You need to continuously monitor trends, to spot opportunities, and prevent problems. Now depending upon your market, this could be one of the biggest challenges.

You don’t need to be guilty of missing a vital trend, that puts your business out of company. Trends on your company happen in several locations. By way of instance, consumer tastes may change. Campbell Soup, as an instance, is looking at ways to modify its legendary, longstanding poultry soup recipe due to perceived changes in consumer preferences.

Trends in technology are just another huge source of risk and benefit. You can also be impacted by trends in economic conditions, politics, regulatory, and governmental acts, in addition to trends in foreign nations.

There’s a lot happening out there. First I determine whether the trend is going to have a huge impact or a small effect on my company. Then I assess if the trend is quickly moving or slow moving.

“I create a 2 x 2 matrix, like this one, and place the names of different trends inside of it. This way, my staff and I get aligned around which ones we are paying attention to. Now I would not say that you should completely ignore low impact tendencies, but clearly you wish to concentrate on the large ones. Those are those that can get you in trouble if you ignore them”, told us James Hendriksen, senior marketing specialist at HowDoDesign.com.

Trends which have a huge effect and are quickly moving demand immediate attention. So delegate someone from your team to examine it and make recommendations. Try to avoid a fast, knee-jerk reaction. You might make things worse.

You don’t need to be guilty of that which we call in advertising overdriving your headlights. Now from my experience, those who give me the most concern are the huge impact slow moving tendencies.

They are slow-moving, so there is no sense of urgency until bam! 1 day you are staring at something which you have known about for quite a very long time, but you are way behind your competition in coping with it. Not good.

So how can you keep up with trends? You will need to prepare a way to monitor what is happening out there, or what I call listening posts. By way of example, you may want to hire a marketing research company to watch trends in attitudes and tastes.

Also, monitor social networking channels to listen to the conversations that customers are having about you and your opponents. Their advice may guide you whenever you need it most.

How can you deal with trends as soon as you spot them? Well, you need to ask yourself a important question.Will I allow this trend change what we are doing or will I go out and change what this trend is performing? To put it differently, you need to determine if you are a market taker or a market shaper.

In fact, you are going to need to be a little of both. It is possible to change some but not all of tendencies. Needless to say, you will need the resources and abilities to do that.You should choose where to concentrate to get the maximum with the tools you have, and avoid trying to change things you can not. For those, you will simply have to adapt and survive.