• by J. Walker Smith , Op-Ed Contributor, July 2, 2025

From all my years in research and consulting, I think I’ve learned a thing or two about marketing worth sharing. Enduring fundamentals, mostly—yet often overlooked. So, over the course of my biweekly column this year, I want to share some snippets for your consideration. I hope they’re helpful.

This week’s thought: Marketers are trend-followers, not trend-setters.

Marketers like to celebrate creativity and innovation. But it is a curious kind of creativity and innovation.

Because it’s never the breaking edge of the wave. It’s always the surfer along for the ride. Which is to say that in marketing, originality is always derivative.

Marketers are trend-followers, not trend-setters.

This is inherent to the very nature of marketing. The essence of a brand’s value proposition is its solution to a problem. There is no such thing as a solution without a problem. So, the first thing a brand must do is identify the problem to be solved. That means following the problem, if you will.

It’s also inherent to the execution of marketing. It’s harder and costlier to teach than to persuade.

Getting people to learn something unfamiliar and new requires more attention and mettle than most consumers are willing to put forth. And there is always more than enough business for the taking with things people want or need already.

Marketing research is an enterprise of discovery, not invention. Researchers field studies looking for unmet, preexisting needs that are currently unfulfilled.

Modelers analyze patterns in clicks and shopping for ways to channel consumers toward a preferred yet known path.

Planners optimize against identifiable preferences in media, content and influence.

This is not to say that new things never come along. It is simply to note that marketing works best when it lets consumers change first, then follows along.

Obviously, there are exceptions. But they are rare.

Take the view of marketing research ascribed to Steve Jobs. Purportedly, he wanted to create not meet demand — show, not ask, people what they needed. Of course, like every fable, this is only loosely connected to the truth.

Jobs did say, “People don't know what they want until you show it to them… Our task is to read things that are not yet on the page.” But that cleverly—and most likely deliberately—begs the question of how “you show it to them.”

Apple spent millions showing people various iterations of its products, iPhone included, testing them over and over again to find the version that consumers liked best.

Apple never introduced something without first making sure it measured up against what people liked best.

Apple never invented needs. Apple invented new ways to solve needs, testing them relentlessly to ensure that what they had to offer would be wanted by consumers.

Where, then, do needs come from? There are two answers to this question.

First, some needs are basic human needs. They are inherent to the human condition. Hunger. Thirst. Safety. Family. Community. Love. Maslow’s pyramid describes this hierarchy pretty well.

Second, most needs are constructed needs that arise through social interaction. These sorts of needs come from our ongoing engagement and evolution with the reference groups against which we measure ourselves — peers, public figures (celebrities, politicians, writers, scientists, artists, entertainers, etc.) and authorities (parents, teachers, faith leaders, etc.).

New ideas arise and new forms surface. These become the fashions and fads we want to follow. At this point, marketers jump in to commercialize these new needs and wants.

For me, a clear example of this is the counterculture of the sixties and seventies in which I grew up. It arose organically and was then hyped by media, pop culture and celebrities, especially musicians.

Marketers had nothing to do with the counterculture phenomenon itself, but were more than happy to jump in with ads and products once the need and interest were there. 

Marketing struggles when it tries to be a trend-setter. This is why sustainability has been such a difficult sell.

There is a core group for whom sustainability is a big need. But most people don’t feel or have that need. Which means that for the most part, sustainability is a matter of teaching rather than persuading.

Marketers can sell culture — and sell it well. But marketing can rarely, if ever, create culture, and certainly not create it out of whole cloth. Yet, marketers can lose sight of this in the industry buzz over creativity and innovation.

This is not to diminish the originality and genius required to follow trends.

It is only to note that following trends, not setting them, is the way in which marketing works.