Should Trends Dictate the Tools You Use

Should Trends Dictate the Tools You Use?


When it seems as though every one of your competitors is jumping on board with a new technological trend, a feeling of unease can take over you. You might start to ask why you have not done the same, if it is right to stay on your current path, and whether the time you spend thinking about these questions is costing you.

Naturally, it can cause you quite a lot of anxiety. Trends are difficult to approach yet impossible to ignore in business, meaning there is no hard and fast rule to how you should approach them – but developing a general mindset can help you take them one at a time.

Blindly Following Trends

The risk of blindly following trends is that you end up cluttering your business structure with approaches that do not cohere, losing your sense of personal identity to something that is indistinguishable from audiences. If you do decide that you are going to capitalize on a trend, you still want your own branding to shine through – you want audiences to recognize the spin that you’re putting on it.

Even in that case, it might still be better to be somewhat selective with the trends that you are trying to incorporate. If you’re seen as chasing every passing trend, it might dilute the sense of individuality that audiences come to your brand for.

Researching Trends

You might feel it is better to take these trends as they come, researching each one and understanding what kind of utility they might have for your business. This is often necessary because of the different ways that industries or even businesses in the same field can use the same tool. This applies to AI, and it is natural to hear about the wide range of applications it can have as a tool – something that makes it versatile, potentially useful, and vague. If you can dispel some of the obscurity through research, understand what kind of AI is right for you and answer questions like what is Agentic AI, you might set yourself up for a much more confident use of the tool.

Making a Point of Avoiding Trends

If you do decide that you are not going to follow a particular trend, you might want to go even further with that impulse. You could decide that you want to draw attention to your decision, make your resistance to the bandwagon a point of pride that looks to draw audiences towards you. If you do this, it’s important that your bragging isn’t all there is to it – audiences will want to know exactly what is in this change for them, why you’ve made it, and what that means. After all, if your competitors are making use of trends but still providing a higher quality of service, why wouldn’t your audiences opt for them anyway?

Illustrating why you are avoiding the trend can help paint your brand as both independent and potentially understanding of what the audience wants, making it a potentially lucrative move.