How Fads Affect Our World Today

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“Trends spread like viruses.” Every day, new events impacting our daily lives generate more (or less) creative and innovative ideas in our relationships with people and businesses.

Trends have the power to focus us on our path of the here and now. They are the forces of wide-ranging change that will shape the future of our society. As consumer trends accelerate and spread, they provide constant inspiration to fuel effective business ideas and tactics. You are always learning by keeping up with trends. New tools, new events to attend, new ways to be more efficient. This gives you a wider range of work. So you can try more things and use them to generate new ideas. 

Every day, the trends we come across in a way consume us. It's whatever's happening at a given time, and can be broadly connected to popularity. Trends that experience widespread adoption can be attributed to the following driving elements: the right place, the right time, the right moment, and the right people. Whether it’s memes, viral videos, catchphrases, or the latest design trends; why do certain ideas or activities capture the public imagination? How do trends emerge? Who is responsible for them? And what defines a “trend” as opposed to a short-lived fad? It’s often difficult to spot the start of trends because they boil down to social forces among which styles or tastes change. Once the changes have been shared and adopted by a critical mass, they gain a footing, become firmly embedded in the public psyche, and may even find themselves returning as part of a cyclical process.

The term “viral” is often used interchangeably with “trend”, though the two are not the same. Trends, as we’ve said, are driven by taste and style, and establish themselves firmly for a given period of time thanks to common sentiment. “Viral” describes the rapid spreading of something from individual to individual, nowadays specifically relating to media and marketing, and is far more transient.

But the real question is who is responsible for creating these trends? It’s simple: trends are spread by people. Everyone has a specific role in making an idea or activity a trend. The Diffusion of Innovation Theory (DOI) best describes the types of people that make a trend possible. According to this theory, the following groups are responsible for trends: 

• Innovators are the ones responsible for bringing an idea to life. 
• Early adopters, who have significant influence, then drive trends towards becoming a reality. 
• The early majority are fans or followers of early adopters and constitute a big piece of the masses. 
• The late majority don’t easily jump onto a trend. They’ll first observe how the early majority is doing before joining in. 
• Then the laggards are the last adopters of trends. Once a trend reaches the laggards it will often die down, or perhaps establish itself as some kind of “norm”.

Besides the theory, there are many different effects that can technically be connected to a trend such as the Band-Wagon Effect. It is basically a term used to describe the likelihood for people to adopt or take up certain behaviours, styles, or attitudes simply because other people are doing those things. Does this seem familiar? The Band-Wagon effect is very similar to our topic of trends because of the fact that people in both scenarios think that because other people are doing that they must also act or think in that certain way so they become more ‘likeable’. 

Written By: Twarita Verma