CultureLabel

The first of our monthly Radar briefings in Arts Industry magazine kicked off with CultureLabel co-founder and former BMW Group trend-scout, Florian Wupperfeld, voyaging into his Favourites folder to profile blogs worth watching to help keep ahead of consumer trends.

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It’s one thing to sit back and watch as leading culture institutions tear up the rule books to better grab consumer attention. It’s another thing to be ahead of the curve, to know who and what the next major consumer innovation will involve or, better still, to be commercially dextrous enough to come up with your own big idea.

We doubt there’s a single person working in culture, marketing or cultural branding who doesn’t wish they were ad agency The Partners, who thought up HP Labs and the National Gallery’s ground breaking, knee trembling project of 2008 - the Grand Tour.

What’s more, the imperative just got greater. As the recession begins to bite, we’re all going to need to be slicker in the way we work. It won’t be enough just to name check another cool collaboration in a meeting. We all need to stay ahead of the competition by coming up with ideas for consumer touchpoints that break the mould time and time again.

With this in mind, we thought we’d give you an insight into CultureLabel’s little black book, the places we go to when we want something to inspire a little magical thinking, or when we want to make sure we know what’s happening across the globe in cultural consumption, cultural branding and subculture.

It’s not specific to cultural branding, but it’s the one we couldn’t be without because we know it makes us better dinner party guests. We love its emphasis on articulating zeitgeist through a round-up of scientific, cultural and anthropological stories from the world’s leading media outlets. If you don’t already get it, register now at Kultureflash.com.

Another site that stands head-and-shoulders above the other pretenders to the “early adopter” crown is TheCoolHunter.net – a neat example of a trend-scouting blog that utilises its users to help generate the site content and then uses its understanding of their predilections to generate further revenue streams. By giving its loyal user base a platform to record and profile their latest passions and issuing a fairly unrestrictive brief about what can be submitted as content, The Coolhunter is able to record and sample the tastes of some 650,000 people. Who needs expensive and time-consuming R&D when you’ve got a loyal sample of that size, keen to record what they’re doing, liking, watching and listening to? The accumulation of this in-depth understanding of their users has allowed the people at The Coolhunter to develop new income streams, such as online retail, consultancy and travel.

Customer experience. How do you ensure that, even though you’re designing exhibitions or writing the specs for commercial space years in advance of its realisation, your customers are left feeling like their experience was at the cutting edge? Especially when every aspect of the culture business needs to be informed by the latest in visual art and design - the aesthetics that power them. A one-stop-shop for thought leadership in design is Dezeen.com.

Not convinced? Currently nestled among blogs focussing on design, architecture, graphics and interiors is a piece about the Wellcome Collection Club Room, which was designed by Ilse Crawford studios. A heads up to trends that will be informing the look of your commercial spaces in 18 months time. For a global perspective on fashion trends, past collections and future forecasts, look no further than cyanatrendland.com. At the moment we’re especially keen on the “Fancy & Cool” section which, unlike the fashion, music and trends sections, just profiles the slickest concepts that eschew definition. Loving the esoteric rationale for the just gorgeous, we find that Sharky Infuser really needs no rationale.

Self-proclaimed image bookmarking experience ffffound.com is one feed that, thanks to its fanbase across Europe and the States, is a must-see for aesthetes, designers and subculture vultures with iconic imagery uploaded on a daily basis.

Meanwhile, if you’re feeling the need for a little retail therapy alongside your daily dose of cool, Colette’s blog lets you have it, with an eclectic culture product curated by designers and experts and timed to coincide with key calendar events. If you don’t know what your other half needs this Valentine’s Day, Colette does (including chocolate, incidentally, from the marvellous Wolff Olins branded New Museum, NY). Better still, the regular guest blogs from people like electro-funk crew Tim & Vas, who are the earliest adopters of just about every future trend going, keep the whole site dynamic and one step ahead.

One final source of influence we’d like to leave you with is Adverblog.com. Once you’ve consolidated all of the potential from the world wide web, designed the commercial spaces of the future and utilised your users tastes to inform your thinking, what are you going to do? For a broad overview of some of the best thinking in audience development and connecting more creatively with consumers, simply watch the experts.

So there you have it. How to harness the almighty levelling power of the web to propel yourself to the forefront of thinking, draw on the opinions and ideas of your core user group and then reflect that think back to them in ever more creative ways in seven easy steps. Not bad for a couple of hours of your surfing time, eh? Let us know what you think at Intelligentnaivety.com.