22 Feb Trend vs Fad
As the CEO of a Content Marketing Agency, one of my jobs is to keep up with the trends. I need to know what is trending to help guide our company and, more importantly, our clients. One of the many services we offer is social media support, which is all about the trends.
In addition, each week my public relations team sends me a list of “trending topics” and asks me to give my opinion. They use my feedback to book me on various interviews that in turn promote our company. But often my feedback on a particular issue is to wait and see if it’s a trend or just a fad.
Too often business leaders get caught up in trying to be trendy and end up just wasting their time and efforts on a fad.
Too often business leaders get caught up in trying to be trendy and end up just wasting their time and efforts on a fad. A fad is short lived, here today and gone tomorrow. A trend is a shift in the way people think or consume a product.
Social media dates back to 1997 with the launch of SixDegrees.com. Have you ever heard of that website? Perhaps not, and therein lies an example of a fad. But the concept of connecting people online has changed the way people think about the world. Prior to the popularity of Facebook, the only time you might have seen a former high school classmate was at a reunion that you tried to avoid. Now your high school classmates are commenting on your current life. But SixDegrees.com was here one day and gone the next.
What if you invested a ton of marketing dollars to promote SixDegrees.com? You would have been wasting your money. And that is the cautionary tale of trying to understand the difference between a trend and a fad.
The Metaverse is a perfect example that is currently being discussed. To read some articles, you might be thinking you need to spend capital dollars developing a virtual store to sell goods to the virtual world. I would caution you to tap the breaks on that idea. Even Mark Zuckerberg has said it will be at least 10 years before the Metaverse is mainstream. And that is just a guess.
There are stories of early adopters to new trends who end up owning the space and making millions. They are stories because they are rare. Most early adopters end up needing to redesign or rethink their idea after the trend starts to mature.
Here is my advice on trends: follow the trends, but don’t be too quick to jump in and join them. Give it time to mature to make sure it is not a fad, and time to come up with a sound marketing strategy for the new trend. Of course you can also reach out to us for help; let us follow the trends for you and help you strategize.
Scott Miller is the CEO of Centerpost Media, host of the Create. Build. Manage. show (seen on BizTV, heard on BizTalkRadio, and available wherever you listen to podcasts,) and a member of the Forbes Agency Council, Entrepreneur Leadership Network, and Dallas Business Journal Leadership Trust. You can find Scott on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter via “@scottmillerceo” or on LinkedIn via “@scottmillermedia.” Centerpost Media is a content marketing agency with a vision to help every business they encounter with their media needs by providing outstanding quality, service and value. Centerpost Media is the parent company to BizTV, BizTalkRadio, BizTalkPodcasts and Bizvod.