, life-cycle and death of trends. We’ve heard their perspectives filled with “familiar” terminology – memes, idea virus, devox, fringe, six degrees of separation, connectors, mavens, etc.

Google has developed an interesting tool that allows us to watch what the world is searching for – Google trends. It also displays how frequently the topics you’ve searched for have appeared in Google News stories, and which geographic regions have searched for them most often.

The example here shows the trend comparison of 3 music groups – the killers (blue line), pharrell (red line), james blunt (orange line) (don’t ask me why I chose them – they just popped out).

Keypoint: useful tool for people involved in any form of “market” research to conduct trend-mapping. The use of market in this sense does not refer to its commercial sense, instead it refers more towards an environment or platform.