Читать книгу Non-Obvious 2017 Edition - Рохит Бхаргава - Страница 18

Last December I picked up the year end edition of Entrepreneur magazine which promised to illuminate trends to watch in the coming year. Earlier that same week, a special double issue of BusinessWeek magazine had arrived in the mail making a similar promise.

It was the end of the year and the trend season was in full swing.

Just like New Year’s resolutions to lose weight, trend forecasting is popular in December. Unfortunately, the side effect of this annual media ritual is an abundance of lazy predictions and vague declarations.

For entertainment over the years, I have started to collect them as standing memorials to the volume of pitiful predictions that bombarded us at the end of every year.

To illustrate my point, here are a few of the worst offending most obvious “trends” shared near the end of last year. For the sake of kindness,

I removed reference to which particular publication or writer a trend came from before listing them below:

 “It’s all about the visuals.”

 “Streaming video content.”

 “The Year Of Drones has arrived. Really.”

 “Content Marketing will continue to be the place to be.”

 “Fantasy Sports”

 “Virtual Reality”

 “Change will be led by smart home technology.”

Virtual Reality? Really?

Not to ruin the suspense, but I don’t believe any of these are actually trends. Some are just random buzzwords or the names of platforms. Others are hopelessly broad, useless and, yes, obvious.

None of them are a unique idea describing the accelerating present.

Meanwhile, all of us as media consumers see these predictions with varying levels of skepticism. To better understand why, let’s review the four main reasons why most trend predictions fail the believability test.