Trends-Atlantic

Where cutting-edge trends are the most developed and the most prevalent is where we find the greatest product innovation by the smartest companies. Competitive advantage lies in being able to drive through to market those commercial initiatives which promise a profit-laden response to the ever-shifting appetite for change and experimentation amongst consumer tribes.

For the first time, the coverage of the Future Foundation’s proprietary trend-monitoring programme has been extended to cover the United States of America and the analysis below sets out to compare - by reference to some of the major consumer trends of the day, both salient and volatile - contemporary British and European consumers with their American counterparts. Put together they comprise, after all, around 800 million human beings and in the setting of all the glorious diversity and boundless opportunity this implies we ask:-

• How far the big, the exploitable trends are likely to evolve and what forms they are likely to take as they morph into the future against much altered economic prospects.
• Whether the widespread presumption that such trends come from the United States and then penetrate the rest of the western world is a truth or a myth.