Dark Planners Eric & Thomas On How Trends Don’t Matter In France

We recently spent a thoroughly stimulating evening at the new Park Hyatt in Paris with Eric and Thomas, two creative strategists who run the site DarkPlanneur.com. One of the things we discussed was the idea that the French don’t tend to respond to trends. They like to be independent you see. Therefore, they don’t follow what’s happening elsewhere. Or so they’d like to think.

Eric and Thomas see their job as strategic planners at Publicis as digesting trends happening around the world, then reinterpreting them and presenting them as new ideas to their fellow countrymen.

Although on the face of it, this sounds different to how brands apply trends in much of the Western world, we wonder if it really is that different. To be the most effective at their jobs, shouldn’t all people who play with trends really need to watch what’s going on in the whole world around them and then reinterpret these trends and present them as new ideas to the rest of us at large?