Just got back from Istanbul last night. Jetlag would be an understatement. I traveled to Istanbul to speak at the first BEYOND Trend conference to share a perspective on wired U.S. teens. We stayed mostly around Istanbul for the week -- a city that in many ways reminded me of San Francisco with its hills and proximity to "the sea." We visited the Princes Islands, ate lots of kebab and dolmas and checked out most of the big tourist sites including the Grand Bazaar where I was talked into buying a small carpet, a couple of scarves and of course, Turkish Delight. I also met Ozgur Alaz (in the photo), a Turkish marketing blogger who has been reading Ypulse for three years. He shared how he has been building his own consultancy focused on youth in Istanbul. On Wednesday, I spent the entire day at their beautiful conference site right on the Bosphorus listening to a host of international speakers talk about trends. I only took sporadic notes on a couple of speakers but will attempt to summarize below.

One of the speakers was Edith Keller from Carlin International -- an international trend forecaster that has loads of clients and appears to specialize in design. Edith spoke in French so I relied on translation (my four years of French in middle and high school did not help). She spoke about what her company actually does to predict trends 3 to 5 years out. What I took away from this was that it's not just marketers but a team of creatives (with help from a historian, sociologist, and other experts) who basically predict what's next, package it in a beautiful book and sell this thinking to loads of brands. It makes you wonder if companies like Carlin, who have so many major brand clients, are actually predicting trends or creating them. She had beautiful Power Point though. Piers at PSFK launched a really interesting discussion a while back about trend forecasting with a post called "The Problem With The Trends (Business)" - worth a read.

The Turkish rep from Adidas spoke later that day. He focused on Adidas' core market (Gen X and Y) but also on how they are paying attention to the growing (global) aging population. Evidently most of Turkey's population is under the age of 25. He spoke about Gen X being defined through television as our medium of choice and Y being the Net. Apparently the desire for flexible office hours and more work/life balance is not limited to Gen Y in the U.S. He also talked about the lack of attention with so many channels and options specifically in sportswear where there are over 250K products introduced each year for whatever mood on whatever day -- "it's their choice to be in touch with you." He mentioned Adidas efforts to be socially conscious by supporting a local campaign to prevent drunk driving and creating a smaller more eco-friendly line (still hard to create sustainable products in apparel, i.e. costly). He talked about the move towards intelligent products (wearable technology) like a chip in shoes that adjusts the shoe according to the pavement) as well as miCoach, a new partnership with Samsung that involves tailoring music to your jogging rhythms. He also mentioned the need to create products you can personalize, i.e. miAdidas (like Nike i.d.). Oh and Adidas is also going to launch a big marketing partnership with Vespa in 2009. Cool.

I made friends with another U.S. speaker, Harley Cross, the founder of HintMint -- a very high end and packaged mint company that has done well with the Hollywood red carpet crowd and in high end hotels and galleries internationally. I love hearing other entrepreneurs' success stories.

My sense of what's different about Istanbul youth culture vs. in the U.S. is the role of family, community and tradition in their society (i.e. it plays an even larger role there than I believe it does here). While Istanbul is incredibly cosmopolitan and westernized, it is still a Muslim country (you are reminded of this when you see some teenage girls wearing colorful head scarves and hear the prayers from the Mosques echo across the city). I was curious to know how these traditional forces vs. the forces of more western individualism/consumerism are playing out within within families and between generations. My guess is that the former tempers the latter. If you were wondering about MySpace vs. Facebook, Özgür told me Turkey is more like Canada in that its tech savvy youth are on Facebook vs. MySpace (though MySpace is coming) and MSN Messenger vs. AIM or Yahoo!. I also sensed that there are lots of Turkish teens still logging on at internet cafes vs. a laptop at home, especially outside of the bigger cities. Either way, I think the portrait of wired U.S. teens I shared was not so different from that of teens in Istanbul. There was one Turkish teen in the audience, and when I asked if anyone had heard of Soulja Boy, he nodded his head immediately.

Posted by anastasia