How Companies Leverage Our Capabilities, and How You Can Have a Cultural Advantage Over Your Competition

There are three common ways organizations leverage our capabilities to drive anthropological thinking through the organization in an agile and scalable manner. Most companies tend to bring us in with one of these use cases in mind. Over time, as they discover the breadth and depth of our capabilities, our impact tends to expand and our clients turn into our partners.

#1: As front-End Explorers.

Identify early signals, and study trends, ideas, and cultural shifts.

This is perhaps the most common reason we get brought into an organization. Many of the companies we work with operate in a highly disruptive and rapidly changing environment. From demands placed on them through the evolution of consumer trends to the impact of social and environmental movements, these organizations have to constantly have their finger on the pulse of what’s next in culture (and why it might be relevant to their business). This is where our Signals and Trends platforms work really well together to deliver a platform with which companies can constantly identify new signals of opportunities and threats, and study them through big data ethnography in an agile and most importantly, consumer-led manner.

Key Benefits:

1. Companies don’t have to wait and overthink scoping research projects. In fact, we rely on the consumer to scope it for us – from telling us what to study all the way down to decoding the breadcrumbs of meaning that consumers leave around topics, trends, and ideas.
2. Everything is consumer-led and highly agile and exploratory. It ensures no stone is left unturned, and no opportunity is missed or misunderstood.
3. It saves an incredible amount of time and resources downstream. Our big data ethnographies deliver so much detail that clients often focus downstream work on more specific projects that require the study of behavior and sensory experiences.

#2: As a Way to Prioritize and Time Key Opportunities.

Study demand spaces, technical areas of opportunity, and identify jobs.

Many of our clients already have tons of data on trends. They have in-house trackers and keep their pulse on everything and anything. What they lack however is context. They don’t know how many people a particular trend or idea is really relevant to, how mature it is, or even how volatile it might be. These are all important questions that our Trends platform answers for these clients – helping them identify and quantify consumer-led demand spaces. This ensures that organizations can always see how the consumer values ideas and compare them to their own perceptions, minimizing bad decisions and maximizing revenue and profitability in the long run.

Clients here also tend to leverage our Needs platform to further dive into these consumer-led demand spaces and uncover specific jobs to be done in the context of various lines of their business. Through the process they’re also able to quantify the relative value of these jobs to the consumer, thereby leveraging a consumer-led framework of prioritizing jobs and needs.

Key Benefits:

1. A consistent way to talk about the “value” of trends and ideas, that can be shared and socialized across the organizations.
2. Agile jobs-to-be-done projects based on pure observational ethnography are more powerful than any JTBD project one can do in person.
3. It saves incredible time and resources downstream and speeds up decision-making significantly.

#3: As a Means to Predict Key Cultural Shifts and Become Proactive.

Study popular topics relevant to the business that are most often misunderstood.

Sometimes companies come to us because they’re facing immense change and they want to get themselves out of reactionary mode. In particular, these companies tend to come from industries that haven’t traditionally done a good job at integrating insights into the innovation process. So they often need a measurable way to dispel myths and misunderstandings internally about the consumer. They also need a way to understand and leverage cultural movements that don’t always seem obviously connected to their industry or product line, yet deliver incredible innovation opportunities that are always identified a bit too late.

In such cases, clients tend to mostly rely on our Trends platform – which is particularly good at not only decoding major trends and cultural movements but also contextualizing their value to a particular type of industry or even product line. Through the quantification of these trends and demand spaces, clients are able to make a better case for proactive innovation – one where ideas are developed before the opportunity fully hits mainstream acceptance.

Key Benefits:

1. A powerful way to educate and transform internal culture around insights and its application to innovation.
2. A way to quantify the value of cultural movements by examining its impact in the context of a business.
3. A consistent way to leverage predictions to make decisions on timing and level of commitment one needs to make in the pursuit of various opportunities.