We’ve been asked several times already this year to identify what we think are the big trends for 2011. I thought I would take a moment to share with you what we’ve come up with. Some are not shockers, but some trends do have the potential to shake up the industry this year in a big way. Here are the first three of a total of six. I’ll share the rest next week.

1. Consumer Spending

We’re not a consumer research company, but we do pay attention to what a lot of consumer researchers have to say. It seems a consensus has been reached among them that consumer shopping behavior has changed in a permanent and lasting way. More consumers start their shopping trips online, more insist on having coupons or deals in hand before they will buy, and many remain stubbornly resistant to going back to old spending habits.

When we look for leading indicators of consumer spending, we pay attention to a lot of contributing factors, including unemployment numbers, consumer confidence levels, the health of the housing market, and debt to savings levels. The one thing everyone seems to have learned from the recession is that even if consumers have money in their pockets, they won’t spend any if they’re worried about losing their house or their job.

At the same time, there is a counter-trend in the works, summed up by a phrase coined by my esteemed partner, Paula Rosenblum: frugality fatigue. Certainly the luxury market seemed to do well enough this holiday season, but retailers are also seeing evidence of small luxuries and brands are racing to fill the need — by providing small indulgences that let consumers feel like they are letting loose a little bit, while still maintaining tight control over the purse strings.

For retailers, they still have to work very hard to get consumers to spend money. It’s been especially difficult to get consumers to buy without having to have some kind of offer or discount or special to entice them in. And while it is possible to have a conversation with consumers about the value that is being offered above and beyond the price, when mobile phone use is tearing open price transparency across both retailers and channels, that value conversation sometimes gets lost in the panic. Retailers will either have to get very good at being incredibly convenient — a value that consumers are often willing to pay for — or incredibly entertaining, so that consumers don’t even think of it as shopping. And if they can pull off both at the same time? That’s a differentiator.

2. The Green Consumer?

This is a question, not a statement: the green consumer? Where is she? When will she spend money? Unfortunately, the answer seems to be that she is very hard to find, and when she is found, she is often highly doubtful that a retailer’s or brand’s green products are actually worth the money.

Retailers greet this cold hard truth with increasing frustration. For those like Walmart and REI, they are on a train that is not going to stop any time soon. But these retailers have decided that sustainability is fundamental to their overall value proposition — in other words, they are incorporating it into their brand identity. They are not relying on sales of green products to drive the benefits they seek.

So 2011 sees us entering a period where a lot of the easy work around sustainability has been done — the compact fluorescents and the skylights are in. The store temperature has been optimized. Packing waste has been studied and reduced wherever possible. Now we’re at the level of activity where the projects are more complex or the ROI of those projects is murky or dependent on certain assumptions that we haven’t hit yet — like the price of oil.

The end result is, if you are a vendor, we don’t recommend leading with Green as part of your message. As much as there are a lot of retailers who have embraced the idea of sustainability, they are very frustrated over consumers’ apparent apathy. That doesn’t mean that it should be abandoned. Many retailers still care, and they still want to know how you’re going to help them become even greener. It’s just not going to be the factor that sets up the deal.

And if you are a green proponent within a retailer, then your best strategy to keep the momentum is to design shovel ready projects, alongside the factors or assumptions that need to be in place before it is worthwhile to kick in with a project — for example, Project A becomes viable when oil reaches $120/barrel.

3. Customer Centricity 2.0

If I had to put a stake in the ground as to when Customer Centricity first really entered the retail consciousness, I would have to say it was the year 2003. In that year, Best Buy announced their Customer Centricity initiative and made a big deal about work they were doing to revamp their organization to put the customer at the center of their business. While companies like Best Buy were thinking strategically, and maybe even transformationally, what really happened after their announcement was a lot of marketing scramble among peers. Retailers did what they could to make their customer-facing channels seem more customer centric, but it only really worked if there was no Toto to pull back the curtain and reveal the mess that still existed behind the scenes.

We’re entering the era of Customer Centricity 2.0. This is where the company realizes that marketing skin is not enough to have authenticity in the customer centricity game. This is where companies look at what it really takes to drive localization into stores, and where companies that are not generally considered at the forefront of customer centricity are doing things like hiring Chief Customer Experience Officers — as Walgreens recently announced.

This isn’t window dressing. This is what is truly needed to enable honest cross-channel processes and one view of the customer. This is more fundamental to the business, and much more difficult to achieve. However, more and more retailers realize that they need both consistency and flexibility if they want to give more control to customers, just as they need one single owner of the customer experience. And while it may be hard, it’s critical to success in 2011.

Next week I’ll talk about the other three, listed here:

4. Channel Proliferation
5. Economics of the Retail Model

6. Opportunities for Growth 

A lot of these trends are intertwined and become difficult to separate out into stand-alone ideas. For example, you’ll find that channel proliferation has a huge impact on the urgency behind both customer centricity 2.0 and the economics of the retail model. And certainly none of them are dark horse trends that we didn’t see coming. But in terms of their ability to shape retailers’ businesses, these are the ones that are going to be huge.