New features in 2022: Improvements to MotivBase Trends

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Written by:

EVP & Group Director, Anthropology

I’m happy to announce a series of new developments coming to MotivBase Trends in January 2022. It’s been a fantastic year for us, not just in terms of our growth and impact within organizations, but also in terms of major breakthroughs in deepening the application of anthropology to studying millions of consumer conversations in context. Specifically, 2021 has been a year where we’ve focused heavily on data, its breath and its depth in allowing us to report on more nuanced socio-demographics, as well as in improving our self-serve functionality aiding clients to easily identify microcultures of opportunity.

Here are a list of improvements and new developments, available to all starting January 2022.

Demographics: For US market analysis

MotivBase Trends will now report on a broader set of demographics, adding 65-74 into its age breakdown. This will give our users and clients the ability to understand how culture is impacting the older populations in the US.

Furthermore, in the US, we will now also report on mixed race consumers, having broadened our dataset and our understanding of the ethnic and racial breakdown of the country.

New: The addition of 65-74 year old consumers and Mixed Race consumers.

These additions are only available in the US market at the moment. Other markets to follow.

Self Serve Feature Improvement

Our technology is built to function a bit like a telescope. You need to first point it towards a “system” of meaning – we can this a macroculture. Once you point it there, you are zooming in to explore various parts of that system to identify clusters of stars (basically clusters of meaning).

We call these clusters microcultures.

Identifying microcultures can be a fairly lengthy process mainly because it requires the user to explore 200 dominant topics most closely related to the macroculture, then cluster many of these topics to identify possible microcultures, and then ‘double click’ into those microcultures for a deeper examination.

While this process results in incredible discoveries, we always receive feedback about the fact that it is a fairly lengthy or time consuming process. Time of course being something that our clients often lack as they run from one meeting to the next.

So, we made it our priority over 2021 to explore this issue further, to try to find a way to get the machine to intervene after a user has homed in on a macroculture. The idea being, if the machine can crunch 200 topics down to 20 or 30 possible microcultures, then it becomes significantly easier for a user to pick 3 to 5 to ‘double click’ into. The net result of course being that the user can identify microcultures in a tenth of the time that it otherwise took to do so.

This is why we’re particularly excited about this development.

When you run a search now, our AI Anthropologist will take a few extra seconds to crunch through the macroculture to identify 20 to 30 possible microcultures straight away. Gone is the need to wade through 200 topics and create clusters of your own. The machine already does the clustering and surfaces topics or most-likely candidates for microcultures.

As it currently stands users have to explore 200 topics to create clusters of meaning and identify microcultures.
New: The AI does the clustering and identifies 30 potential microcultures.

All you have to do then is pick 3 to 5 of these microcultures that look the most relevant to your business and click to apply them to the microculture tab for further analysis. And off you go on your journey to exploring each chosen microculture in all its glory. Here’s a quick video walkthrough of exactly that process.

Introduction of signals capability into Trends.

We’re also pumped to announce that those of you who have access to our signals technology will now also have it directly integrated into our Trends platform. Which means you can do direct comparisons of dominant meanings against emerging meanings in a matter of seconds! Reach out to your customer success lead for more information.

Cheers. ????????????????

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