What makes something trendy? Is it seeing Adele wearing a particular hairstyle? Warren Buffet driving an eco-friendly car? Or maybe Apple investing in a huge marketing and advertising campaign for the iPhone 4s?

Trends are about ideas and what people like that are fresh and in the moment.  Some trends become “classics” and then woven into the fabric of popular culture.

But, as often happens, as something becomes too trendy, it becomes stale and a cliché to be avoided.

We like trends too, when used gently. Companies certainly need to appear modern and in touch with their customers and if possible trend-setting.  Here’s a look at some trends we expect to see in 2012 as well as our recommendations on how to embrace, avoid, or reinvent them to reach your customers.

And as always, ask us anything. We’ll give you honest answers on trends or just great ways to promote your message.

Happy New Year from the Trendiest Team we know… Red Thinking!

Color it

Pantone, has just released its 2012 color of the year: Tangerine Tango PMS# 17-463. This is a glorious color. (We especially like the hint of red in it!)

How to use it:

• Sprinkle a little into your marketing and promotions, or find a similar vibrant color. It’s youthful, eye-catching and honestly appealing.
• Don’t base a logo or long-lasting campaign on it.
• Wear it if it looks good on you.

Type it

Font styles can be trendy and Adobe, the leader in font types, has new fonts to keep you looking sharp.

How to use it:

• Remember that communicating your message is the most important job. Select a font that is easy to read.
• Don’t mix too many fonts on a page or in a particular piece.
• Select both serif and sans serif fonts that complement each other.
• Pick one and stay with it as your signature font for your company or a campaign.

Move it

Video clips, animation, YouTube channels, custom apps… These elements are skirting the line between trendy and the way businesses communicate with customers.

How to use it:

• Make sure you need it.
• Make certain it is high quality.
• Make sure no one will spoof it – unless that’s part of the marketing plan.
• Remember that anything posted on the Internet is there forever.
• Consider your image… nothing with an “ist”… racist, sexist or in general bad taste or bad for children

Visit Adrants for a great archive of both good and bad advertising videos.

Take it with you

Design for smart phone and tablet viewing. This falls between trendy and becoming normal.

How to use it:

• Make sure your website can be viewed properly on a smart phone or a tablet. This may require some new coding but if you want customers to take you with them as they move about their day it’s a must.

Tell the world everything

Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, Foursquare…

How to use it:

• Make sure you need it. Just because you’re a business doesn’t mean you have to have a Facebook page.
• Commit to it. Twitter is a feed; it’s hungry do you have the time to take care of it?
• That video from the holiday party was a riot – but it doesn’t belong on the web.
• Plan for it. Create a marketing plan first then incorporate social media for optimal success.

Have fun with trendy ideas but use them with caution.

On September 16, 2011, President Barak Obama signed the Leahy-Smith America Invents Act (AIA). (In my old high school as a matter of fact.) It’s about time.

There are a lot of problems facing the nation right now. There are too many to list and our blog doesn’t like to talk about politics – we’re about creativity. In our last Red Thinkers post, we profiled Dean Kamen, a modern day inventor and science and technology leader who is working to support science education for kids 6-18. One of Kamen’s leading accomplishments is that he holds 440 U.S. and foreign patents. Here’s why that is a feat to be celebrated.

Prior to the Leahy Smith Act, it took inventors up to three years to receive patent approval. Three years is a long time to act on an idea. Three years is a long time to show an angel investor an invention and receive funding. In the course of three years, solopreneurs and small companies have to keep their cards close to their chests and protect their ideas and hope that a different, more robust solution to something they think they solved doesn’t come to market first and grab the consumers imagination.

Oh sure, there are hundreds of products on the market that say patent pending. This is to serve as preliminary patent and trademark protection, but it’s not the same. And yes, there are critics to this new act. Some feel it gives an advantage to large corporations who have the money to push harder. One thing about laws in the United States, they are far from ever perfect, whoops, that was a political idea again, sorry for the lapse. Here’s an interesting discussion from NPR Talk of the Nation. Decide for yourself.

We see this new law as a way to release creativity in the marketplace. America may be short on jobs – that’s not a political statement, that’s a fact – U.S unemployment now stands at 9.1%. But we are not short on ideas. As a nation we never have been. This law gives the Patent and Trademark office the ability to hire more people to help free up the immense backlog of applications. This isn’t bigger government. The Patent and Trademark office has always been independently funded. The fees inventors pay to file their ideas pay for the office.

Since it first opened in 1790, the U.S Patent and Trademark Office has issued 7,752,677 patents. Millions of jobs have come from those ideas. There are now an estimated 700,000 patent applications backlogged in the system. Imagine the millions of more jobs that will be created with the amazing ideas waiting to see the legally protected light of day. It’s about time. Let the creativity flow and let’s empower the next wave of Red Thinkers.

Where Innovation and Technology Change the World
Let’s talk for a moment about innovation and technology. Innovation is the idea of renewing something or changing something. Technology in its purest sense is the use of tools and techniques to solve problems or create something specific. These two words are linked. You can’t have success with only one. Yes, you can have an innovative idea, for instance a car that goes two hundred miles on a tank of gas. But without technology this innovative idea can never happen. And the tools you need to build such a wonder car need innovative inspiration to be built.

The balanced concept of innovation and technology working together is RED THINKING and one of today’s most exciting inventors, Dean Kamen is Red Hot.

Kamen, hails from the Granite State, New Hampshire and makes his home there today. Though he’s a celebrated and wealthy genius and entrepreneur, we give extra Red Points to his desire to stay close to his roots and perhaps the source of his inspiration.
Kamen is best known as the inventor of the Segway PT, the popular upright personal transportation vehicle. But long before the Segway came the first wearable infusion pump, a medical device that changed how patients received chemotherapy.

Kamen began his formal studies at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) in Worcester, Massachusetts where as an undergraduate he invented the infusion pump. In 1976, he founded AutoSyringe, Inc., to manufacture and market the pumps. The company was then sold to Baxter Healthcare corporation.

With the proceeds from AutoSyringe and a mind spinning with ideas he started his next company DEKA Research and Development. DEKA has been responsible for some of the most innovative medical devices now is use including:

• HomeChoice™ peritoneal dialysis system for Baxter International Inc. This invention allows patients to be dialyzed at home
• ThinPrep® Pap Test
• UVAR™ XTS™ System, an extracorporeal photophereisis device for treatment of T-Cell lymphoma
• An advanced prosthetic arm in development for DARPA
• The Hydroflex™ surgical irrigation pump for C.R. Bard
• The Crown™ stent, an improvement to the original Palmaz-Schatz stent, for Johnson & Johnson
• iBOT™ mobility device
• The Segway® Human Transporter

Kamen has also been awarded the National Medal of Technology in 2000 by then President Clinton. He received the Lemelson-MIT Prize in 2002. In 2005, he was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame. He also holds 440 U.S. and Foreign Patents.

FIRST
But, let’s get back to the ideas of innovation and technology and what we see as Kamen’s Red Core. In 1989, Kamen founded FIRST® (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology), “an organization dedicated to motivating the next generation to understand, use and enjoy science and technology.” This organization will help over a 250,000 students ages 6 to 18, in more than 50 countries. “High-school-aged participants are eligible to apply for more than $14 million in scholarships from leading colleges, universities, and corporations.” In Kamen’s own words, “You have teenagers thinking they’re going to make millions as NBA stars when that’s not realistic for even 1 percent of them. Becoming a scientist or engineer is.”

We believe that a generation of Red Thinkers are now on their way to creating the next innovative solutions to solve our world’s most pressing problems. FIRST’s celebration of science and technology combined with Kamen’s creativity and leadership is a very RED road to follow.

Red Thinkers are often in a constant state of learning and reinvention. American artisit Georgia O’Keeffe (1887–1995) lived a very colorful 98 years. She carved out a very significant place for herself and other women in the American art community, which before her time had been exclusively men. Her innovative abstract paintings stood apart from those of other artists. She dared to exercise techniques no other artist of her time could readily replicate.

O’Keefe began her art instruction at a young age, first using watercolors. As she moved through high school, she continued to pursue her love of painting. She enrolled at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and later attended The Art Students League of New York where she studied under William Merritt Chase, a world-renowned American impressionist painter.

In 1908, she won the League’s William Merritt Chase still-life prize for an oil portrait. The prize was a scholarship to attend the League’s outdoor summer school at Lake George in New York. This was the beginning of a stream of significant awards O’Keeffe earned.

In the 1920s, she revolutionized the tradition of flower painting, presenting blossoms and petals close up as if seen through a magnifying lens. Her paintings of buildings, structures, and landscapes were soon recognized as very compelling work. By the mid 1920s, O’Keeffe had become one of America’s most important artists.

Her fame grew even as she continued to learn and practice new techniques of painting as well as pursue other arts, including sculpture and eventually pottery. Her passion for all things artistic made it easy for her to master every art form she pursued. After her husband, Alfred Stieglitz, died in 1946, she pulled away from her work for three years to handle his estate and focus on healing from her loss. Eventually she was able to resume painting. Through the 1950s and 1960s, she travelled extensively around the world, taking on commissioned work.

When her eyesight began to deteriorate in 1970, she withdrew from her artistic life though not for very long. In 1973, she met a young ceramic artist, Juan Hamilton, who soon became her manager and confidant. He inspired her to return to her art and she began making pottery.

In 1970, the Whitney Museum of American Art cited her as one of the most influential American painters. In 1977, President Gerald Ford presented O’Keeffe with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and in 1985 she was awarded the National Medal of Arts.

Throughout her life, Georgia O’Keefe worked with mentors, always curious to learn new techniques and art forms. Despite setbacks, when she took the time away she needed, she always returned to her art, reinventing herself each time. Her perseverance, vitality, and vision makes O’Keefe a true red thinker.

Frederick W. Smith, founder of FedEx, has transportation in his blood. His grandfather was a steamboat captain, and his father built up a regional bus line that became the Southern backbone of the Greyhound Bus system. Smith learned to fly as a teenager, a skill he turned to cash by working weekends as a charter pilot during his years as a student at Yale University in the 1960s. While flying students and other passengers around, Smith had the insight that led him to revolutionize the delivery business. He noticed that he was also frequently ferrying spare parts for computer companies such as IBM that could not afford to wait for scheduled passenger airlines in order to get critical components to customers.

An economics major in college, Smith first broached his idea for an express delivery service in 1965 in what must now be among the most infamous term papers in corporate America (or academe). Lore has it that he received only a modest C grade, though Smith doesn’t think that was the case. Whatever the grade, he wasn’t deterred. “I knew the idea was profound,” he says.

After a hitch with the Marines in Vietnam, Smith returned in the late 1960s and began to pursue development of his concept. He soon found backers with more faith in his ideas than his professors (or at least that one). With $4 million inherited from his father and $80 million raised from venture capitalists, he formed Federal Express in 1971. Its promise: guaranteed overnight delivery of goods between any two points in the initial 11-city network FexEx served.

His company was hardly an overnight success. Ready to launch the service from Memphis (a city picked for its central location and under-used airport) on March 12, 1973, Smith secured all of seven packages for the first night’s run. He sent his salesmen back into the field, more than doubled his network to 25 cities, and relaunched the service a month later — this time beginning with a grand total of 186 packages.

Sparse initial volume wasn’t the only headache. Until the late 1970s, the U.S. postal monopoly prevented FedEx from delivering documents. Onerous airline regulations at first restricted FedEx to flying tiny Falcon jets. By 1973, Smith was so desperate for cash that he flew to Las Vegas to play the blackjack tables. He wired the $27,000 he won back to company offices in Memphis.

Smith’s persistence paid off. By the late 1970s, American business came to rely on FedEx’s ability to deliver goods overnight — be it spare parts, urgent business documents, or 11th-hour birthday gifts. Merrill Lynch executivess even discovered employees were using FedEx to deliver documents between floors of its Manhattan headquarters building because it was faster and more reliable than the interoffice mail!

Today, FedEx has become a linchpin of the “just-in-time” delivery revolution — its planes and trucks serving as mobile warehouses — that has helped companies around the globe cut costs and boost their productivity. The logistics service now contributes the lion’s share — 92% — of FedEx’s $26 billion in annual revenues.

Although FedEx has spawned numerous competitors, it is still the biggest operator, with a 44% share of the air express market. Its widely-recognized fleet of 645 aircraft and 71,000 trucks carry an average of 5.5 million shipments each day. And all because a college kid could see a market niche that others couldn’t. Now that’s vision and innovation.

Red Thinkers often brave unchartered territory to make new discoveries. They dedicate themselves to a purpose and look deeply into the core of things. James Smithson, founder of the Washington-based Smithsonian Institution, had a colorful background. He was born the illegitimate son of Elizabeth Hungerford Keate Macie, a mistress of Hugh Smithson, the 1st Duke of Northumberland, in the northeast part of England. After his parents’ death, he changed his name from James Macie to James Smithson, thus claiming his bloodline.

Smithson was enrolled at Pembroke College in Oxford and studied the natural sciences. He soon established a solid reputation as a chemist and a mineralogist. There was little technology to retrieve quality information in the natural sciences in the 1700s. Despite this drawback, Smithson’s curiosity sparked his dedication to learning more about minerals and ores. His thirst for knowledge and the resulting understanding was what he wanted to be known for. He was wealthy by heritage but was determined to make a name for himself among scientists and other scholars.

Just a year after he graduated, the Royal Society recognized Smithson for his scientific contributions. His research notes recorded detailed accounts of his findings. Each discovery was calculated with precision.

He published nearly 30 research papers throughout his life; always learning and sharing what he discovered. He was adamant about carefully documenting the knowledge acquired through years of intense research.

Indeed, Smithson was so committed to the sharing of knowledge that upon his death, and after several interim steps, his fortune of more than a half-million dollars (more than $10 million today) was left to the United States, a country he had never even seen, to establish an institution in Washington, D.C. dedicated to “the increase and diffusion of knowledge among men.” Although Congress took some time to act, his bequest was eventually accepted in 1838 and formed the basis of the institution that today bears a version of his name — the Smithsonian Institution.