Now you’re ready to rank the key trends you’ve identified. You can do that in a very formal way, or you can just instruct your groups to “Rank your six trends in order of potential impact.” That's what I choose most of the time. It's what we did in Nashville. Here's why.
For most groups, most of the time, a gut-sense of importance turns out to be as good or better as what you get from a formal ranking process. I might make an exception for a large group, or one that required several different meetings at different times or places. In situations like that you need to assure that the same general criteria were being used.
Even so, in the situations where I’ve used a more formal process, I’ve almost always used the gut-sense ranking as well. That way we can use one method to test the other.
In Nashville we had the groups rank the trends they identified. I asked the group reporter for each group to give me their written rankings. Their rankings and a final composite will appear on this site within a week after the program.
Each group went over their list of six trends so everyone could hear. Then I asked the groups to pick the top three trends that will affect musical instrument retailing in the next few years. Here are their choices. You will note that some choices were added after listening to the other groups selection of six trends.
Group A
- Increased use of e-commerce
- Time constraints
- Globalization of manufacturing and marketing.
Group B
- Price competition
- Foreign (Non US) manufacturing
- Empowered consumer
Group C
- Increase in non-US production
- Non-traditional retailers
- Expanding church market
Group D
- Globalization
- Time pressure
- Digital technology in products and commerce
Group E
- Globalization
- Technology
- Music made by non-musicians
Group F
- Growth of non-traditional retailers
- Shrinking music education budgets
- Recreational music growth
