As Global Consumer Trends and Futuring Manager at Ford, Sheryl Connelly’s work sees her analysing everything from alien invasions to the more realistic trend of aging population to determine the future strategies and prospects of the company.
Here, Connelly talks to Ruth Dawson about how predictions feed into production.
When you have identified a trend, where do you go from there? How does your work affect design and production?
In the early days, we would come up with the trends, and talk about the implications for Ford. We were a push organisation: we’d have to knock on doors and ask to go into meetings, to share what we found. If we were talking to designers, for example, we would take them through the trends and explain how Ford might design a better car. This, of course, was very naïve because we are not designers, So it was decided that we would avoid that.
Where we could contribute was to highlight things that were not within the view of the experts closest to the vehicle. We started to talk about trends, and looked outside the auto industry and found illustrations of how other categories were responding. That became a springboard for discussion for the experts who were best able to determine what implications it would have for Ford.
Are there any trends you paid less attention to in the past which have turned out to be quite important?
Because we have a three-year development timeframe, what we watch is fairly slow moving. If it were to change rapidly, we’re probably watching the wrong things. I always explain how we think of trends by using denim as an illustration. Denim has been around for 150 years and, in the early 1900s, it was often associated with a lower social economic status because it was a work uniform; it wasn’t expensive, it was durable. If you look at denim today, it’s high fashion. Consumers are willing to spend a great deal of money on a pair of jeans. That is a manifestation of a trend: it’s a shift in a deep-rooted value, attitude or behaviour.
By contrast, if you were to look at styles of denim – boot cut, acid wash – those are fads. If the things we watched changed that rapidly, by the time it played out and you’ve built a car around it, it may no longer be relevant. I can’t really think of anything that I can say we didn’t see coming, but there were instances where we were focusing on a symptom and not a cause. We used to track middle-market squeeze, recognising that low cost producers were moving up the value chain, trying to offer more premium goods, and, at the same time, luxury producers were trying to work their way downstream. The middle-market – the bread and butter brands like Ford – felt that they were being squeezed out…
This interview first appeared in the Q3 issue of Megatrends magazine. To read the rest of this article, download your free copy today.
