‘Looking around the corner’ can mean different things. Are you experiencing a communications crisis requiring immediate resolution or sorting out fashion trends that will impact merchandising decisions several months later? Regardless of the context, knowing what’s coming for you is critical, and the right data reveals all.
AI-assisted discovery is crucial to understanding, simulating, and significantly shaping what could come next—and this applies to various use cases. Leading businesses are using AI-powered consumer and market intelligence to manage the following:
- Identifying trends that impact brands
- Creating opportunities and leading in innovation
- Assessing risk and being proactive
Identifying Trends That Impact Brands
It is essential to monitor the market and competitors to identify emerging, peaking, or diminishing trends. This information powers a competitive edge by shaping product development, supporting campaign design, and ultimately meeting consumers’ needs.
There’s an abundance of social and news media channels holding a wealth of trend data that’s just waiting to be explored. Brands can use it to identify and track trends while pinpointing specific industry opportunities and undiscovered niche audiences.
As an illustration, sustainability has steadily gained momentum since 2020, prompting companies worldwide to devise fresh approaches to enhance their efforts. In this regard, a brand seeking to progress in this field could analyze the broader discourse and pinpoint the prevalent themes currently in vogue. Here, our conversation is separated by clusters with the highest engagement:
This chart offers a quick snapshot of popular themes within a broader discussion. A growing commitment to sustainable gaming stands out and warrants further exploration for adjacent industries. And whether or not gaming applies to your brand, you can quickly sort through the information and dig into relevant subsets that do.
Beyond that, companies can configure notifications to monitor evolving trends over time. You can monitor conversation volume and be early to identify promising investment opportunities.
But it’s not enough to simply anticipate what lies ahead, as you may want to shape the future as well.
Creating Opportunity and Leading in Innovation
Uncovering current or emerging trends to remain relevant is an amazing capability, but AI-assisted discovery offers much more. Some companies have an appetite for trailblazing and helping trends take hold by relying on predictive analysis to identify opportunities. And with data-driven decisions, this roll of the dice feels less . . . dicey.
In every industry, there are gaps and opportunities for growth and development. Unfortunately, many companies only take advantage of these opportunities when forced to do so. This was evident during the COVID-19 pandemic when some brands were slow to adapt and then ceased to exist. However, forward-thinking companies identified areas of need and created new paths to success, with many relying on AI-powered market research.
One way that data provided a distinct advantage was around patent discovery. Staying current on patent filings in your industry is competitive intel many companies aren’t properly vetting. It tunes you into evolving technologies and market movements that can significantly impact your offering. Combined with consumer trend analysis, you have powerful competitive intel to inform your next move.
Continuing with sustainability, we are exploring the second most substantial conversation: Blockchain Technology. It’s obvious that this technology has come of age, and its scope has expanded to cover domains not even envisioned a half-decade ago.
There’s been a substantial surge in the number of blockchain patents filed in this field in the past year, revealing innovative ideas being explored and generating excitement around opportunities yet to be discovered. Companies can capitalize on this trend by pursuing existing concepts or carving out new ones, as 2023 is said to be the year that blockchain becomes a sustainability solution.
And as ideas and patents percolate, AI-powered analytics can help companies precisely profile the target audience for whatever path they take.
Precisely identifying the characteristics that define your audience, such as age, interests, professions, and more, empowers brands to create targeted products and promotions that resonate.
For example, the primary interests of millennials having conversations about sustainability follow. Maybe a promotion with their pets would be in order? Like everything else, these interests shift over time, so preparing too far ahead is ill-advised. However, ongoing monitoring will alert you to any potentially brand-damaging shifts as you map out ways to connect with fickle consumers.
Regardless of the products or services your company creates or how you promote them, before diving headfirst, it’s important to conduct a thorough risk assessment. This helps you prepare for potential challenges and have something to benchmark this risk against.
Being Proactive Instead of Reactive
A strategic risk analysis provides you with early detection of opportunities, potential risks, and information you need to be proactive.
AI-assisted discovery reveals risks through targeted consumer and market research. With it, one can see industry challenges associated with specific competitors or niche opportunities.
Consumer opinion figures prominently here as well, as it can shift overnight. The speed of an organization’s response is vital to reputational threats and determines its impact on brand health. It’s much better to catch wind of something as it’s spinning up versus stepping blindly into a sandstorm.
For example, AI-assisted discovery surfaced this blog on sustainability that’s calling out companies for not living up to sustainable practices they claim to support:
This is something to have a prepared response and proof points ready to message out, particularly as this sort of claim is far from uncommon. And there are others relevant to every industry that surface and go viral with little warning if one isn’t actively listening in the right places.
By staying vigilant about identifying potential crises, brands can pinpoint the root cause of issues, identify activities that triggered it, determine who is amplifying the news, and understand the context surrounding the problem to decide the most effective course of action.
Consumers are emotionally driven, so tracking sentiment attached to behaviors (as seen below) helps brands understand the correct challenge points and language to use when crafting a response.
Pinpointing this intel is essential with the wide world of online possibilities, especially social media sites. The amount of noise can make extracting any understanding overwhelming. AI-powered contextual analysis helps companies forecast the events that may unfold in the coming year.
You, too, can have this analytical capability by requesting a demo and putting our technology to the test.
