Understanding Trends and Facing Culture Changes

Definitions
We should start with some simple definitions - ‘a trend is a general development, direction or change’ and a trendsetter is ‘a person who leads the way’ whilst ‘culture is a way of life, it is what we think, what we do and what we produce in our societies and in our practices’.
We can see trends and change happening everyday in our newspapers and on television with what is happe- ning around the world in terms of population shifts (e.g. increases in the third world and decreases in the western world), globalisation (e.g. multinational companies), and health problems (e.g. new viruses),

Trends
We can also see trends in our societies with more working women, flexible family structures, an increasingly powerful media, a more multicultural society, fast mobile communications and an image-conscious society. We are faced with increasing consumerism that demands convenience, the best prices, top-quality, new technology, choice and more information. All of these changes have some impact on your clients, their views and experience of your practice.

The Tesco Example
If we take Tesco the global retailer as an example they have been able to take the trends in society and provide new products and services to their customers. This has helped them to become the number one retailer in the UK and one of the biggest retailers in the world. Tesco use a steering wheel approach to balance the potentially conflicting demands from their financial objectives, customer needs, operational requirements and rewarding their people. Tesco have just this year added another spoke to their steering wheel that of community where they set out their corporate responsibility for the environment and to be a good neighbour to the communities around their stores. Tesco have therefore translated these external pressures into internal policies and procedures to benefit their business, customers, people and communities. [...]