Build a trend board

A trend board is a data-driven trend report packed with tailored dashboards that support you to find the right answers. It consolidates trends related to a specific strategic challenge, wether you want to scout the new, emerging, and materialised trends in your industry or understand how transversal trends are having an impact.

This step-by-step guide walks you through the trend board creation workflow. Click the ‘Create trend board’ button on the homepage or the ‘Explore Trends’ header link to get started.

Note that you can always edit a trend board after its creation via the board’s ‘Settings’ dropdown menu. Trend board creation and edition follow the same workflow, so these instructions also apply to the latter.

Select trends

Creating a trend board begins with selecting the trends (or topics) to analyse. This task is performed via the ‘Explore trends’ screen (Figure 1). Since more than 1,200 trends are available within Trendtracker, multiple filtering and sorting options are available to facilitate this task:

• Filter trends by category and subcategory using the left filter panel (Figure 1a).
• Search for trends by name using the search bar (Figure 1b).
• Display all trends or recommended trends only (Figure 1c). Trends are recommended based on a given industry and their evolution within this context. Three groups of recommended trends are available:
  1. ‘trending now’: trends having a high impact in the present
  2. ‘trending soon’: trends forecasted to reach a high impact in the near future by our algorithms.
  3. ‘fast movers’: trends that are evolving rapidly.
• Click ‘Select all’ (Figure 1d) to bulk select all the trends matching the active filtering criteria.

Figure 1: ‘explore trends’ screen. (a) filter panel; (b) trend search; (c) all/recommended trend toggle; (d) ‘select all’ button; (e) progress banner; (f) ‘continue’ button.

You can view all selected trends at any time by clicking the corresponding link in the progress banner (Figure 1e). Doing so toggles the trend selection sidebar, shown in Figure 2, which offers the possibility to remove individual trends or clear them all.

Figure 2: trend selection sidebar.

Press the ‘Continue’ button to confirm the selection of trends (Figure 1f). In case you are browsing trends via the ‘Explore trends’ page, the button has a different label, ‘Create Trend Board’.

Create clusters

To facilitate the analysis of related trends, you can group individual trends into clusters (Figure 3). Although this step is optional, defining clusters opens up filtering shortcuts on your trend board for rapid selection.

To create a cluster containing an arbitrary selection of trends, click the ‘Create Cluster’ card (Figure 3a). In general, Trendtracker suggests preconfigured clusters based on our internal trend classification (Figure 3b).

Figure 3: initial cluster creation screen. (a) new cluster creation card; (b) suggested clusters.

Creating a cluster consists of two main steps, illustrated in Figure 4:

1. First, pick trends that should be included in the cluster (Figure 4a). A trend can be present in multiple clusters and a search bar is available to aid the selection. Click ‘Continue’ once you are happy with the selection.
2. Choose a name for your cluster and click ‘Create’ (Figure 4b).

Figure 4: cluster creation steps.

Each created cluster is represented by a card summarising its content (Figure 5a). You can edit a cluster’s content or name by pressing the pencil icon (Figure 5b) and delete it by pressing the trash icon (Figure 5c).

Figure 5: cluster card

Press the ‘Continue’ button to move to the next step.

Select industries and primary industry

A trend’s impact differs from one industry to another. To handle this, Trendtracker allows you to refine the context in which you wish to investigate trends.

You may select up to three industries per trend board. In addition to the selected industries, a general context encompassing all industries monitored by Trentracker is automatically selected. To select a trend board’s industry, click industries from the list of available industries, as shown in Figure 6.

Figure 6: industry selection screen. Selected industries are represented by coloured cards.

Press the ‘Continue’ button and select the primary industry (Figure 7) among the previously selected industries. The primary industry represents the main focus of the trend board and will be the default view for the widgets. Press the ‘Continue’ button to move to the next step.

Figure 7: primary industry selection screen.

Select feeds

To ensure that the articles available in the trend board’s newsfeed are the most relevant to your objectives, the feed selection screen (Figure 8) allows you to specify which type of articles should be displayed.

Figure 8: feed selection screen. Select feeds by clicking the corresponding ‘+’ icon.

Select the feeds and press the ‘Continue’ button to move to the final step.

Give an identity to your board

The last step consists of giving an identity to your board, which will help you recognise it immediately in your trend board overview.

As illustrated in Figure 9, via this screen you can indicate:

1. The name of the trend board.
2. The description of the trend board.
3. The cover image for the trend board. In case you don’t upload any, a random image from one of the trends included in the trend board will be used instead.

Figure 9: trend board details screen.

Press the ‘Continue’ button to create the trend board. After a brief moment (up to a few minutes), your trend board will be available for you to explore. To get the most insights out of it, we recommend you to read our other knowledge base articles: navigate a trend board, and understand key metrics.