Keeping Up with the Trends

Let’s face it. If you’re in PR, you probably have an interest of what’s hot and what’s not in every industry. Fashion, food and beverage, beauty, tourism, event planning—you name it, it’s got a trend. And in PR, it’s our job to know what these trends are for our clients. Luckily for us, we have so many resources to research the latest trends that it makes it easy to find what we’re looking for. In fact, we have so much information at our fingertips that we have to weed out the info that’s irrelevant to our client.

Here are some tips you can use to make your research much easier:

• Know Your Competitors: If you are representing a chef who specializes in Southern cooking, don’t check out what chefs who specialize in Italian or French cooking are doing with their restaurants or cuisine—the more efficient search would be to see what Paula Deen is cookin’ up with some butter.
• PowerPoint is Your Friend After All: Instead of typing up extremely long reports, use PowerPoint to create organized slides of your findings. You can summarize your findings much easier in bullets, and then show examples with pictures. Make it a fun learning experience for your client as well as your staff.
• Split ‘Em Up: More often than not, there are many trends going on in your industry of research. Make sure to create categories for the trends that differ from one another and add anything that goes with the trend. For example, there is a “glamour” trend going on in fashion next spring, and it would be important to add the accessories that go with that trend to the report.
• Learn by Doing: Now that you know the basics, exercise what you know! Trends are all around you, and they’re just waiting to be discovered and acted out.

This guest blog was written by PRowl Public Relations staff member, Ashley Kraynak.