The Culture County Speaks to Joanna Feeley

Do you know what you’ll be wearing, eating, or how you will speak with your friends and family in 2030?... Joanna Feeley may be able to shed some light on our future behaviours.  Joanna is a futures expert and founder and CEO of TrendBible, a trend forecasting agency. She has advised brands, charities, investors and governments all over the world to help them understand what individuals and communities will think, feel and do differently in two to five years’ time.

Ahead of the fourth annual Bright Ideas Gathering on 2 November 2024, The Bright Ideas Gathering is an event that brings together visionary thinkers and creative change-makers for a day of bold ideas and thought provoking conversations. Joanna has kindly sat down with the Culture County to explain the process of trend forecasting, the certain trends that didn't make it and how retailers decide what products to put in front of the customer. 

Q. Hi Joanna, firstly, welcome to Durham, could you give a brief overview of your talk and what you hope the audience will take away from the Bright Ideas Gathering?

A. Thank you! I’m really looking forward to the event, both to speak and to see the other amazing keynotes. My talk is a behind-the-scenes look at how the brands and retailers we buy from decide what to put in front of us as consumers. They spend two- to five years profiling what we will need and crave, anticipating our tastes before we know ourselves what we’ll want. I wanted to explore the tension between what we consider to be our personal tastes and autonomous choices with what brands plan for us to have. I’ve had over 25 fascinating years in the trend forecasting industry looking at consumer behavioural psychology, how influence spreads among different groups of people and the motivations of brands and I’m going to explore that in my talk.

Q. How does the process of trend forecasting work? Is it a seasonal operation or are you consistently monitoring shoppers’ activity and what people are watching and talking about?

A. We track and monitor trends all the time, in fact we use an app called Slack that pings constantly as our trend team and international trend scouts share new ideas, innovations and seeds of an emerging trend from all over the world. Our job is to cluster these together and make them meaningful for a variety of sectors, markets and companies. We do publish a forecast of four trends every six months and these showcase trends two years ahead for the home and interiors industry. If we’re commissioned by a brand in say the kitchen or domestic appliance industry, they will be working five years ahead so we have to use different methodology to forecast that far ahead. It’s less about predicting the future when you’re working that far ahead, and more about understanding the context in which the future consumer will live and creating a series of preferable and probable scenarios that could occur from that.

Q. Is it hard to separate personal opinions on trends when forecasting or is this something that you learn to separate over the years?

A. I learned at the very start of my career that personal opinion has to be carefully expressed. It’s fine for us all to have opinions of course, but when you’re working on a trend forecast for a global corporate business and they are expecting millions of consumers to be drawn towards it, you need to include as much diverse opinion and thinking as possible when you are crafting it to ensure it lands well with multiple intended audiences. If you exclude certain groups from the forecasting and ideation process, you can get a nasty shock when that idea hits the market. I can have an opinion, but if the audience for one of my clients trends is an eight-year old boy, my opinion isn’t going to be all that relevant! So really our focus is on understanding what’s motivating the end consumer and to represent that. I have noticed as I’ve got older and more experienced that I am seeing trends come around for the second or third time, and whilst that might have a particular meaning for me, for a younger audience, they will explore that trend like it’s completely new and fresh. We have definitely forecast décor trends before that I don’t personally like, but that have sold really well to younger audience, there is a sort of generational aesthetic.

Q. Can you remember a time when a brand, sector or even the media was convinced on a trend that never materialised, an example I can think of was 3D TV’s, which threatened to make a breakthrough in the early 2010’s but ended up being seen as more of a gimmick, niche product?

A. So many examples! There are trends that people get very over-excited about that don’t come to fruition, for example even in recent years we’ve had the ‘Metaverse’ and before that NFTs and before that cryptocurrency, even the Smart Home promised so much that really hasn’t delivered much value in over 15 years since it first emerged. There is a bit of an obsession with tech trends here as you can see, where there is heavy investment in innovation but the promise of mass-market uptake is just not evidenced.

Q. How has trend forecasting changed in the last 10 years, with the growth of personalised advertising, online shopping, supermarket loyalty schemes and just generally a whole lot more data. Is this something that has helped forecasting or is it still more of a manual process which data can’t predict?

A. There is more data but data only really ever tells us what’s happened before. Humans are intrinsically fickle and illogical so forecasting future trends isn’t simply a case of spotting a pattern and projecting that forward. There are all kinds of ‘chaotics’ that come along and impact a consumer’s mindset, tastes and needs. It’s what makes the job so interesting really. Part of trend forecasting is actually planning and imagining multiple future scenarios and mapping these out or tracing back from a ‘preferred’ future a brand would like to create. So data and research make up part of the method, but so do creativity and imagination. Trend forecasting both a social science and an art.

Joanna Feeley will be among 13 other guest speakers attending the fourth annual Bright Ideas Gathering on Saturday 2 November at the Gala in Durham City. The Bright Ideas Gathering is an event that brings together visionary thinkers and creative change-makers for a day of bold ideas and stimulating conversations.

Discover more about the event here.