When people think about Lux MotivBase, the first word they usually think about is “Meaning”.
Meaning is what we are obsessed with. Because what something “means” is constantly evolving in culture. And by analyzing how meanings may be undergoing change, we can make foresight work more accurate, improve innovation planning, prioritize R&D decisions and even hone communication efforts. How?
Let’s look at the top 20 questions you can answer using Lux MotivBase.
Question 1. Who is the most important consumer to make my project more successful?
Whether you are starting your innovation journey or looking to position a brand message for an existing product to an audience, MotivBase can examine culture and identify the people that are most important to a product’s success. Our PhDs can identify what culture a solution belongs to, and our AI Anthropology engine can surface the consumers driving the growth of that culture. We can provide a breakdown of their socio-demographic details as well as their dominant motivations, attitudes, values, and fears. If you are asking yourself “Who are we doing this for?” We can help.
Question 2. What are the key requirements for my product or service to succeed?
Every product or service has a culture. And if you have consumers, we can study the meanings that are shaping their expectations. Our team will use our technology to identify the culture most relevant to your product or service, and then follow the consumer’s breadcrumbs to identify and prioritize the requirements that are shaping their expectations.
Question 3. What are the barriers to adoption for my product or service?
Have you ever wondered why consumers just aren’t gravitating toward a solution? Do you need to find the things that may be getting in the way or holding consumers back from adopting your product or innovation? We can specifically look for the challenges or obstacles to help you eliminate the barriers or help the consumer overcome the issues they may have with your product or service.
Question 4. Are there unexpected cultural forces changing consumer expectations?
The social justice movement had an impact on how consumers value packaged food. The last presidential election had an impact on women’s fashion. Because we can identify where cultures intersect and meet, we can do more than tell you what is trending in your category. We can go look for the unknown, and sometimes unlikely cultural forces that may reveal big opportunities or important threats.
Question 5. Does my industry definition of a benefit match the consumer’s definition of the benefit?
Are you banking on a benefit and about to invest in linking your product or service to this key strength that lies at the heart of your offering? Many of our clients will perform a feasibility analysis (included in their engagement with us) just to have our team confirm if their definition aligns with the consumer. If it does, they’re off to the races. If it doesn’t in 5 days we can come back to tell them what elements of the definition are aligned, and what elements need to be reconsidered.
Question 6. What are the key components (ingredients) that are best suited for a product or service?
Sometimes clients want very tactical information to inform their innovation initiatives. Not only can we explore a culture to get to the most dominant components or ingredients that clients are linking to it, but we can also decode why certain types of components are winning in the mind of the consumers and prioritize which have more long-term potential.
Question 7. What is the consumer language that will resonate when describing or presenting a product or service?
Because we study meaning by looking at the words consumers readily associate with a topic or culture, we naturally can decode the most dominant and relevant language. This isn’t always logical, but it is a pure breakdown of the keywords that are most prevalent and will likely ring true if used to communicate with the consumer.
Question 8. What are the most important trends that will impact my business in the next 2 years?
Lux Motivbase allows our PhDs to look at the most important trends that are currently relevant to consumers. But we can also predict if they are increasing in relevance with broader, more mainstream consumers. This allows us to pinpoint trends that are important today, and that will likely peak in the next two years.
Question 9. What are the most important trends that will impact my business in the next 5+ years?
For those clients that have access to our Motivbase Signals technology, we can extend the scope of our analysis and increase both the data set we study and the contextual boundary of the cultural universe that is important to our business. This allows us to go find trends that may be less dominant in the present, but that are exhibiting large amounts of growth that will shape our category in the long term.
Question 10. Do my brand pillars align with the consumer’s expectations for my product or service?
Lux MotivBase doesn’t just provide insight at the beginning of the product development lifecycle. Many times, clients will come to us to get a consumer-led POV on what a brand pillar means to their lives. In these scenarios, the client has a hypothesis or a position statement for a product. Our job is to identify the culture that matches that position, explore and size the key elements, and size its potential to take a great idea and make it even better.
Question 11. Is a news story actually relevant to my business or is the media creating hype that consumers don’t actually care about?
Just because a lot of people are talking about something, doesn’t mean that consumers a) understand it, or, b) care about it. Many times, a client will ask us to take a news topic, and provide a consumer-led POV on the issue, to gauge how drastically it needs to be considered and addressed.
Question 12. Does Senior Leadership’s Strategy align with consumer expectations for my product or service?
Senior Leaders often have directions they want to take the organization. This can lead to corporate strategy or new areas of focus for innovation initiatives. When these directions are based on the Senior Leadership’s industry experience, it can be very helpful and beneficial to get a consumer-led gut check. Our research is often used to validate these decisions or to challenge some preconceived hypotheses and assure that the consumer’s true needs are being met.
Question 13. Does my product have the right to play in a culture or with a certain type of consumer? Will a change to my product be well received?
You can’t fit a square peg in a round hole. Yet, many times an industry lens can push us in a direction that doesn’t align with the emotional needs and motivations of the consumer. If there is any doubt, Lux Motivbase can assess how open or accepting key consumers will be to an idea. But we can also help if you are making changes to a product, by helping you anticipate how consumers may react.
Question 14. What trends should I prioritize in the short and long term?
When we decode a culture, we can plot trends based on the population size that a trend is relevant to, and identify how much it is growing in culture. This allows our clients to not only better understand what is happening in a culture that is important to their business but also helps them pick areas to focus on in the present, and plan for the future.
Question 15. What is the single most important thing to the consumer when it comes to my category?
Communication briefs are best when they have a clear, and unique “Single Most Important Thing.” Because our platform can pinpoint the motivations, attitudes, values, and fears that shape the emotional needs of a consumer in the context of culture, our reports can feed into and improve creative briefs, to better guide communication efforts.
Question 16. Why do consumers have an irrational need for something from my product or service?
Sometimes consumer behavior can be counterintuitive. Despite rational or logical reasons for why they should act one way, they follow their emotions and act another. Because we can decode the associations consumers are naturally linking to a topic or trend, we can help teams understand why logic may not be enough to connect with the people that matter most to your project.
Question 17. Are there emerging trends that will make my product or service relevant to a larger group of consumers?
Because we can size how relevant a culture is to a population, we can compare different trends to identify if there are more “sticky” trends in culture that are going to resonate with a larger, more mainstream audience. This often helps clients find faster, and more efficient ways to position and promote new ideas in the marketplace.
Question 18. Are there occasions where my product or service is a better fit for consumers?
For those clients that have access to our MotivBase Jobs To Be Done capability, our team of Ph.D. researchers can use our system to analyze millions of consumer product reviews. From this data, we can pinpoint both the underlying needs the consumer is trying to fulfill and also identify the key occasions where these solutions are more effective and most relevant.
Question 19. What are the unexpected consumer needs that are being ignored by our category?
Even if you think you know everything about a category, many clients will task us with doing exploratory research to go searching for the things we simply don’t know and we use our Signals platform to achieve this (examine early signals of change). This can be some of our most awe-inspiring research because the value of finding an unexpected insight can be transformational for many clients. And being the first to discover it, can provide a client with a first mover advantage.
Question 20. What do I do to prepare my product/service for success in light of major world events?
Sometimes the world throws us a curveball. We have done extensive research on the impact of COVID on multiple categories. We have looked at how the Social Justice Movement will reshape how we think about food. If you are concerned about how a major world event or major news story may impact your business, we can explore those cultures and tell you how consumers are linking these things together and changing how they think about your product or service.
Conclusion
If you have a question we haven’t captured here, don’t hesitate to ask us if we can leverage the platform to answer it. Some of the questions above were posed by a client, and we simply did a feasibility to see if we could get the client the insight they so desperately needed.
If you think you have a question, contact our team and we can have our team of PhDs take the question, and do what we call a “Reality Check”.
Think of it as a 24-hour feasibility, where we use our platform to see if there is something worth exploring.
As they say, there are no bad questions. Only dangerous assumptions.