Trends are the currency of our cultural lives in a global economy built on cycles of disruption and innovation. For the first episode of season 8, we’re joined by Dr. Devon Powers, the author of On Trend: The Business of Forecasting The Future. Devon shares her insights about the global agencies and professionals whose job it is to identify, explain, predict, and manufacture consumer trends. We discuss how these patterns can influence how we all live, work, play, shop, and learn. 

Episode Transcript

Adrian Tennant: Coming up in this episode of IN CLEAR FOCUS:

Devon Powers: I think that the idea of thinking about the future and of talking in the language of futures and predictions -it’s hot! And so that to me is indicative of the moment and the change that people really desire and want and need.

Adrian Tennant: You’re listening to IN CLEAR FOCUS, fresh perspectives on the business of advertising produced weekly by Bigeye. Hello, I’m your host, Adrian Tennant, VP of Insights at Bigeye. A full-service, audience-focused creative agency, we’re based in Orlando, Florida, serving clients across the United States and beyond. Thank you for joining us. In this season of the podcast, we’re taking a look at the future: consumer behaviors on the fringe of the mainstream, that denote trends – and what they might mean for marketers.  Customer-centric organizations are always looking for new ways to cater to consumers’ evolving needs. Identifying and analyzing patterns in consumer purchase and usage behaviors can help inform new product development, service enhancements, or inspire entirely new customer experiences, marketing strategies, and advertising campaigns. Identifying trends in consumer behavior and their cultural contexts is a part of the work that many advertising agencies, management consultancies, research groups, and design firms undertake for clients. But there are also many standalone trend agencies, which focus on helping organizations imagine and plan for the future. We’ve talked about some of the practical applications of trends to marketing communication and brand strategy previously on this podcast, but today’s guest is an expert on the trend industry itself. Dr. Devon Powers is an Associate Professor in the Department of Advertising and Public Relations at Temple University. Her research explores branding, promotion, and how culture moves through the world. She’s the co-editor of Blowing Up The Brand: Critical Perspectives on Promotional Culture and the author of Writing The Record: The Village Voice and the Birth of Rock Criticism, as well as the book that inspired today’s conversation: On Trend: The Business of Forecasting the Future. To talk about her work and reflect on her deep dive into the world of trend forecasting, Dr. Powers is joining us today from her home office in Philadelphia. Devon, welcome to IN CLEAR FOCUS!

Devon Powers: Thank you so much, Adrian, for having me.

Adrian Tennant: Your work explores historical and contemporary consumer culture.  Your book about The Village Voice, entitled Writing the Record was published in 2013. What led you from there to On Trend?

Devon Powers: I’ve always been very interested in the people who work behind the scenes in culture. So not necessarily the people doing the writing or making music or making cultural products, but the people whose job it is to circulate culture and to sort of perform that job that’s kind of behind the scenes that we may not know about. So rock critics were one of those things and I think that futurists and trend forecasters and people who work in the future space are another one of those professions. So once I  learned about it, I was just totally hooked and fascinated.

Adrian Tennant: Your research for On Trend included interviews with many people working in the industry. Devon, do they typically agree with one another about what constitutes a trend?

Devon Powers: You know, that’s an interesting question because, on the one hand, I would say if you talk to people who work at different companies, they think that their companies are doing something that other companies are not doing. And I think that they tend to kind of see their work and their method is very unique. I think if you look at the work that’s being done at a lot of the different companies, though, not only are they doing work in a similar fashion, but they’re actually finding very similar things in the culture, so they’re finding similar trends. So in a way, the answer to your question is yes, because they agree, but in terms of how they might define a trend, if you ask them, “Can you define this thing that you’re looking at?” you’d probably get a dozen different definitions.

Adrian Tennant: So Devon, how do you characterize a trend? And how does it differ from a fad?

Devon Powers: So I think of a trend as what I call in the book, “a trajectory of social influence.” And what I mean by that is that trends are social. They involve people and they involve people looking at what other people are doing, whether directly in front of them or indirectly. And following what those other people are doing. And I think that that can take place over a very long period of time: it can be years or decades that it takes a trend to unfold or it can be these momentary social media trends that people on TikTok are looking at, Starbucks drinks and everybody’s getting the same drink. So that can happen. I think when we call something a fad though – for me, the difference between a trend and a fad is that a trend speaks to some kind of enduring need that people have. It’s something that taps into their values and their needs and something deeper in the culture that you can connect it to. And a fad is just something that’s ephemeral that you might forget, for instance, like a fidget spinner. We all may have one of those sitting around in our offices somewhere, or the cat has knocked it under the bed, but how many of us are using a fidget spinner anymore? But you know, two years ago – or maybe it was three years ago, I can’t even remember, it could have been longer than that – you know, they were kind of the thing that people had!

Adrian Tennant: On Trend provides a fascinating look at the beginnings of the industry and one of the early contributors you highlight is Everett Rogers. Could you explain his significance and how he influences the way we still think about consumers even today?

Devon Powers: Yeah, Everett Rogers is one of the most impactful thinkers I think that people don’t really know. He’s not a household name per se, but very influential because he developed what’s known as Diffusion of Innovations. So basically, diffusion of innovations is the idea that when you’re trying to figure out how change moves across a society, you have to look first at the people who are the most innovative or have the new idea or try the new practice. And then once those people start doing something, it kind of travels. I like to think of it like the weather. So it travels like a weather system across the society going to the early adopters and then the people who are in the middle and then finally to the laggards. And then often what happens is that the people who are innovative innovate again, right? And they start doing something different. That is just endemic to how we think about how change happens. And all marketers and advertisers use that idea, even if they don’t know Everett Rogers’s name and even if they don’t know the term diffusion of innovation, it’s basically how we assume that change happens.

Adrian Tennant: Well, bringing us right up to today, Amy Webb is the founder of The Future Today Institute and the author of the book, The Signals Are Talking, in which she offers six “times zones” to help define what we mean by the future. She offers up now: within the next 12 months; near term: which she defines as one to five years; mid-range: five to 10 years; long-range: 10 to 20 years; far-range: 20 to 30 years; and finally distant: more than 30 years. Devon, I’m curious, in the context of consumer trend forecasting, which of those timezones did you find agencies and industry professionals are most typically focused on?

Devon Powers: They don’t use terms that Webb uses in her book, but many of the people I talked to said that they were interested in “What’s next”, right? So “What’s next” would probably fit that now timeframe that Amy Webb is using and really they’re thinking in the next 18 months to 24 months. Because they’re working with businesses that are making decisions about what’s going to happen in a few quarters. and they want to do it in a way that’s measurable. But you do find them kind of flirting with the longer-term futures, especially when there’s a time horizon that you can point to as a landmark. So for example, 2030. You have a lot of businesses that are starting to think about 2030, especially around things like climate and climate neutrality and trying to change their sustainability practices. So 2030, and then the next one is 2050. So you do have those years that people fixate on, but more often than not, they’re talking about `no further than 24 months, really.

Adrian Tennant: Are there particular consumer product categories that are especially either popular or attractive to forecasting agencies?

Devon Powers: You will find trend forecasters in every sector. There are forecasters looking at food. There are forecasters looking at automotive. But if you’re talking about the kind of big, generalist agencies that I looked at, many of which are attached to advertising agencies or who do marketing and branding consulting as well, they’re definitely looking at luxury, they’re definitely looking at retail. They’re looking at hospitality and wellness. They’re looking at food and bev. So I think that those kinds of agencies are also going to be looking at issues that cut across different sectors. So for example, the future of payment would be one, right? So if you think about cryptocurrency, even things like finance and meme stocks and that kind of stuff. So you do have the sort of sector-specific forecasting, you have the generalist agencies, and then you have the issues that kind of cut across different industries.

Adrian Tennant: Do you think those reflect the revenue potential of those categories relative to one another? Or do you think some industries are just naturally associated with trends? So I’m thinking of fashion and apparel, for example.

Devon Powers: Yeah. You know, so fashion is its kind of own animal. Fashion has always had trend forecasting as a very known part of its industry for a lot longer, and you have companies like WGSN that do trend forecasting for fashion and that’s all they do. Another example is color. So color forecasting, which is connected to fashion, but not just fashion, also impacts things like materials, home goods, home furnishings, that kind of stuff. And those industries absolutely move in a trend-based fashion and they do it very intentionally. Fashion has seasons and the colors change every season and the cuts change every season, et cetera. Although, that is also getting kind of more mixed up these days. But then once you get beyond that, you know, I think one of the things that has happened is you’ve started to see fashion elements moving into other sectors. And by fashion elements, I just mean this idea that innovation is constant and you want to kind of keep moving forward. So retail is another really good example of that. And we’ve seen this during the pandemic – of companies that are really trying to rethink how they shape their retail spaces, how they move customers in and out – these kinds of things, and wanting to be at the cutting edge of that, not wanting to fall behind their competition.

Adrian Tennant: Devon, what did you learn about the research methodologies and philosophical approaches that trend forecasting companies adopt? Are they fairly consistent or do you think there are some significant differences between the organizations that you observed?

Devon Powers: I do think there are some differences. I would say that there’s a lot of familial resemblance. So even if companies aren’t using exactly the same, for instance, databases, if they’re not using exactly the same systems of say, sentiment analysis on social media, they’re all kind of doing the same thing insofar as they figure out what are cultural units – big parent trends – that they can then fit smaller trends into, and they track them across time and space and then use that to develop their reports and their bespoke research for their clients. But one of the things that really does differ and that has changed a lot since I started my research is AI. So you’re seeing a lot more companies use data science, trying to figure out how to build their own AIs to do some of this work, to quantify some of the things that had been more qualitative in the past. And the way that they’re doing that is very proprietary. So how they do it is going to differ from company to company and what they use their AIs for is also very different. So that’s really, to me, the kind of game-changing space and the thing that’s really shifting at the moment.

Adrian Tennant: I recently interviewed Thomas Klaffke, who’s Head of Research for TrendWatching, an Amsterdam-based firm with a global client base and one of the organizations you included in On Trend. Thomas happens to be based in Berlin, but he shared with me that he holds an M.A. In Future Studies. I’m curious Devon, in what kinds of ways, if at all, do academic studies around the future shape or inform commercial trend forecasting?

Devon Powers: That’s an interesting question. Trend forecasting as an industry you can get into without any specific training. I found that many of the people who I interviewed – I interviewed about 75 futurist and trend consultants for my book – and most of them did not have formal training in futures work. Many of them were journalists, they worked in fashion, they came out of marketing, they came out of advertising, and that was kind of what sort of put them on that path, in that direction. That said, though, there are a number of Future Studies programs. There are a number of Futurology programs that train people to be professional futurists, and there is a pipeline between those programs and some of these agencies, but people who are trained professionally as futurists also go into different sectors. They go into government, some of them go into more traditional consultancies like Deloitte or McKinsey, so there are some different career paths for people who have formal training in Future Studies and trends is only one of them.

Adrian Tennant: Let’s take a short break. We’ll be right back after these messages.

Adrian Tennant: Welcome back. I’m talking with Dr. Devon Powers, the author of On Trend: The Business of Forecasting the Future. Earlier this year, your work was the subject of a podcast interview with Julian Bleecker of The Near Future Laboratory. His organization produces design fiction: artifacts that appear to come from a not too distant future,  that have interesting assumptions and backstories built into them. What kinds of methodologies or approaches have you come across since On Trend was published that you think have the potential to be useful in the context of commercial trends forecasting, which maybe have been overlooked?

Devon Powers: Yeah. So I think design is a really interesting element and prototyping is very interesting. That is one of those things that does draw on a different skill set and there is some more formal training for people who are working in speculative design in that way. And I think of a company like IDEO, which has been very big in that space for a long time and design thinking – Tim Brown brought that idea and coined that. So I do think that that is an opportunity and it’s one that some companies are starting to flirt with, but like you said, because of that specialized training, and because there are some big players in that space, I didn’t find that a lot of the more marketing and branding-based companies that I were looking at were getting into speculative design. There’s an interesting company called Impossible out of London, and they are kind of doing the most what I would say, like it’s a hybrid between some of this market- brand-based consultancy that people like Brain Reserve or Sparks & Honey do, but melding that with a more speculative design element and focus. So they’re a really interesting company to look at.

Adrian Tennant: And you just mentioned Brain Reserve – we should say that’s the company that was founded by Faith Popcorn.

Devon Powers: It is. Yeah. That company was founded in 1974 and Faith Popcorn has been running it ever since.

Adrian Tennant: And she came from an advertising background, so I learned from your book.

Devon Powers: She did, yeah. She worked at an agency and she and her partner left that agency to start consulting companies on where to go next, which was a very interesting and pretty new idea in the early seventies.

Adrian Tennant: Right. And I think she was interesting too because she was a female entrepreneur, quite unusual for her time, but also with that background in advertising, perhaps had a sense of what the client might be looking for, or wasn’t getting from traditional methods of research might be

Devon Powers: Yeah, absolutely. I think she was really, I mean, it’s a little cliche to say, but she was really forward-thinking in terms of what kinds of needs she could fill for companies that weren’t being filled by those traditional agencies. We need to remember advertising was very different back then. How people thought about brands was very different and much more limited than we think about brands now. So I think looking at innovation, looking at, innovators in the market space was one of those things that Faith Popcorn helped to bring into what is the standard practice now.

Adrian Tennant: On Trend was published in 2019. Since its publication, the world has, of course, endured a pandemic, and at the time we’re recording this, COVID-19 is still a cause for serious concern. Of course, many businesses want to know which customer behaviors that emerged during lockdowns and restrictions are likely to stick if and when COVID becomes less of a concern. Many consumers were forced to purchase essential goods such as food online. And in response, we’ve seen more retailers implement omnichannel solutions, integrating online ordering with collection in-store or curbside pickup. Some observers have characterized all of this as an acceleration of trends that already existed pre-pandemic. Devon, do you think that’s a plausible thesis or is it intellectually lazy? Is it more like what author and retail industry futurist Doug Stephens describes as “a once-in-a-century wormhole, a wrinkle in time that will alter the future completely”?

Devon Powers: I don’t think it’s an either-or answer to that, right? I think we can say that this is a once-in-a-century, once-in-a-lifetime occurrence, for which it will be very difficult to see where things are going. And we can also say that it’s accelerating trends that existed. So for example, curbside pickup was not invented during the pandemic. So to say that it’s a once-in-a-lifetime thing – yeah, it’s not, it’s not really accurate because people we’re doing that already. It did push a lot of retailers to move into that space much more aggressively than they might have in the past. It also pushed things like Instacart. Right. So people would go and shop for you, these services like that exploded during the pandemic, but they existed previously. I think the things that are truly game-changing and shattering will be a little harder to ascertain. But one of them that I do think that we will think about are masks and the fact that people wear masks in public space, that they wear them, and you don’t stop the person and say, “Hey, what are you doing? Take that off. I can’t see your face.” Right? We don’t assume that somebody is coming into shoplift when their face is covered. That to me – it’s such a monumental change. And it’s one of those things that I think in five years we will continue to see and we’ll go, “Oh, right. Remember the days when people didn’t wear masks in public?” And what that says for companies that are, for instance, moving into facial recognition. And we’re using those either to say prevent theft, or they were using them for marketing purposes or to track customers. That’s entirely different, it just changes that practice and that game right there. So, those are some of the signals I think we should be paying attention to.

Adrian Tennant: COVID-19 has also prompted a lot of trend forecasting related to the portability of white-collar work and, by extension, the potential impact that a greater incidence of remote work could have on every aspect of our lives, including transit, housing, office spaces, retail, and education. Researchers at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business published a report in March of last year, which found that 34 percent of all US jobs can plausibly be performed at home. And according to that study, 48 percent of jobs in Silicon Valley can be done remotely, which is more than in any other metropolitan area. Whereas in Cape Coral and Fort Myers here in Florida, only 26 percent of jobs can. Devon, what’s your take on the idea of a remote working revolution?

Devon Powers: Well, that’s another one of those trends that I actually think has been very long coming. You know, there was a report published by the Institute for the Future in 1971 about telework, which is what that one… And then they were thinking about telephones, you know, and very expensive, large rudimentary computers. They weren’t thinking of people having even more powerful computers in their pockets as we do with our phones. So I do think that that has gotten a big push during the pandemic. I think that people are expecting a lot more flexibility and a lot more latitude about where they want to work. But I think that’s also part of just a broader trend of people making more demands on their employers to sort of accommodate their needs. And that extends to things like diversity and ability and maternity leave and all of these kinds of things. So what I think we’re seeing is kind of the creation of a more – when I say more flexible workspace, but flexible doesn’t just mean “I work at home” or “I work in the office”, it can also mean maybe “I have to bring my kid to work today,” that kind of thing –  and I do think we’re gonna see a real expansion of that. My favorite story around this is if you look at Apple, which simultaneously opened a $5 billion office space and said, “You only have to come in three days”. Both of those things happened at the same time. So those are actually competing trends, but they speak to the same thing, which is “If I want to be in an office where I have a wonderful chair and a beautiful view, I want that. And then the days I want to be home with my kids, I want that.” 

Adrian Tennant: In On Trend, you observed that most trend forecasting occurs in major metropolitan cities in the developed or at least developing world, but you also introduce readers to alternative contexts, including Afrofuturism. Could you explain what it is and why you felt it was important to include it in the book?

Devon Powers: Yeah. So Afrofuturism is basically the idea of looking at the future through an Afro-centric lens. So it means thinking about how does the future sustain and promote the interests of Black people and what does that do to our imaginaries about what’s necessary in the future?  Afrofuturism is also very much a different paradigm for thinking about the future in a less linear fashion. And it promotes the idea that the future is intimately tied to the past. So for instance, we can’t think about what’s going to be happening tomorrow or in five years or in 10 years, without thinking about the legacies of history that have impacted Black people. And I think that was really important to put into the book because often when we think about visions of the future, we think about them as they pertain sort of generically to the human race. But we don’t think about how those kinds of generic visions are often coming from one particular sector of people. They often come from very wealthy people. They often come from white people. They often come from men. And the example I can use of that is so perfect, which is Blue Origin, right? So Jeff Bezos launching into space and Richard Branson a few days before that. And the idea that space needs to be colonized and that people [have] got to get off this planet, right? It’s such a privileged way of thinking because there are billions of people who are not going to be able to get off this planet. So I think thinking about that as a priority for the human race ignores a lot of other things that are happening around the world, that are much greater priorities for more people.

Adrian Tennant: I think one of the most vivid sections of the book for me was when you describe the Afronaut. Could you talk a little bit about that?

Devon Powers: Yeah. So one of the, stories that I tell in the book is about an artist named Ayodamola Okunseinde. Ayodamola Okunseinde is a Nigerian-American artist and he In 2015, walked around Harlem with a video camera dressed as a what he called an Afronaut, which was like a Black astronaut. And what he imagined was that he was coming from a point in the future to come back to the present time and kind of help Black people understand the kinds of developments that had happened in the future. So he had the spacesuit and the spacesuit was supposed to protect him from racism and do all of these other things. And I think the idea behind that really is when we think about the problems we want to solve, how are we conceptualizing those problems? And if we conceptualize them in a way that looks at diversity, that looks at intersectionality, and that looks at the different identities that people have, then we come up with different kinds of solutions. A favorite example that I tell students around this is many of the early health tracker apps did not track menstruation. And so you think like who was in the room to create an app that tracks your breathing and your sleep and your nutrition and your steps, and it doesn’t track the most fundamental thing to half the people on the planet. You know, it tells you a lot.

Adrian Tennant: In what ways did any pre-existing assumptions or opinions you held about the trend forecasting industry change or evolve as you researched and wrote the book?

Devon Powers: Yeah. So when I started working on this book, I didn’t really understand at all that people could get paid to anticipate and predict and even manufacture ideas about the future. It blew my mind completely. And when I would talk to friends about it, they would be like, “What?” and it blew their minds as well! So just the idea that there was all of this imagination and speculation and forecasting and prediction that was going on in a commercial fashion that could be packaged and sold I found to be absolutely profound. And I think what changed for me also is once you tell people about this, they go, “Well, what’s the difference between that and looking at a crystal ball? Aren’t they just charlatans? Isn’t that just fake and sorcery? Is any of it real?” And I came to the conclusion that it is real. I came to the conclusion that if you have a person who is well-positioned, who knows the right people to talk to, who has insight into what businesses are doing, who is observant about the culture, they can have a lot of pretty good ideas about things that are going to happen and not just that they can have influence that can sort of press the accelerator on some things that are happening as well. So it gave me a lot more faith than I think the average person walking around has about the idea of forecasting the future.

Adrian Tennant: Does that put us in a better position as a society, when we look at some of these huge challenges, like climate change, for example?

Devon Powers: You know, I do. I’m going to be an optimist here, although it’s very easy to be pessimistic when you think about something like climate change. But to me, predictions and forecasts exist in the hope of encouraging people to one: understand where things are going, and two: potentially intervene when they can. Right? So forecasts are not destiny so much as they are strong suggestions, but they mean that there’s potential for people to do something else, you know? And that’s what I hope is happening around climate change. And I think it’s starting to because the signals are so powerful, right? It’s very hard to deny that there’s not something wrong happening right now when you see floods in Germany and in Turkey and in China and gigantic wildfires in Canada and Siberia, you know. When you see these things, that is an urgent wake-up call, I think. And my hope is that that is what makes businesses and regular citizens kind of wake up.

Adrian Tennant: So the future, as you say, is not a destination, it’s not for definite – we have the opportunity to change what the future looks like?

Devon Powers: Yes, absolutely. We do. And I think that the idea that the future is kind of in our hands as individuals and as a collective is a really powerful idea. And it’s one that I think everybody needs to attach to because when you give up that power, you cede it to people who are actually already intervening, and who are kind of making their visions of the future known and making those decisions for the rest of us. And that is, again, my strong, optimistic hope that more people take these methods and use them and use them, not just in businesses, but in elementary schools and in communities and in, nonprofits and kind of all over.

Adrian Tennant: What’s been on your mind recently?

Devon Powers: Oh, gosh. What has been on my mind recently? Lots of things are always on my mind! Well, yeah, I mean, obviously climate has been on my mind a lot, because of the news, which is seasonal. It’s very interesting how that happens. But one of the other things that I’ve been thinking a lot about is the future as a brand or the future as a trend. And what I mean by that is I think that futures are very, very trendy right now. I think that the idea of thinking about the future and of talking in the language of futures and predictions is just like it’s hot! And it’s way bigger than it was when I started doing this research five years ago. And so that to me is indicative of just the foment and the change that people really desire and want and need. So much of that came out in the pandemic, and it’s coming out in positive and negative ways. It came out for instance, like the George Floyd protests, it came out through this heightened awareness around environmentalism, around disability rights, around things like that.  I think it’s also coming out in a very ugly fashion and things like gun violence, and just this kind of, almost like ticking time bomb of desire to like to change, and change kind of fundamentally things about how we live. So, that’s what I’ve been thinking about. And, I’m just very interested in how. The question of how to mobilize some of this energy and point it in different directions is kind of the question of the day for me.

Adrian Tennant: Do you have any plans for another book?

Devon Powers: Yeah. I’ve been thinking about a lot of different things. You know, I have a lot of ideas floating around in my head, but what I will say is I think these landmark years, like 2030, 2050, right? I think 2020 was one of those years. If you look back at books that had been written from the Eighties until the Nineties, many of them were looking at 2020 as the year that something big was going to happen. It turns out something big did happen, not one that many of those people got right in terms of their predictions. And I think that 2030 is the next one, but I actually think 2050 is the real kind of big moment, right? That people think, for instance, like The Singularity could happen by 2050, which is, for people who don’t know, the merging of our consciousness with machines and the Internet becoming conscious, right? Or that all of these kinds of big things we’re seeing with climate change could happen by 2050. So I want to think more about that these kinds of banner years and what they signify, and what the predictions about them are going to be.

Adrian Tennant: Devon, if IN CLEAR FOCUS listeners would like to learn more about you, your work, including On Trend as well as your other books and articles, where can they find you?

Devon Powers: I am on Twitter @DevJPow. I also have a website, DevonPowers.com. My book On Trend is on all the major online retailers, if anybody wants to buy it. And I am a Professor at Temple University, so I have a page there. They can find me there.

Adrian Tennant: Devon, thank you very much for being our guest this week on IN CLEAR FOCUS.

Devon Powers: Adrian. Thank you so much for this conversation. I really enjoyed it.

Adrian Tennant: Coming up next time on IN CLEAR FOCUS.

Thomas Klaffke: We’re always looking through a certain frame a certain lens when we look at things. When you’re analyzing different people, for example, and what their idea of the future is that really also shows you the ideologies and the belief systems that are behind that.

Adrian Tennant: That’s an interview with Thomas Klaffke, Head of Research at the global insights firm TrendWatching – next week on IN CLEAR FOCUS. Thanks to my guest this week, Dr. Devon Powers, an Associate Professor in the Department of Advertising and Public Relations at Temple University, and the author of On Trend: The Business of Forecasting The Future. You’ll find a transcript with links to the resources we discussed today on the, IN CLEAR FOCUS page at bigeyeagency.com under “insights”, just select “podcast.” And if you enjoyed this episode, please consider following us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Amazon Music, Audible, YouTube, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Thank you for listening to IN CLEAR FOCUS, produced by Bigeye. I’ve been your host, Adrian Tennant. Until next week, goodbye.