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Hello, everyone. My name is Carolyn Childs, and I am the CEO of MyTravelResearch.com and a futurist and strategist.
This blog piece has been edited from the video transcript to flow as a written document, but we have not changed the key points.
We all love a good trend …
Now, one thing about this time of year: sort of back end of one year and the start of the next, is we see a LOT of content that comes out about hot trends. And I’m going to talk to you about that because I’m pleading guilty, I’ve done this many times myself, and I plead even more guilty that I probably will do that in the future!
But over the past seven or eight years, as I’ve studied and considered trends in-depth, I’ve actually considered that this focus on the hot trends is sometimes very distracting.
But we need to look at trends differently
Our time is very important. All of us in travel and tourism work very, very hard, and we often are doing so with very limited budgets. So, if you are spending your time focusing on hot trends, you’re often taking your mind away from other things that may be more important to your business.
So often what I try and do when I talk about trends now is to equip people to be aware of trends and almost to be your own trend spotter but with very low effort.
And so, what I’m going to do over the next few of our vlogs and blogs is to follow that old saying ‘If you give someone a fish, they have a meal, if you teach someone to fish, they can eat for life”. And what I’m trying to do is to make myself redundant and turn all of you into trendspotters.
Don’t look at ‘hot’ topics, look at what underlies them
So what I’m going to do is take a series of things that people talk about as being “ hot topics“ and try and generate ways of looking at them in two ways, which is (1) to look at the ways that you can be alert to trends, but (2) to look behind those trends. One of the things that I would say is that over the years, one of the things I’ve noticed is that when people talk about trends, they’re often talking about things actually have existed for a very long time. They’ve just manifested themselves in a different format.
And those of you who are MTR members can actually look at this for what I’ve likely called the four laws of trends.
My belief about how trends occur (the first law of trends) is they occur when something that is a universal human need is enabled in a different way by technology or social change. So what I’m going to do in this session and in some of the others that I do on this topic of trends is to look at a particular trend and try and 1) unpick what sits behind that trend so that you can learn how to apply that in your own business and 2) get you to think more about how you can look at these trends in different ways.
So the first of the trends that I would deal with was prompted by something in, The Economist’s Christmas issue.
The rise of the journal influencer is a hot trend – or is it?
It was in The Economist’s Culture section. I’ve shared a link to it above. I can gift up to five people each month access to this article as a gift. And if you would like to be one of the lucky five, please email me at carolyn@mytravelresearch.com or you can message me in the comments box for this post.
So there’s been a trend for ‘journal influence’, which is younger women reading their teenage diaries audiences online, particularly on Tik Tok.
It is seen as a kind of hot new trend.
Why it attracted my attention is that this is just a manifestation of something that has happened for a very long time. Some people think of journals as private, but the article points to accounts, including work by Cynthia Huff with regard to how 19th century women shared journals.
Travel Journal influencers are nothing new
A recent article from The Conversation also talked about a manifestation that’s particularly relevant for us in travel.
A lot of travellers (in the article women travellers) people took journals and published those journals, and those journals were very influential on other people in terms of their travels. And I think we can all think of examples in our own life.
One of them that I particularly did like was the journal of Elizabeth Marsh who was traveling and then was kidnapped by pirates and almost sold into sexual slavery. And many, many travel writers talk about the fact that lord Byron’s descendant, Robert Byron, who published a journal of his travels, influenced them to be a travel writer.
So, we can see that that trend is not a particularly new trend and it comes through when we look influencers more broadly, I’m going to share one more piece of insight on this because the trend of influence itself is not something that arose with social media.
Nor is the trend to using influencers
When the influencer trend began I remembered a book that I had read and enjoyed for a long while, which is, the biography of Georgiana Duchess of Devonshire, by Amanda Foreman. This was later made into a movie: The Duchess. It brought back to my mind one section and I’m actually going to read you this. This is from the 1780s and it’s a comment around being an influencer. ‘Georgiana had become so famous that her name was enough to make anything fashionable’. Sound familiar?
The entrepreneur Josiah Wedgewood understood the principles of selling (I would say actually the principles of marketing and brand) way better than any manufacturer in the country.
And he makes a comment in a letter which Dr Foreman quotes in the book. ‘“Few ladies, you know, dare venture at anything out of the common style, till authorized by their betters, by the ladies of superior spirit who set the tone or tone.” To entice the middle classes to buy his China sets, he named them after royalty and famous aristocratic families. “They want a name. A name has a wonderful effect. I assure you” he told his partner. “Suppose you present the Duchess of Devonshire with the set and beg leave to call them Devonshire flowerpots.”’ There is a classic example of an influencer in the 1780s!
And I think Josiah Wedgewood’s, comments enable us to probe a little bit behind the influencer trend to look at what that is.
Malcolm Gladwell talks about this in his book The Tipping Point. There are people who are naturally able to influence us. They tend to stand apart.
They may not all be famous, but we recognise them as a trusted authority. He calls them the Mavens.
Turning influence into money is growing, but is not new either
They just stand out and by their behaviour inspire. But increasingly, what we’re seeing is people realising that’s a monetisable asset. But, I believe if you look at some of her actions, Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire did so too. Increasingly, influencers want to share their insights and knowledge whilst making a living. In the case of women diarists of the twentieth century, it was a way of earning money. So on their side, there is that desire to share knowledge and a recognition of their economic value, just as it is with influencers today.
Why influencers are effective – (1) it speaks to a need to belong
Josiah Wedgewood’s comment goes to something that we today know from behavioural psychology. It’s something very important about humans. We are social animals and many of us are not comfortable with making experiments until we see someone else do it. Interestingly, I just read another Economist article where he talks about how people supported Boris Johnson as prime minister of the UK until everyone one or two people started to step outside that and resign. And then once that happened, it became a landslide of people who moved out, resigned from his cabinet, and ended his premiership.
Why influencers are effective – (2) It’s a statement of who are are
So that instinct of wanting to belong to a crowd is one thing, the other thing is display or performative actions.
There’s another trend at the moment which is ‘bookshelf wealth’ (incorrectly referred to in the video as ‘bookcore’ which is a separate but related manifestation of the trend!).
This is a trend of people being photographed with a shelf of books behind them. These are beautifully curated, of course, but also show them to be knowledgeable. And, again, this has a long pedigree. There is a picture of Georgiana’s mother in the eighteenth century that is directly equivalent to bookshelf wealth.
When people had their portraits painted, they had their interests depicted with them. So if you are somebody who loves to hunt, you would have your portrait painted with your horse. That desire to express ourselves and show who we are meets that desire to be part of the group. People join and belong to groups, and this display (and sharing) it reduces the risk of what we’re doing whilst showing people who we are as the ‘best version’ or ourselves. That performative aspect drives our uptake of influencer recommendations and influencing behaviour itself.
And so that’s, I think, when we look at these trends of things like TikTok journals, it’s not really a trend to me. It’s a manifestation of a trend.
How you can make influencer ‘trends’ work for you
Not being a trend makes this manifestation useful because it enables you to look at this and say ‘okay, is this the right thing for my audience?’ But also to look at other ‘trends’ and say ‘does it meet either of those two needs’? With influencers this means ‘Is this somebody who has a natural alignment with our brand and is this somebody who connects with our audiences?’
You should always think about that when you are looking at influencers and also the use of celebrity endorsements. You have to be looking at this and saying who is it? A great example of this done well Tourism Australia’s use of Chris Hemsworth as an ambassador. We know that women around the world enjoy watching movies with Chris Hemsworth in, and we know that women are the major travel planners. He also happens to be a very proud Australian, a very successful Australian, and to live in some very beautiful parts of Australia as a result.
What I would always like you to be thinking is ‘How is this relevant to me?’ and to ask yourself those simple questions around this, and also apply a degree of scepticism to trends.
Because I think we’ve now seen that the trend of influencers is around two hundred and fifty years old (maths failed me in the video and I said 220) – one of the diaries I referred to was published in 1774! So the trend of influencer journaling is clearly not a new trend. But it is something that you can make to work to your advantage, if the answers to those questions stand up.
Remember opportunity cost if you are considering working with influencers
I would always caution on top of that – as I do with all trends – remember that opportunity cost I noted earlier. Ask yourself what you’re not doing, if you’re doing this. And is that something that you should be doing instead?
Want to know more?
If you’re intrigued by what I’m talking about on influencers or trends, and you are a member of MyTravelResearch.com you can see we actually have a presentation on this. (We will soon add an updated version.)
https://www.mytravelresearch.com/getting-the-most-out-of-influencers/
We have a whole section on the member hub on understanding and predicting trends, including infographics on our laws of trends.
https://www.mytravelresearch.com/tourism-trends-hub-new/
So thank you for listening/reading.
If you have any questions, please post them in the comment box. You may email me at carolyn@mytravelresearch.com.
I won’t be giving the whole influencer or trend details away. But if you email me, post a comment to that effect on the blog, or fill in the contact form on the website (address below), we will be happy to share the Law of Trends infographics.
Please also update us on what you are doing with trends or influencers. We love to hear (and share) your stories!
If you would like a copy of our trends infographics, sign up for our newsletter on the home page https://www.mytravelresearch.com/
Or email carolyn@mytravelresearch.com
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Influencers really do have a big impact on travel trends! It’s interesting to see how they can shape where people go and what they experience. Thanks for sharing these insights!
Insightful article! Loved how it delves into making tourism trends actionable. Looking forward to more valuable insights.
Thank you! More trends coming up