Rethinking how you measure demand

“Most organisations don’t need more data. What they need is a wider, more dynamic view of where demand is forming. And they need to be looking in the right places to find it.”

In this episode of The Persuasion Game podcast, we’re joined by Karl Miley, co-founder of Forge and leader of its Dynamic Demand practice. Karl has spent years helping some of the world’s biggest brands understand where consumer demand is heading, and why so many of them are looking in the wrong direction.

This episode is about why brand confidence in decision-making has never felt lower, how static demand frameworks are partly to blame, and why a new approach is needed.

Karl takes us through four forces reshaping demand: cultural and behavioural shifts, the arrival of new entrants, technology-driven changes in discovery and behaviour, and macro shocks that rewrite consumer priorities overnight.

If you work in identifying demand spaces, this episode is not to be missed.

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This is an 18Sixty production for Forge.

CHAPTERS:

(00:00) Introduction

(03:41) Signals Beyond Trackers

(10:06) Stanley and Diet Coke

(17:08) Spotting Early Signals

(39:50) Best Practice Dynamic System

Transcript

Karl: “Most organisations are measuring the right things for understanding where they are today, but the wrong things for understanding where they’re heading. You know, the metrics you measure in trackers, they tell you what’s happened, but the signals that tell you where demand is going, they often live somewhere else entirely.”

Adam: Welcome to The Persuasion Game, Forge’s podcast all about growing brands and influencing consumers in the modern age, brought to you by MSQ. I’m Adam Rowles, and in today’s episode I’m going to be speaking to Karl Miley, co-founder of Forge and leader of the dynamic demand practice in the business. We’ve talked a lot about growth on this podcast and why businesses today are finding it harder to come by.

For years, businesses have relied on demand spaces to help them see where future growth will come from. They guide strategy, shape innovation, and even influence M&A decisions. But they’re built on a single snapshot in time and were designed for a time when the world moved much more slowly. Karl has spent years now helping some of the world’s biggest brands understand where consumer demand is heading.

In this episode, he shares why confidence in decision-making has never felt lower, why our static demand frameworks are partly to blame, and why a new approach is needed. We’ll look at the four forces reshaping demand and talk about what best-in-class organisations do differently. Hopefully, by the end of the conversation, you’ll have a much clearer view on how to think about where future demand will come from in your category.

Welcome, Karl, to “The Persuasion Game.”

Karl: Very pleased to be here. Thank you, thank you for having me.

Adam: It’s an absolute pleasure. We’ve been trying to get you on for a while, haven’t we?

Karl: We have, so I’m finally pleased to be here!

Adam: So Karl, I want to kick off with something that I think a lot of people are feeling, but they’re not saying out loud. So businesses have never had more data, but it feels like most senior leaders right now are struggling most with decision-making. What is going on there, and why is that happening?

Karl: I think it’s absolutely the right question. In truth, the problem has never really been a lack of data. It’s really been interpretation. You know, knowing what all of that information is actually telling you, where the category is heading, where future value’s going to sit. More data doesn’t answer those questions. If anything, it makes it much harder, in truth, because you’ve now got five different sources pointing in five different directions and no clearer view on which one to act.

Adam: Yeah, and I think what we’re seeing is that underneath all of that, sits a kind of problem that the biggest calls businesses have to make, whether that’s about their portfolios or their innovation or brand positioning, they’re making those calls now against a view of the category looking into the past rather than the future.

Karl: Absolutely. You know, the data is everywhere, but often the demand maps that our clients are using can be stale. And those two things make each other worse because more data than ever and a framework that was built for a category that’s already moved on. Even having lots of data at your fingertips, it creates an illusion of rigour, but in truth, it doesn’t really have the substance to back up the decisions that people want to make confidently.

Adam: First of all, I think most people listening will have a view of their category, will have a view of demand, will have a view of where the category or the organisation is going. But why are they feeling a lack of confidence around those things?

Karl: I think most organisations are measuring the right things for understanding where they are today, but the wrong things for understanding where they’re heading. You know, the metrics you measure in trackers, the things like brand share, penetration, purchase frequency, those aspects, they’re lagging indicators, yeah? They tell you what’s happened. They’re built to look backwards. But the signals that tell you where demand is going, they often live somewhere else entirely. You know, these signals live in culture, in what people are searching for online, in the social communities that people use to talk about and share their lives. And the signals we find in those sources, you very rarely see in trackers effectively.

So I guess whilst you can be completely rigorous in terms of tracking your markets, you can still be completely blind to what’s reshaping it. And that could be a big macro force from the outside. It could be a small pocket of unmet demand that’s sitting in your category at the moment, but it’s dormant but building.

So, to go back to our earlier point, most organisations don’t need more data. What they need is a kind of wider, more dynamic view of where demand is forming, and they need to be looking in the right places effectively to find that.

Adam: So what I’m hearing here is brand managers, category managers or directors, people that are leading the insight or strategy functions in their businesses, they might actually have some of these signals or they might have a view of demand, but they are in different places at once. And when you’re doing a structured growth framework, you’re often not considering the cultural or future-facing signals and vice versa. When you’re looking at the future signals, you might not be thinking about where the kind of growth is gonna come from.

Karl: Exactly. And I think there’s also another problem that sits at the heart of this as well, which is demand frameworks were built for a world where markets moved slowly enough that taking a snapshot every three, four, five years would work for people. And I think historically that’s been a reasonable assumption, and I don’t think that assumption holds any longer. Markets and categories are moving at a much greater pace than I think many of our clients are kind of tracking these things.

Now, I think what’s really important to stress here is what that doesn’t mean is that the demand framework that you’re working with, that it’s broken. Absolutely not. You know, the core needs that it maps, the fundamental human drivers that underpin each demand space, they all remain remarkably stable over time. But what goes stale much faster is everything that sits in those spaces themselves, the codes, the way those needs are being expressed, the way those needs are being satisfied, the cultural context around each one, and that’s what moves, and that’s what most frameworks aren’t keeping up with.

I guess what that means in summary is whilst your spaces are right, the intelligence inside them that’s describing your world is already lagging and behind. And I think that’s where the confidence problem comes in for many people. It’s not that people don’t want to make bold decisions. You know, we see lots of our clients wanting to make those brave choices in dynamic categories. It’s that deep down, often they’re not entirely sure or they’re not trusting of the data upon which they’re basing those decisions.

Adam: I mean, I guess I could see how that manifests in real time. So like, if you’re a business that is following your growth framework, thinking about how to move into a space, but that growth framework was delivered two years ago, and you can see with your own eyes what’s happening in the market looks quite different and not the sort of thing you want to be doing, or competitors have moved in and made a move into that space. You then start lacking the confidence about whether those bets that you decided to make two years ago are still the right bets today.

Karl: Absolutely. And I think having a more dynamic view of demand and understanding how your kind of priority demand spaces are reshaping, how they’re evolving, how consumers are engaging with them, gives you much greater confidence in terms of the decisions that you want to make. Because if your competitors are already doing it, what have they seen that you potentially haven’t?

Adam: Actually, what’s really interesting is that, that you sent me the other day, the McKinsey State of the Consumer report, I think it was like twenty twenty-five or something.

Karl: Yes.

Adam: And in that, they called out that static frameworks are now no longer fit for purpose. And I just thought that was fascinating, like a business that has built so much of that consumer practice around its frameworks and kind of views of the future. Really interested to see them kind of come out and say that.

Karl: Absolutely. I think it’s a big statement from a firm that builds a lot of these frameworks, and I think it matters that people are saying this loudly because again, this isn’t a niche problem, the whole industry is wrestling with it. And I guess the question ultimately is, what do you do about it? How do you get that more dynamic viewpoint that makes sure maintains your map and makes sure that it doesn’t go stale and is representing your category as it operates today?

Adam: As accurately as it can.

Karl: Yeah.

Adam: Okay. So I think you said you had four areas to cover here, four reasons why these things happen and some potential, like what to do about it to follow. Right? Okay. So number one, cultural and behavioural shifts moving faster than your category framework.

Karl: I think this is probably the most underappreciated of the four that we’re going to talk about today. And I think it’s really important because consumer demand doesn’t solely change because of what happens inside a category. It changes because of what happens in culture. And culture is moving continuously as we all know. Culture doesn’t wait for your annual planning cycle. It doesn’t wait for your next research dip. The things that are likely to shape your category will first appear in online communities, in search behaviour, in the language that people use online. And I think what that means for many of our clients is if you’re not looking there, by the time that meaningfully shows up in your kind of sales data, you’re already too late.

And I think there’s a brilliant example of this kind of happening in real time that I think most people will realise, most recently, and that’s with Stanley. Now, I’m sure we’ve all seen those large quencher tumblers on social media. I mean, we’ve even got a couple of them at home in that water bottle drawer that I’m sure every household in the UK has. But to give you a bit of a backstory, Stanley are a 110-year-old brand, and they’ve built their entire identity around delivering to one consumer, and that’s the outdoor-person, the rugged consumer.

Adam: Yeah, yeah. Absolutely.

Karl: Those people that, you know, kind of need something that will be durable in those harsh environments, where they’re operating. And Stanley’s entire positioning is around built for life, which again, you know, speaks to that consumer quite clearly. Now, what’s been really fascinating to see is that large Stanley Quencher tumbler that we’ve all seen on social media, that was actually discontinued by Stanley in 2019 because of low sales.

But then this enormous kind of cultural shift happened that hugely benefited them. Hydration all of a sudden became like a lifestyle signal. You know, it was a visible expression of people’s health consciousness.

Adam: Yeah.

Karl: Of their own self-care, even, you know, to the extent it like manifested in terms of their identity. And as I mentioned, it got discontinued. But then randomly, that Quencher tumbler got picked up by a women’s lifestyle community on Instagram, and from there it went viral on TikTok. And from 2019, when it was worth about seventy-three million US, in 2023, it was seven hundred and fifty million US. It had a tenfold increase in just ten years.

Adam: Wow.

Karl: I think what’s fascinating about this as an example is that it wasn’t that Stanley misunderstood the hydration need. You know, their problem was that they were defining hydration in the way that they’d always done.

Adam: Yeah.

Karl: What they’d missed is what it was becoming. What they’d not picked up on were the signals that this kind of newer demand for hydration was forming, and they didn’t spot that simply because they were just looking in the wrong places. So Stanley got lucky…

Adam: Yeah.

Karl: …in reality. You know, culture moved in their direction, and they were in the right place to benefit.

Adam: What’s so interesting about what you’re talking about is stuff that we’ve talked about before, right? Where when you do a demand spaces map of the category, you have to group everything together so it all equals a hundred, right? And you don’t want there to be a hundred demand spaces. You want there to be, you know, seven or eight or nine, whatever it is that pulls the category apart. But these like little bits or moments in culture that are bubbling up, they get stripped out. You can’t see those. So yeah, fascinating that just in the approach of the way of doing it, you end up creating the problem.

Karl: I think the challenge with delivering kind of demand spaces and embedding them within businesses is that there is a need for you to be pragmatic. You need to make sure that these pieces of work land within a business. People across all different divisions can understand it and start to engage and use it. But what that ultimately means is that when you’re developing your frameworks, you often look to try and simplify as much as you possibly can to make sure that it will deliver what it needs to. What that means is you then take those outliers…

Adam: Yeah.

Karl: …that you’ve just kind of just, like, mentioned, and because they don’t really fit well and they haven’t really become substantial in terms of size and volume or value, then you end up rolling them into your model, and you kind of lose some of those really kind of interesting edges that I think can start to identify some really interesting new spaces for our clients to operate.

But just to go back to that Stanley point, what I think was really fascinating was that they were a business that ultimately benefited from a cultural shift. But you see so many examples as well of, you know, I guess brands that have been impacted negatively by that cultural shift, and therefore they’ve had to pivot quite significantly. So, you know, for example, take Diet Coke.

Adam: Yeah.

Karl: …as an example. You know, that word ‘diet’, for decades it was a positive signal, yeah. It was low calorie. It was a smart choice. It was, you know, healthy trade-offs. But then a generation came through that associates that word with, I guess, more restriction, losing something… that they actively don’t want anything to do with. So all of a sudden, that cultural meaning of just one word changed massively, and you see that in the sales figures. You know, Diet Coke lost significant market share and has done over the course of the last decade, and you can see Coca-Cola having to massively pivot hard behind Coke Zero to recover that ground.

Adam: Interesting. Okay. So what you’re saying is the cultural risks aren’t showing up in the data. So you might be looking at future growth spaces, thinking these are, you know, all to play for, but what you haven’t spotted is how the whole context has changed.

Karl: Absolutely. That’s primarily because the frameworks that many of our clients are using are a static snapshot in time. To give another example as well, it’s gonna be a podcast full of lots of examples today, just to try and bring this to life. But I think wellness is another amazing example of how cultural shifts affect what consumers are looking for, because wellness has always been a fundamental human need.

Adam: Yeah.

Karl: And will always remain one, in truth. And any kind of framework that our clients use that have health or wellness as a space is not wrong. But I think when it’s defined at that level, it starts to become a potential challenge because wellness is a big, fat term, and what consumers mean by it, how they express it, what they want, what they’re looking for to help satisfy it can change in a short space of time.

Go back five years, wellness in the food and drink industry was all about an absence of a negative. It was taking out fats, it was taking out sugars, it was taking out additives and salts. And I think for many of those brands, that was their way of delivering to the wellness need that consumers were seeking. Fast-forward to today, that frame has like massively changed. Wellness now is about the presence of a positive. Often it’s about microbiome support. It’s about optimising the gut-brain health axis. It’s about increasing cognitive performance. So the macro need is the same, wellness. It’s always been there. But what it means from a codes perspective, what it means from a language perspective, what it means from an occasions and the products that are satisfying, all of that has reshaped. And it therefore means that, again, if you’ve got a very old or static viewpoint of what wellness is, you’re gonna be behind the pace. You’re gonna be lagging when you’re delivering products and services and experiences in that space.

Adam: Okay. So challenge number one is that cultural signals are influencing the context, and we can’t see those in our static maps. So question to you is how do you find those signals?

Karl: Brilliant question. I think as I mentioned earlier, you know, the most important signals almost never appear first in your market data. They appear in culture, yeah, in the search behaviour, in the online communities. I’m gonna sound a little bit like a broken record today. But these sources, you know, have been surfacing what’s shifting months, sometimes years before it even shows up in your trackers. And so the brands that move earliest to try and identify these and find them and satisfy them aren’t always necessarily the smartest brands, but what they were doing is that they were looking in the right places for those changes.

Adam: Danielle in our team, shout out Danielle, showed me a brilliant example earlier of Lucky Saint, they’ve brought out another non-alc variant which has got electrolytes in it. Now you think Lucky Saint were one of the first into the non-alc space, and they had like a fully, you know, brilliant product in the market while everyone else was sort of scrambling to make their non-alc lager. Now the space is fully, you know, grown, they’re already going on the offensive and looking for like other spaces adjacent to that, like what they could be doing next and the functional ingredient additive non-alc lager is something that we’re seeing a lot of clients sort of looking to do. And it was a real surprise to see that they’ve already got one on shelf, which is just, I guess it just shows an organisation that is staying one step ahead of those signals. Easier for them to pivot as well and kind of move, be agile because they’re a smaller business. But they’ve clearly got a good sense of what’s coming next.

Karl: Absolutely. And I think they are looking in the right places to identify where these signals, where consumer need and demand is shifting, and they’re being able to tap into that very effectively.

Adam: Okay. So talking about new entrants, I think this is a really interesting one. The way that categories can completely change with the influence of someone that comes into the category doing something slightly different.

Karl: Absolutely. Yeah. I kind of feel like this is a situation where this one always feels quite sudden. And that’s not because all of a sudden this new entrant just appeared out of nowhere and whatever. It’s because ultimately the demand has always been there, but nobody has been truly satisfying it in the best way. So that new entrant doesn’t always create a new demand within our world, but most of the time what it does reveal is that there was an existing need or demand that was being under-met that it then comes in and brilliantly resolves.

So that space, that opportunity was on your map the whole time. But if you haven’t got this kind of dynamic viewpoint of how things and the levels of frustration that consumers have with fulfilling that demand, then you kind of miss that growing frustration, that growing dissatisfaction. And that’s what often many new entrants into a category really prey upon and actually deliver well. And I think we all know the example of Blockbuster Video and the rise of Netflix, and I think this is a prime example of this. But I think what’s really useful about this example is not the detail, it’s the pattern that we kind of see emerging.

Because in the case of Blockbuster, they would have had a framework that helped them truly understand the world of entertainment and the entertainment category. But I guess what that framework didn’t do was really highlight the frustration that consumers were feeling across every single demand and across every single interaction that they had with the brand. So, for those of you young enough not to know who Blockbuster are, let me just explain the experience that you would need to go through. But you drove to a store, you browsed thousands of VHS tapes or DVDs with no recommendations, no catalog, no way to filter your choices. Then you hoped that the one that you actually wanted was in stock. If it was, brilliant, you drove home. You then remembered to return it on time, and you drove back to the store to deliver it. If you didn’t remember to take it back on time, then you end up paying a fee, which often cost you the same amount as the overall rental itself.

So if you think about that experience, every single step of that journey is in truth a friction point. It’s a point of frustration. And then all of a sudden, Netflix comes along and takes that entire experience and removes every single friction point within it. There’s no store. You don’t have to drive to a place to go and collect your DVD. There’s no due date. There’s no late fees. There’s no out of stock, you know. So all of a sudden, everything within that category shifted. Netflix understood this inherent frustration and this inherent kind of tension that consumers were experiencing within the world of entertainment through existing sources and providers, and were able to immediately just come in and kind of like remove all of those kind of points of friction and deliver an amazing experience, which, you know, we know what’s happened to Blockbuster as a result.

I think there’s another interesting one as well, which I think many people will also realise as well, which is around in the world of fast fashion and apparel. You know, Zara and H&M have spent years believing that they’d effectively cracked this category. They were delivering fast fashion. You know, their framework showed strong share. They showed loyal customers in a category that they truly understood. Then Shein arrived, you know. And between November 2022 and November 2023, while Zara launched 40,000 new items in the US market, Shein launched 1.5 million. Thirty-seven times more. And by the end of 2023, Shein accounted for nearly a fifth of the global fast fashion market.

Adam: Wow.

Karl: Just came out of nowhere in truth.

Adam: I mean, let’s not talk about the sort of sustainability angle on this, just in terms of the supply chain point, I mean, I was listening to someone talk about this on a podcast recently, the whole model of going, what is celebrity X wearing? What’s in the kind of magazine? How quickly can we replicate it? How quickly can we get it shipped to the kind of Western markets? And then be in that cultural moment at that time that that piece of thing is still being worn and talked about?

Karl: That’s exactly what, you know, Shein have done. They haven’t discovered a new consumer in any way, shape, or form. What they’ve identified is the existing consumers in the market, their desire for that variety, like you say, that trend responsiveness and price is far more acute than, I guess, how Zara and H&M understand them. I think what’s really interesting here is that I guess H&M and Zara were looking at their map, and they knew the category was fast, but Shein revealed that fast was effectively a relative concept, in all honesty. And the gap between what the likes of Zara and H&M are offering versus what the actual consumers wanted in terms of fast fashion is worth billions and billions.

Adam: So if we’re gonna go and look then to find where these tensions exist and get confidence that they exist at a level enough that we’re going to spend time and money and resources investing in solving them, where would we look for this if it’s not in our regular demand frameworks?

Karl: Well, the first thing I’d say to that final point is don’t look at your existing category trackers. When you ask people how satisfied they are with how well a brand or a product is serving their needs, in most surveys, trackers, whatever, you see eighty, ninety percent of people being satisfied, and that’s often because consumers can’t articulate their dissatisfaction or their frustration until there is a change in the frame of reference.

Adam: Yeah.

Karl: So when something better comes along, and they suddenly go, “Ah, do you know what? That is so much better.”

Adam: Yeah.

Karl: One of the really important things is where you can start to surface some of these pockets of latent frustration and dissatisfaction are in more kind of search and social-based sources, what people are putting on communities, what people are putting on Reddit, what people are putting on Instagram, what people are calling call centres about with frustrations. That’s where you can start to surface some of these more latent frustrations and dissatisfiers and then start to act upon them.

Adam: Okay. Interesting. And I guess when you were talking then, the question I had is, it’s all very well hindsight saying, this competitor came in and changed it up like this. You can’t obviously predict the future, but what can brands do to be, I guess, more prepared for something like this happening?

Karl: I think it’s a great question. Can I use another example to…

Adam: Go for it! I’m loving the examples.

Karl: So this is in the world of beverages.

Adam: Yeah.

Karl: And it’s Olipop.

Adam: Yeah.

Karl: Which you may or may not have heard of, but it’s a new entrant that has brilliantly resolved a latent kind of category frustration. Let me just give you a bit of backstory about where that kind of emerged from. I think in years before, the better-for-you drinks category asked consumers to make a sacrifice. If you wanted low calorie, it probably meant artificial sweeteners. If you wanted something more functional, it felt quite medicinal in nature. Healthy meant it often didn’t taste like you wanted it to drink. You know, the trade-off that the category was asking consumers to make was, if you want something that feels good for you then you probably have to give up a little bit of the pleasure in it as well.

Now, Olipop emerged in 2018 with a very, very different proposition, and one that looked to resolve that tension. They launched a product that had both the pleasure and the indulgence of a carbonated soft drink, but with ingredients that were also actively good for you. So that need for a trade-off, sacrifice was just removed instantly. And that message and the product landed brilliantly with consumers. Their revenue went from one million US in 2019 to 400 million five years later, and the whole probiotic kind of soda category saw similar growth as a result as well.

What’s happened next is really fascinating, and to your point about what do the big players do about this? How do we stop a new entrant, or how do we prepare ourselves for it? Well, PepsiCo had been watching that space really closely, and they’d built a really clear picture of where they believed demand was heading. And as a result, they acquired Poppi. That is effectively the other leading brand, and they bought that for one point nine five billion in March twenty twenty-five, and they completed that before Coke had even made any kind of moves in this space as well.

And I think what that acquisition kinda tells you is something quite important, because you don’t make a one point nine five billion dollar acquisition on instinct. Yeah? That kind of confidence comes from already kinda having done the work and understanding where demand is heading. So those organisations that have a live view of their category, they have options. The ones that don’t end up scrambling.

Adam: Makes me wonder just what other opportunities they’re also keeping a close eye on. What other signals that they’re waiting for to grow to a certain enough scale to make it worth the investment.

Karl: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, and as I said, I think the organisations that do best are the ones that have this kind of continuous kind of dynamic view of their market and how things are evolving.

Adam: So I mean, one of the things that we’ve seen a lot in the last, I don’t know, five years since COVID, remember those times, COVID.

Karl: No, thank you.

Adam: But we’ve seen huge changes in the way that we interact, communicate, the way we consume content, the rise of TikTok. These things must also have an effect on our demand frameworks, right?

Karl: Absolutely. I mean, technology is a massive reason for why potentially, again, your map and the perspective that you’re looking at is slightly out of date and has gone a bit stale. Technology doesn’t just change what people want, you know, it changes how they discover things, how they evaluate things, how they make choices, how they talk about products afterwards. Their needs are often stable within any given category, but the way that they’re able to satisfy those needs shifts completely. And a survey asking people about, you know, what their current behaviour is, isn’t gonna capture any of that.

And I know I’ve talked about Blockbuster. I’m now gonna talk about another example, which I know everyone is intimately familiar with, but Kodak, I think, is a prime example of this kind of technology shift. They invented the digital camera in 1975, but they couldn’t get approval for it internally because of what it would do to their film business. And we kind of all know what happened next. But here’s a situation where, again, the consumer need to capture and to share a moment with others never changed. But the technology that satisfies it now has changed beyond all recognition, and all of a sudden that has like massively impacted their overall business.

And we’re seeing that same pattern follow in many other categories at the moment as well. So let’s talk TikTok. Are you a big TikTok user?

Adam: I went on TikTok. This is a true story. I went on TikTok for a total of 48 hours. It was so distracting, and it was like being in a nightclub for 48 hours. I mean, I found it difficult to put my phone down. Like, it was so addictive I just left almost immediately as soon as I basically started. It was just was not right for me.

Karl: 48 hours of doomscrolling. That might be a Guinness World Record potentially.

Well, I think TikTok’s fascinating because I think, you know, for decades, demand frameworks in most categories such as beauty and food and FMCG, they’re all built on an understanding that consumers discover and choose products through advertising, through word of mouth, through, you know, editorial, et cetera. And that model held, but then all of a sudden, along came social media and in particular TikTok, and they changed the mechanics of discovery in a fundamental way. You know, in 2024, 64% of Gen Z consumers were regularly using TikTok as a search tool to research products, compare prices, and also kind of verify their authenticity. So all of a sudden, entire categories — I think this is another brilliant example — entire categories, things like cleaning products, really functional, quite boring categories, they go from marginal to mainstream overnight because of that kind of organic kind of community behaviour that no demand model can predict or have visibility of.

So I think what’s interesting here is, you know, the underlying need to discover new products and then make sure it’s right for you before you purchase it, that’s never changed. But the platform through which that is now being satisfied changed faster than most brand research cycles could register.

Adam: Yeah.

Karl: And so brands whose demand maps are built around TV, the old traditional means — TV, Google, Instagram — they found themselves operating frameworks that described a world that effectively moved on, for a significant part of their kind of customer base.

Adam: Yeah. We’ve had some really interesting conversations about the creator economy on this podcast with Fiona Hughes, who’s a creator expert. We obviously had Nathalia Amadeu come on, the global brand director at Vaseline.

Karl: A brilliant podcaster, might I say.

Adam: Talking about Vaseline Verified. And like, it is just fascinating, isn’t it? Just quite how fast that space has become as big as it has in terms of not just how you communicate with people, like via social media, but how you collect insight from what is trending, what’s happening, and how quickly you can then incorporate that and add it to your innovation cycles or start to map your portfolios against it. It’s very fast-moving and still continuing to move and I think we’re only just getting a handle on it now.

Karl: Exactly. And it just talks about this whole podcast itself. You know, the reason is you need to be looking in all of those places to start to identify the signals for these shifts. If you have a static framework, yes the architecture will remain the same. The motivational kind of human needs, the human drivers, the demands upon which it’s built, they all remain the same and they will remain stable for a number of years. But it’s that kind of intelligence layer that sits over the top of it, that’s what needs to change. Your understanding of the different demands, and that’s what moves incredibly fast. And you’re not gonna pick that up through survey data, and you’re not gonna pick that up through your category trackers and your sales data. When you do see it in those, you’re already too late.

Adam: So does that require different speeds then, Karl? So we talk about fundamental human needs, they tend to stay the same. That’s what the demands are built on.

Karl: Yeah.

Adam: So that might tell you what macro or what subcategory you might be in. So for example, protein additive spaces in yogurts, for example, might be something that’s based around the need for satiety or for strength or whatever protein needs people might have, and they tend to be quite slow in terms of the shifts and the changes. Is there a faster lane where it’s about the expressions in advertising or the expressions in your comms or like the flavour that you might bring out that year that tends to move a bit quicker, like that you can kind of respond a bit more quickly to the signals that you’re talking about?

Karl: Yeah. And I think one of the biggest challenges that you often find is how do you make a distinction between a trend and a fad.

Adam: Yeah.

Karl: You know, fads are very quick to influence behaviour within a category, impact it massively for a short space of time, and then diminish again.

Adam: Yeah.

Karl: Whereas trends have that kind of much longer kind of impact in terms of what consumers are doing. And so I think one of the things that we always kind of say to our clients when you are looking to these signals in other data sources beyond your standard surveys and trackers, is you just need to always be mindful that you are not jumping on a fad. You need to be super careful in terms of making sure that you are tapping into trends that will have some longevity and that again, you can make kind of confident decisions behind in terms of how you change your portfolio, how you change the products, how you change your NPD pipeline as well.

Adam: Shall we move on to the fourth and final?

Karl: Of course. Yes, please. We’ve already talked about the three: the culture, we’ve talked about new entrants changing the shape of the map, and we’ve also talked about the rise of technology and how that shapes.

The last one that I want to talk about is much bigger than a lot of this. It’s about macro forces effectively changing consumer priorities. Now, for the first three that we’ve talked about today, there’s a signal often somewhere if you are looking for it in the right place. This one is slightly different. You know, you can’t see yourself ahead of a pandemic. You can’t easily spot a cost of living crisis that is forming in a community, an online community 18 months before it actually hits. You know, macro shocks are imposed upon us, and they often arrive without a huge amount of warning, and no brilliant intelligence system or demand system could ever kind of predict those happening. Nobody could, in all honesty.

But what you see is the organisations that do the best in those different scenarios, they’ve already asked themselves the right questions. So in the context of the cost of living crisis, many of the businesses that did well, they’d asked themselves, “What is going to happen to our consumers when all of a sudden they’ve got less money in their pockets? Which of our demands are going to be impacted the most? Which needs are gonna fundamentally change?” They’ve started to do all of that planning well ahead, such that again, when these big macro shocks change a category and change consumer behaviour, they’re in a position to be able to act decisively on that because they’ve already started to question and challenge and see what potential futures for them could look like.

Adam: So the scenario planning in this example is intrinsically linked to playing out how the demand will shift in the future?

Karl: Exactly. Effectively, what they’d done is they’d stress-tested their map with different futures before those futures had actually arrived. And so as a result, when one of them did, they had a plan rather than a question. And I guess those organisations that have a live kind of current view of their demands landscape, they can reread it quickly. They can see which demands are holding, which ones are collapsing, and that’s a massive advantage because those organisations that have a static framework who all of a sudden find themselves navigating this very, very different world, there’s no way or quick way for them to easily update it.

Adam: So Karl, I totally agree with what you’re saying in terms of, you know, going into a cost of living crisis, and it was some of those manufacturers that had a portfolio that could address different pockets of the market, right, effectively. I guess one of the questions that we don’t often ask with demand spaces that we potentially could ask more of is rather than just like where are the opportunities, should be asking like where are the risks?

Karl: Absolutely, and I think this is where kind of scenario planning becomes quite a powerful tool. You have a framework, you have an understanding, you’ve got a rich understanding of what consumer needs are, what consumer drivers are. What you can then start to do is you can play with that map. You can predict, you know, COVID crisis, where are the challenges on our map? Which demands are gonna massively decline? Which ones are gonna increase? Cost of living crisis, you can do the same. You can start to model out what some of those futures are.

And I think one of the real powers of AI is that it can map and start to see many of these different futures, millions of different futures — it does all the heavy lifting. Exactly. It does all of the heavy lifting. So what you can then start to do is use AI effectively here to start modelling what future scenarios look like, and you can start to prepare yourself for all of those eventualities.

Adam: So we’ve heard that the static traditional way of looking at demand isn’t really fit for purpose in a modern dynamic world. We’ve also heard you say we can overlay a lot of this stuff and we can bring these elements in. What is the best practice here? Like how do we bring all this together to make it something that works for the clients that you have and the people listening on this podcast?

Karl: Yeah. I think there is a common theme across all the organisations that are doing this well. Fundamentally, what they have stopped doing is treating demand understanding as a project and started treating it as a system, and a dynamic one. One that kind of keeps pace with that speed of market, not the speed of their planning cycle or when they’re gonna be doing their next research dip. You know, the insights that they use aren’t the ones that are just found in decks that they created eighteen months ago. It’s in live dynamic tools that the whole business is using every single day. That demand language is embedded within the organisation, and there are the tools that are giving those kind of live signals and live updates on a regular and frequent basis such that these changes don’t come out of the blue, and they can start to be spotted early.

Adam: Okay, so let’s try and pull this together and make it useful for the people listening. We’ve heard about the four reasons that demand maps go out of date more quickly now.

Number one, culture moves very quickly, fast. It moves faster than our research cycles allow.

We’ve got just the proliferation of new entrants that a static demand map just can’t capture, especially when we see categories colliding with each other and crossing over.

Technology changes. We’re living in a world of rapid technology change, and those are obviously influencing. And obviously, just we’re living in a more VUCA world now. The macro pressures create surprises more frequently than they maybe used to when we were in a more stable environment.

So, none of this is unpredictable in hindsight and that this will be the challenge I think people will be thinking of. So, what do we do about this, Karl? How do we bring this all together so we can mitigate some of these things that you’ve discussed?

Karl: The overarching principle for me is that the businesses that moved early and made the most of these changes weren’t the ones that were necessarily smarter, but I think they were the ones that were paying attention to the right things. So I think for people listening to this, whether you have an existing demand framework or no framework at all, the fundamental question doesn’t change. And that question is, do you know where demand is going? Not where it’s been! But where it’s going next. And can you keep up to date with that as well? Can you start to make sure that you have a dynamic viewpoint as that shifts as well?

Because a good demand framework, the architecture, the spaces, the human needs, that’s not what breaks. What breaks is assuming that the meaning inside those spaces stays the same. The map isn’t wrong, but the world kind of keeps writing new things inside of it, and the organisations that win are the ones with a dynamic enough view of demand to read that in time to act effectively.

So what I would ask everyone listening to this is to pick your most important demand space, the one that your biggest brand is aligned against, or that your biggest innovation bet is built around, and ask yourself honestly, do you know how consumers are satisfying that need today versus two years ago? Do you know what’s kind of changed in terms of the codes, in terms of how that need’s being delivered? Do you know what’s changed in terms of the occasions and the products that they are reaching for? And if you can’t answer that with confidence, yes, your map might be right, but the read inside of it probably isn’t, and that’s a risk.

Adam: Karl, brilliant. Let’s leave that there. Thank you so much for coming today and sharing all of that with us. It’s been a really fascinating listen.

Karl: Thank you so much for having me. It’s been really enjoyable.

Adam: Thank you so much to Karl for coming on the podcast. If you’re leading on brand management strategy or insights at your business and you want to ensure that your demand map is as agile as possible, visit forgemsq.com to find out more about our dynamic demand offering.