Although the easier approach would be to lump consumers into very broad groups around the world, we did not accept that all Europeans or Africans are impacted by the same trends. In fact, even within a single country, influence is often localized by city, town or neighborhood.

Clients are often data rich, insight poor when it comes to understanding their consumers. Data is already available on purchase figures, income brackets, media consumption and countless other measurements but not much on the physical environmental, personalities and daily influences consumers are surrounded by. We decided that this was more of an empathy gap, not a “data gap” and decided the best cure was a qualitative insights approach.

As much as we enjoy a good read as researchers, we are also appreciative of the power of the image to communicate a message or reality. Often there is no better way to get straight to the essence of a culture, region, trend or topic than to immerse yourself visually, so we include supporting photos, videos and links to multimedia as much as possible.

Trends impact consumers in both cyclical and structural ways, meaning that there is a combination of short term, medium term and long term trends happening in different regions. It would not be enough to publish one annual report commenting on the year behind, and expect subscribers to be able to act on it, so clients need to have a better handle on trends, as they happen.

As one of the pioneers of crowdsourcing, we rely on over 180,000 creatives around the world to source impactful brand campaigns, consumer trends, and local imagery. Using our “Creative Taxonomy” we can optimize local panels in each city based on the type of feedback we receive from our community, their background and experience, age group and gender.

Working with our networks are central research teams that interact with the community throughout the month, quality control, validate and analyze submitted trends. The teams are comprised of traditional qualitative researchers, brand strategists and trend experts.

Living up to our desire to shine a light on what’s impactful in local markets, we use state of the art survey technologies, enabling trends spotters to submit insights through their phone, tablets and computers, at home or on the go.

We are already are delivering over one hundred rising, emerging and fully blown trends on a monthly basis, and will be striving to improve on that by offering continuous updates as they are submitted and validated.