Leveraging Industry Trends – The Secret Sauce for Business Growth

Category: Academics

The ability to identify and leverage industry trends could play a decisive factor in the success of any organisation. Organisations that are able to successfully leverage trends are able to seize new opportunities, identify upcoming threats and create a powerful strategy that gets results. Let us have a look at the different trends that need to be analysed. Market Trends Which is the market segment that is showing the highest growth and why? Technology Trends What are the major technology trends? Which technologies represent important opportunities or disruptive threats? Competitor Analysis Trends What are the latest developments with respect to competitors? Which are the areas they are focusing on? Regulatory Trends Which regulatory trends may affect your business? Which regulations and taxes affect customer demand? Societal Trends Which shifts in cultural or societal values affect your business? Which trends might influence buyer behaviour? Primary research wherein interviews are conducted with individuals from the industry ecosystem such as customers, competitors, channel partners are an effective way to identify the trends. From a secondary research perspective, some of the ways that trends can be identified are by analysing the latest developments of key companies, evaluating the conference topics in that industry, reading interviews of industry thought leaders of the industry. By Abbas Naqvi, Director, NextWave Research Solutions, a market research company in Pune.