← All topics

Consumer behavior & culture

Trends, foresight & futures research

27 indexed claims · 12 guests · peaked 2026-Q2

Trends, foresight & futures research

Overview

These conversations reveal an industry at an inflection point: the professional standard has shifted from hindsight and real-time intelligence toward genuine foresight, and guests across sectors feel the urgency of that shift differently. The central tension is methodological — foresight is not prediction, as strategic foresight practitioner Mina McBride insists, yet every insights professional is being asked to act like a futurist in an environment where the pace of change makes even five-year planning treacherous. Meanwhile, Oksana Sobol, Laurie Demeritt, and Gloria Reardon wrestle with a practical corollary: how do you distinguish a durable trend from a fad worth exploiting briefly, and where do early signals actually live? What emerges is less a map of the future than a craft guide — for scanning, for building scenarios, and for getting organizations emotionally ready to act before certainty arrives.

From the corpus

  • Synthetic data is not a current fit for forward-looking innovation work: it is a model of past behavior, not real current consumer behavior, and it cannot predict the next big trend — for flavor foresight she must instead watch away-from-home channels, restaurants, and chefs and track how those signals trickle down to CPG. — Kerry-Ellen Schwartz, Ep. 63 · cl-kerry-ellen-schwartz-014
  • A durable food trend requires two conditions: authentic baseline consumer demand (not just purchase interest) and alignment with what is happening in the broader food culture — organic exploded because consumers believed it was healthier AND cultural discourse about food safety was rising simultaneously. — Laurie Demeritt, Ep. 50 · cl-laurie-demeritt-017
  • To find emerging trends early, brands should 'befriend the dissatisfied' — talk to consumers who dislike or have stopped buying the brand, not to win them back, but to understand how their own core consumer is evolving, because trends disseminate down from disaffected leading consumers. — Laurie Demeritt, Ep. 50 · cl-laurie-demeritt-018
  • Triangulating hindsight, insight, and foresight at Saucony — equity in trail running, ethnographic evidence of burnout on overbuilt shoes, and foresight signals about life-fluidity and personalization — produced two product franchises that became the brand's best-performing trail lines. — Lindsey Goodman, Ep. 13 · cl-lindsey-goodman-006
  • Insights work can no longer rely on hindsight or real-time alone; foresight has become the center of gravity, and every insights professional must now operate as a futurist — even though the accelerating pace of change makes 5- and 10-year planning nearly impossible. — Shanon Adams, Ep. 49 · cl-50th-009
  • The most exciting evolution of strategic insights is using AI-augmented analytical and role-play simulation to construct alternate futures and starting points — sorting hundreds of scenarios down to the five or ten that matter is a perfect use case for the new tools. — Christopher Khoury, Ep. 47 · cl-christopher-khoury-019
  • A useful foresight practice begins not with predicting the next hot trend but with cataloguing the things — demographics, climate — that can be known with high confidence five years out, then back-casting to today's decisions. — Tina Tonielli, Ep. 2 · cl-tina-tonielli-021
  • Visiting a high-confidence future state and then looking backward gives organizations the gift of hindsight — once people work past the dystopian shock, they discover they can act now in ways that change the outcome. — Tina Tonielli, Ep. 2 · cl-tina-tonielli-022

Contributing guests

Episodes in Trends, foresight & futures research

See Consumer behavior & culture mapped across all quarters →