On the occasion of the Singles’ Day shopping holiday, TD Reply traditionally conducts a buzz analysis to reveal new market trends in China and identify changing preferences among Chinese consumers.
This year, focusing on premium fashion brands, a similar pattern emerged: 4 of the top 10 most discussed fashion brands are Chinese brands. The number one brand, Bosideng, generated almost as much buzz as all the other brands combined. The infographic below provides an overview over our key findings.
We are happy to announce the release of the Pulse 2.55.0 “Baby Lia” update!
In order to celebrate the arrival of the newest member of the TD family, this month’s iteration of our data story-telling solution Pulse is named after Lia, the newborn daughter of Martin Schmoll, our Director of Data-Driven Business Innovation. She will definitely change Martin’s life – and “Baby Lia” will also change the lives of Pulse users, as it comes with a variety of very useful new features.
We at TD Reply are experiencing through multiple interactions with our clients that the theory of our world turning more and more into Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity and Ambiguity is an undeniable truth. This is commonly described as the “VUCA world” phenomenon. A good way to deal with it for an organization is by fostering Vision, Understanding, Clarity and Agility. The improved and new contextualization features that “Baby Lia” brings along are designed to help our clients to do just that.
What’s new in 2.55.0 “Baby Lia”:
Fixed Period Benchmark in the KPI Explorer– The Fixed Period Benchmarking function in the KPI Explorer is one of the definite highlights of this new Pulse release. This feature propels one of Pulse’s popular go-to-module for KPI comparison and contextualization to becoming one of the most capable modules in terms of analytical prowess, making answering key business questions with Pulse even easier than before. You can now track up to three KPIs along two adjustable time series of the same length in order to help you track, benchmark and compare their development. It also allows you to display events for both time periods on screen.
Brand Health Indicator – Enables you to completely dissect the impact of an event on a KPI during that event timeframe! As an extension of the last releases’ KPI EventAnalyzer, we are now able to also incorporate relating event information to the marked outliers as well as adding additional KPIs into the analysis. Based on the values displayed, an assessment of the KPI performance in the context of the item analyzed is shown. The most common use case might be assessing your brand health using an established respective KPI alongside another outlying KPI during a particular event timeframe, hence this feature’s name.
Automated Event Period Analysis – An extremely powerful tool for data contextualization! This feature allows you to analyze any KPI in your timeline charts as it checks it for outliers (either being above / under static values or relative to the KPI’s average value) during the timeframe of a specific event from the insight section. Also, it is one of the most remarkable Pulse features in terms of overall connectedness and complexity as it combines Fact, KPI, Module and Event Setup.
Improved Event & Insight Readability – In Pulse, we offer the possibility to contextualize data with events and related insights. This improvement allows you to read-up on events without losing focus or your dashboard page at all, as information is now presented in the same tab.
Document View in Browser – Due to the recent improvements extending Pulse’s capabilities to store and curate business relevant documents, we now extended this function to allow the view of PDF documents right in the browser. No longer users have to unnecessarily download files.
Single-Sign-On with Azure – The function is similar like e.g. a “Login with Facebook” function only it is an Azure account in our case. The Pulse user rights & roles of a SSO user are considered & applied with a SSO. This solution is a blueprint for potential Pulse SSO requests in the future!
The monthly trend monitor provides a unique data-driven overview over the most important global consumer, industry, and society trends. How it works: We use the SONAR trend radar, which tracks the volume of written scientific and journalistic publications on a certain trend, to find out what the top five trends are in these three categories. Utilizing intelligent algorithms, SONAR analyzes a continuously growing database of more than 40 million publications from academic journals, expert blogs, mass media, and patent registers to gain unique insights on global trends.
SONAR can sort trends by Volume (number of articles relevant to a trend and relative to the SONAR index), Growth (YoY growth, volume of the last 12 months vs. previous 12 months) or Momentum (MoM growth, volume of the last month vs. volume of the previous month).
Each month, we present the top 5 consumer, industry, and society trends by Momentum.
Top 5 Consumer Trends in September 2021
Healthy Lifestyle & Wellbeing is the number one consumer trend by momentum in September 2021, also boasting high volume and strong growth. Eco-Awareness is the only consumer trend in the top five that was also among the top consumer trends in the previous month.
Top 5 Industry Trends in September 2021
No industry trend from the previous month is featured in the top five for September 2021. Food Tech takes the lead with a very high momentum index, followed by E-Learning. Artificial Intelligence and the related trend Deep & Machine Learning close the top five of industry trends.
Top 5 Society Trends in September 2021
Against the backdrop of the Afghanistan crisis and the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, Global Threats is the number one society trend in September 2021 with extremely strong momentum. It is followed by Digitalization with a nearly identically strong momentum. The list is closed by Right Wing Populism, which may allude to ongoing political discussions in Germany and France concerning the importance of right-wing parties in the two countries.
The monthly trend monitor provides a unique data-driven overview over the most important global consumer, industry, and society trends. How it works: We use the SONAR trend radar, which tracks the volume of written scientific and journalistic publications on a certain trend, to find out what the top five trends are in these three categories. Utilizing intelligent algorithms, SONAR analyzes a continuously growing database of more than 40 million publications from academic journals, expert blogs, mass media, and patent registers to gain unique insights on global trends.
SONAR can sort trends by Volume (number of articles relevant to a trend and relative to the SONAR index), Growth (YoY growth, volume of the last 12 months vs. previous 12 months) or Momentum (MoM growth, volume of the last month vs. volume of the previous month).
Each month, we present the top 5 consumer, industry, and society trends by Momentum.
Top 5 Consumer Trends in August 2021
Urban Gardening & Farming is the new and somewhat surprising top consumer trend in August, followed by Eco-Awareness and Impact Investing. In general, the top five of consumer trend this month is dominated by niche trends with a generally low publication volume and negative year-over-year growth.
Top 5 Industry Trends in August 2021
The industry top trends in August 2021 are dominated by trends in the area of biotechnology and related fields. Bio Hacking and Gene& Stem Cell Therapy in particular show high total volume, strong growth and even stronger momentum.
Top 5 Society Trends in August 2021
Compared to the previous month, Climate Change moved from the fourth to the top position. With the exception of Fake News, four of the five top society trends are related to ecology.
The monthly trend monitor provides a unique data-driven overview over the most important global consumer, industry, and society trends. How it works: We use the SONAR trend radar, which tracks the volume of written scientific and journalistic publications on a certain trend, to find out what the top five trends are in these three categories. Utilizing intelligent algorithms, SONAR analyzes a continuously growing database of more than 40 million publications from academic journals, expert blogs, mass media, and patent registers to gain unique insights on global trends.
SONAR can sort trends by Volume (number of articles relevant to a trend and relative to the SONAR index), Growth (YoY growth, volume of the last 12 months vs. previous 12 months) or Momentum (MoM growth, volume of the last month vs. volume of the previous month).
Each month, we present the top 5 consumer, industry, and society trends by Momentum.
Top 5 Consumer Trends in July 2021
Four of the five top consumer trends were not in the previous month’s top 5. The only exception is Meme Culture, which jumped from the third to the second position. Self-Employment is the new top consumer trend, replacing June’s Vegan and Vegetarian Food.
Top 5 Industry Trends in July 2021
The top 5 of industry trends changed completely compared with the previous month. Food Tech is the fastest-growing trend, showing extraordinarily strong momentum, even though it declined in YOY growth. Open Data follows with relatively low publication volume, but strong momentum.
Top 5 Society Trends in July 2021
Global Threats, a global trend that incorporates publications on the COVID-19 pandemic, drops from the first to the second place. Taking its extraordinarily high publication volume and YOY growth into account, it continues to be the dominating society trend.
The new Pulse 2.52.0 update brings new features, workflow improvements and bugfixes to TD Reply’s Pulse dashboard. Want to know more about Pulse? Make sure to read this article to learn what makes Pulse stand out from other Business Intelligence solutions.
What’s new in 2.52.0 “Heartbeat”:
Brand Health Indicator – Enables you to completely dissect the impact of an event on a KPI during that event timeframe! As an extension of last releases KPI-Event-Analyzer, we are now able to also incorporate event information relating to the marked outliers as well as adding additional KPIs into the analysis. Based on the values displayed, an assessment of the KPI performance in context of the item analyzed is shown. The most common use case might be assessing your brand health using an established respective KPI alongside another outlying KPI during a particular event timeframe, hence this feature’s name.
Embedding Pulse in other BI solutions – Pulse can now be easily embedded in other BI solutions.
Additional Info on Quentin imports – Quentin imports now show you how long they were running. They are sortable or even filterable on all the information provided.
Improved readability in the Standard Module – Tooltips now indicate which value is hovered on, the legend is more interactive and allows you to filter for single values on right click.
Flexible Table Rows in the Multi Comparison Matrix – This improvement allows to change the Dimension on which the row setup is based on for a more flexible setup.
Release Notes 2.51.0:
KPI <> Event Linkage in Standard Modules & KPI Explorer -> will highlight metric peaks/ throughs and connected events in timelines
Standard Module & KPI Explorer – timeline default time granularity setting (daily, weekly, monthly)
KPI Explorer improvement – bars won´t clutter the chart anymore
VMA <> Pulse connection fix
SM disconnected line on overtime charts, when there’s no data;
SM zoom in function
Filter API handling edge cases
Demo instance theming
In progress:
Excel upload for Dimensions and Dimvals (in development)
Pulse SSO Integration with Azure (in development)
Fixed Period Benchmark display in KPI Explorer – Refinement ahead
The monthly trend monitor provides a unique data-driven overview over the most important global consumer, industry, and society trends. How it works: We use the SONAR trend radar, which tracks the volume of written scientific and journalistic publications on a certain trend, to find out what the top five trends are in these three categories. Utilizing intelligent algorithms, SONAR analyzes a continuously growing database of more than 40 million publications from academic journals, expert blogs, mass media, and patent registers to gain unique insights on global trends.
SONAR can sort trends by Volume (number of articles relevant to a trend and relative to the SONAR index), Growth (YoY growth, volume of the last 12 months vs. previous 12 months) or Momentum (MoM growth, volume of the last month vs. volume of the previous month).
Each month, we present the top 5 consumer, industry, and society trends by Momentum.
Top 5 Consumer Trends in June 2021
Vegan and Vegetarian Food and Healthy Lifestyle & Wellbeing remain the dominant consumer trends in June. Strong momentum propels Meme Culture, Data Privacy and New Work into the Top 5.
Top 5 Industry Trends in June 2021
The Top 5 of industry trends has completely changed compared to the previous month, which signals significant shifts in the tech world. Augmented & Virtual Reality is the new top industry trend, followed by Encryption Attacks and Natural Language Processing. Even the total publication volume is still relatively low, Encryption Attacks sees both considerable YoY-growth and strong momentum, indicating growing cybersecurity challenges on the global scale.
Top 5 Society Trends in June 2021
Global Threats, a global trend that incorporates publications on theCOVID-19 pandemic, is once again the number one society trend by momentum. This is indicative of the growing worries surrounding the Delta variant of the coronavirus, which threatens to result in a fourth global COVID-19 wave.
Late last year, Les Binet, arguably the world’s most respected expert on advertising effectiveness, introduced a distinctive metric to a wider audience: share of search. It has since seen an explosion of industry press coverage and for a good reason. At TD Reply, we have been using share of search for several years as a cost-effective, timely, and accurate method for answering a wide range of high-level marketing strategy questions. While many industry experts have espoused its virtues as a proxy for share of market or an indicator of the media spending efficiency, its benefits at the level of regional marketing have not yet been acknowledged.
What is it and what can I do with that?
The math behind the metric is fairly simple. To calculate a brand’s share of search, you take the total number of all organic searches for a brand and divide it by the total number of all organic searches for all brands in the relevant category over a certain period of time. The search data can be obtained from Google Trends, among other sources.
At the EffWorks Global 2020 conference, Les Binet presented some of the impressive insights that can be achieved with the help of search of search. He found that share of search is not only a strong predictor of market share, but can also act as a convenient way for measuring brand health.
But there is more to this metric. Share of search also enables uncovering regional brand growth opportunities that can be easily missed when relying on common market research methods. That is particularly true when looking at booming developing economies such as Vietnam, India, Indonesia, or the Philippines, where regional differences are substantially more pronounced than in Europe or the US.
For a leading global dairy company looking to increase its category penetration in Vietnam, we relied on share of search to devise a brand growth tracking model that offers clear answers to a whole host of strategic questions: How is the category interest developing in the urban and rural areas? What is the brand’s share of category search in the different areas? How to explain the discrepancy in search interest and sales?
How to take advantage of the regional differences to foster brand penetration success?
This brand growth tracking model is based on two key metrics, Category Health and Brand Momentum, which we combined into a matrix that already provides most of the answers. Additional qualitative research building upon the results takes care of the remaining ones.
Category Health and Brand Momentum
The first key metric, Category Health, represents the category search interest per capita (net users) in percent for all defined regions during a given time period. Converted to a percentage, it reveals the exact state of category penetration per region. Regions with a growing category penetration are usually the ones to be prioritized in terms of marketing activity. It should be noted that when it comes to developing markets such as Vietnam, it is important to calculate the search interest per capita and not just to perform a simple category search volume analysis. The latter might yield misleading results as the amount of internet users in the poorer regions is still rapidly growing, potentially suggesting a higher category growth than it should.
Brand Momentum on the other hand refers to the brand’s share of category search in percent for all defined regions during a given time period. It is calculated simply by dividing the total number of searches for a brand by the total number of searches for all brands in the category – repeated for all regions.
In our case, we calculated these key metrics for our client’s brand, six competing brands, 58 Vietnamese provinces plus 6 key cities (about 35 percent of the Vietnamese population lives in these major cities) and using a Year-over-Year time period.
A powerful regional insight matrix
After calculating both key metrics, we entered them into a matrix that proved to answer many of the existing business questions by itself. We came up with the idea when the client wondered why the growing total category search interest was not translating into sales for him as much as it should have. One explanation was that the client‘s share of search (Brand Momentum) was particularly high in regions with shrinking category penetration (lower Category Health), but lagged behind competitors in the growing regions (higher Category Health).
Figure 1: The Category Health x Brand Momentum cross matrix offers an ideal basis for optimizing regional category penetration strategy.
By simply laying together both key metrics using the cross matrix outlined above, we were immediately able to see that the client’s Brand Momentum was indeed particularly high in declining Category Health regions. As the data has shown, those low health regions surprisingly turned out to be the urban high-income areas, while the poorer rural areas were the ones with growing Category Health. Constructing the same matrix for the competing brands, we noticed that the top competitor enjoyed a substantially stronger Brand Momentum in these growing regions.
Accordingly, the matrix allowed our client to pinpoint exactly which region he should focus on in order to increase his category penetration through his Vietnam marketing activities to convert the increased category interest into more sales. Of course, it also provided a very neat visual overview of the category penetration in all regions as well as a proxy for the brand’s share of market down to province level. Openly available and quickly retrievable search data is all we needed to obtain these high-level insights and we had all the base analyses completed within two weeks. Can traditional market research compete with that?
It should be noted that this model can also be created using Baidu and Yandex data, feasible for projects in China and Russia.
Figure 2: Outline of the four major steps that we followed to significantly increase our client’s relative market share in Vietnam based on regional share of search data.
Moving from insights to brand growth and sales
The insights generated from this share of search-based approach not only tell marketers a clear story of how they should optimize their big country-specific strategic marketing plan, but also how to create a differentiated plan per province or region.
In our case, the client managed to realize a market share growth of 25% within six months by calibrating his marketing spend through regional prioritization without increasing his total spend.
There are many other ways to use the model outlined above as a basis for maximizing marketing success in a region. Marketers could go further by updating the data in frequent – even daily – intervals resulting in a sophisticated near real-time brand growth tracking. This allows for accurate short-term measurements of marketing success as well as on-the-fly marketing steering, enabling quick reactions to current developments and helping brands gain a competitive edge. Or add a “Brand Advocacy” metric based on brand sentiment and share of buzz to better understand why exactly a brand performs better than another in a certain region and how the target audience perceives them.
Thanks to regional data on brand and category growth, a quote attributed to Henry Ford about the “wasted half of advertising” might get a new layer: How much better can advertising be when we balance out marketing activities according to regional requirements?
To sum up, share of search is not just another marketing hype. This case clearly demonstrates how regional share of search data enables uncovering enormous growth potentials for brands performance that would otherwise likely remain hidden, and this is just one promising use case of many. Apart from the needed expertise, the range of applications for share of search data is only limited by imagination.
Lastly, coming up with creative ways to use share of search is not something that should be left to the data wizzes alone. For CMOs and brand strategists, familiarizing themselves with the topic and assuming a leading role in driving share of search projects would be a good way to regain some of the relevance they have been consistently losing over the last years.
The monthly trend monitor provides a unique data-driven overview over the most important global consumer, industry, and society trends. How it works: We use the SONAR trend radar, which tracks the volume of written scientific and journalistic publications on a certain trend, to find out what the top five trends are in these three categories. Utilizing intelligent algorithms, SONAR analyzes a continuously growing database of more than 40 million publications from academic journals, expert blogs, mass media, and patent registers to gain unique insights on global trends.
SONAR can sort trends by Volume (number of articles relevant to a trend and relative to the SONAR index), Growth (YoY growth, volume of the last 12 months vs. previous 12 months) or Momentum (MoM growth, volume of the last month vs. volume of the previous month).
Each month, we present the top 5 consumer, industry, and society trends by Momentum.
Top 5 Consumer Trends May 2021
Many experts have projected that an increased consumer inclination towards a slower pace of life could be one of the lasting effects of COVID-19 pandemic. The strong momentum displayed by the Slow Movement trend in the SONAR universe appears to confirm this assumption.
Top 5 Industry Trends May 2021
Artificial Intelligence is May’s top industry trend, both in terms of Volume and Momentum, followed by Deep & Machine Learning, which also includes AI-related publications. Functional & Enriched Food almost triples its momentum compared to the previous month.
Top 5 Society Trends May 2021
Remarkably, Global Threats, last month’s number one society trend that includes publications related to the COVID-19 pandemic, is not featured in this month’s top five list. Climate Change is the new leading society trend, boasting double the momentum of Diversity & Inclusion, the second strongest trend.
The monthly trend monitor provides a unique data-driven overview over the most important global consumer, industry, and society trends. How it works: We use the SONAR trend radar, which tracks the volume of written scientific and journalistic publications on a certain trend, to find out what the top five trends are in these three categories. Utilizing intelligent algorithms, SONAR analyzes a continuously growing database of more than 40 million publications from academic journals, expert blogs, mass media, and patent registers to gain unique insights on global trends.
SONAR can sort trends by Volume (number of articles relevant to a trend and relative to the SONAR index), Growth (YoY growth, volume of the last 12 months vs. previous 12 months) or Momentum (MoM growth, volume of the last month vs. volume of the previous month).
Each month, we present the top 5 consumer, industry, and society trends by Momentum.
Top 5 Consumer Trends April 2021
The top consumer trends in April are dominated by food-related trends. We record a huge surge in the volume of literature on Urban Gardening & Farming, which is the April trend with the strongest momentum by far.
Top 5 Industry Trends April 2021
Somewhat surprisingly, Bacterial Personalization takes the top spot among the high-momentum industry trends in April, followed by E-commerce and Functional & Enriched Food.
Top 5 Society Trends April 2021
Owing to the ongoing COVID-19 crisis, particularly the skyrocketing infection rates in India, Global Treats remains the top society trend in April. Propelled by the George Floyd trial in the U.S., Diversity & Inclusion jumps to the second place.
