The ability to anticipate trends before your competitors recognize and react to them is a key indicator of business success, the Entrepreneur.com article “7 Tips For Getting Good at Spotting Trends” explains. If you can predict the interests of customers, you obviously have a leg up in appealing to them through products, services, values, and communications. But what makes some people so adept at predicting the taste of the market? Follow these tips to hone your trendsetting ability:

1. Know your market’s sensibilities. What does your target customer read? What do they watch? What do they eat? What do they wear? The trendsetter will learn as much as they can about everything that’s relevant to their market. To identify a trend before it becomes obvious, look for common themes across disciplines and think about the psychological underpinnings behind the attraction to something. Sometimes conveying the right message and values at the right time can be just as beneficial as introducing a new product or services.
2. Tune into your customer’s anxiety, stress and desire for answers or solutions. Remember, it’s not only about what they like – think about what they don’t like, what they are missing out on, and what problems you can solve for them. To do this, you’ll have to develop empathy for your audience.
3. Continuously read about trends. Scour industry publications, major newspapers, business magazines, blogs and more for all the hints you can find. You’ll obviously get a ton of information from reading specifically about your industry, but you’ll also benefit greatly from staying up on pop culture and other broad topics.
4. Talk to your prospective customers. Social media makes it easy to informally survey your audience. Ask them about their favorite activities, music, vacation spots, and whatever else you want to know. You can also keep an eye on a broader audience by searching keywords (i.e. tanning) on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.
5. Know your customer’s diversions. Once you understand what your customer likes, you can predict what they don’t even know they like yet! This could mean a new service, product, or type of diversification that they might have never even known existed, but you can guess that they would use it and would trust you enough to buy it from you.
6. Most decisions are “Predictably Irrational.” Unfortunately, you can gain a perfect understanding of the rational choices your customers make and why, and then they might go and do something completely irrational. It’s the nature of humans. The only way to try to combat this is to gain an understanding of the irrational things that affect people’s decisions. A book titled Predictably Irrational, by Dan Ariely discusses this and presents case studies that will help you understand how rational and irrational factors combine to form a decision.
7. Connect the dots. Finally, you’ve got to put all the information you’ve gathered together, consider the impact of irrational behavior and try to guess what trend will be in vogue at what time. You won’t always be right, but when you are, it can have a huge impact on your business.

Click here to read the article from Entrepreneur.com.