How do you decide what to focus your innovation efforts on as a business? Do you receive most of your input from syndicated research, news articles in the popular press and trade publications? You likely also visit trade shows and conferences, exploring the latest innovations in fields directly and indirectly related to yours?
While all these steps are helpful in keeping your finger on the pulse of new developments in your industry, none of these sources of input are truly consumer-led.
- Syndicated reports come out of customer interviews – so they apply an industry-led onto the consumer’s opinions.
- If the news media is reporting on something, it’s already too late for you to be doing something with it- at least if you’re hoping to gain a competitive edge.
- Trade shows and conferences are great for the discussion of new ideas, but they too give you more of the industry lens on your category. Not the consumer’s unadulterated, organic perspective.
So, when our clients discover that there’s a much easier way to get at the pure consumer-led version of the emerging signals impacting their business, it transforms their approach not just to the tracking of issues and ideas but also to the exploration of new opportunity areas that feed the innovation pipeline.
That is the value of MotivBase Signals.
Specifically, there are three common ways in which companies leverage Signals.
1: Examining issues and threats in relation to key areas of the business.
Many of our clients operate in categories that are experiencing severe pressure from a variety of angles. From emerging sustainability requirements to the increasing desire for healthfulness and well-being, many categories are changing at a pace that requires a significant more agility and expediency than before. Signals helps these businesses track all the emerging signals of change so by the time a signal becomes a trend, our clients are already in market with the right solutions and messaging.
2: Identifying secondary and tertiary signals that can impact and change their business over time.
There’s an innate relationship between animal welfare issues being raised in the food industry and the new requirements emerging in the personal care industry. Signals allows our clients to identify and track the emergence of “secondary” signals, in the context of their category or business.
Culture is created when new knowledge and new sets of meanings develop around existing topics and ideas. These new topics of knowledge develop indirectly first, in the outer edges of the contextual boundary. By the time they become directly linked to the root topic, the culture is fully formed. Which means if we’re just studying direct meanings and relationships with social media trackers, we’re uncovering ideas that are already well formed in culture. Meaning we’re too late to the game. Signals therefore helps our clients solve this problem and implement a more forward looking strategy.
3: Keeping a pulse on broad shifts in culture – e.g. racial injustice, multiculturalism, environmentalism, gender.
The changing cultural climate creates opportunities for companies and brands in ways that aren’t always tactically obvious. Signals gives our clients the ability to track broad trends and cultural shifts, to identify the future impact on their corporate strategy and brand portfolio. For example, the emerging changes in gender norms and ideas can and will impact not just the DNA of brands but the overall position taken by a corporation in its day to day operations and customer touch points. Signals allows our clients to track such seemingly esoteric trends to identify tangible opportunities that will apply to their lines of business so as to allow them to take a more proactive position in society.