A Real Life Application of the MC&Co Trend Wheel

This post originally appeared on mcco.com.au

This is the process of aligning a home and lifestyle brand’s customer, with the global trends we have identified and classified as commercially relevant and profitable.  

We recently had a client come to us needing help. They were seeing declining in-store sales and conversion rates. Our client was also seeing many competitors emerge to cannibalise their market share. 

We spent some time with this recognised global home and lifestyle brand identifying the issues. Many related to the trends they were attempting to replicate.

MC&Co visited several stores and discovered that the customer journey through their store was just not compelling. We didn’t get a sense of inspiration or excitement. They were presenting so many looks, products and trends. It felt confused and overwhelming. 

In talking to the team behind the brand, they confirmed they were finding it difficult to manage stock and to present all the different looks both online and in-store. When we started to analyse their product offering and identify the trends they were working with, there were more than 13! No wonder everyone was confused and struggling!

The ideal customer journey through a store should be inspiring. It balances inspiration with information and keeps a customer focused. It presents a look to a customer that is aspirational and confirms for them that they are in the right place and can find what they need. 

We spent some time analysing the brand’s customer demographics.

This including reviewing their psychographics, transactional history, sales and store footprint. This gives us the starting point to apply the science of the MC&Co Trend Wheel to classify their customer base. It is this information matched with our Trend Science, plus our 30+ years of home and lifestyle product development as well as our trend consulting experience. This helps us identify the trends that are relevant for this brand.

In this case, we also needed to consider the complexities of a global brand who was serving many different sectors of the market including socio economic and geographic factors. 

Applying the MC&Co trend intelligence, we identified that the brands customer really sat in two psychographic segments that were quite different from each other. 

We presented a formula that can be applied to their product architecture.

Our recommendation was as follows:

• They should aim for a Product style of 70% classic and 30% romantic
• They should aim for a Style sensitivity of 70% masculine, 30% feminine
• They should aim for the Style attitude of 30% mature and 70% youthful
• They should aim to be 20% in emerging trends, 5% in declining trends, 30% in enduring and 35% in evolving trends
• They should look for trends have between 7-9 points out of 10 for commercial viability.

Applying these recommendations we landed on 5 key trends to focus on for this client

• American Contemporary 
• Coastal Architect
• Mid Century
• Spice Road
• New Euro

Our client also invested some time into understanding our Trend Wheel and internally workshopped the customer data as well as historical sales information. They reverse engineered the process based on historical sales information and confirmed our hypothesis that demographics and psychographics determine sensitivity, style, attitude and velocity. The client confirmed the trend choice we ourselves had landed on. The magic of science! 

We are now working with this client to help them evolve. This is an 18 month process for a home and lifestyle brand. We work our clients through the process of project management and price alignment. For example, we recommend that the price point of the emerging New Euro trend is entry level and pitched at student, kids and those venturing into their first apartment. The Enduring trend of American Contemporary we direct at families moving or upgrading their home. We are excited that this client is now in the position to pare back their trend confusion and confidently make strong statements with their product offering. They are starting the journey armed with strategic trend decisions and will look to own these trends in their market.

The approach we have taken them through is highly repeatable and we look forward to continuing to collaborate towards 2025! 

MC&Co have identified, curated, classified and analysed more than 24 trends relevant to home and lifestyle brands for 2020-2021. This is a process we go through every year based on our analysis of global trade fairs, influential designers, and hundreds of hours of research. 

If you want to have us help your home and lifestyle brand make strategic trend decisions, get in touch for a tailored trend consultation based on your consumer insights. We will walk you through all 24 of our forecasted trends and help you determine which one is right for your consumers. MC&Co can help you turn those declining sales and conversions around and transform your customer journey in store to one of excitement and inspiration.

If you’d like to know more, Contact Us.