Foresight Streaming: Being succesful by looking into thefuture.

Because then you can distinguish yourself from the rest and can continue to be successful over a prolonged period. Apple founder Steve Jobs articulated that perfectly. He claimed that you have to get as close as possible to your customers. So extremely close, that you can tell what they need, long before they realise it themselves.

The lifecycle of products is becoming increasingly shorter. A product reaches at the top of its growth and sales curve within a few months and a few months later it is on its way back down again. As a result, innovation is becoming more and more difficult. There is scarcely time to ask for customer feedback and to incorporate it in the development of new products. Even more so, as by the time you have established precisely what the customer demands, the customer demands something different again. So thinking one step ahead,which is easy to say, but how do you pull it off?

Understand what's going on with customers
One major advantage of a Research Community is that it is a flexible tool. The research follows the rhythm of the organisation and adapts to it. The community generates structured data which you use directly to improve your product during development. We have already done this for various companies, for example,ABN AMRO and Philips. The most useful aspect of this approach is that you know that your product meets expectations when you introduce it to the general public.

Because the community yields a great deal of unrequested information from spontaneous conversations, it is also possible to collect bottom-up information. We study this unstructured data and discover patterns from it.

For example, topics for discussion which frequently arise or recurring questions from customers. We combine these with the trends we observe around us and information we have already analysed, for example, internal details and in publications and social media. Enhanced by our marketing expertise, these patterns can assume a predictive value: Foresight.

Foresight streaming enables businesses to monitor their target group closely.

To summarise, Foresight Streaming is:

• An ongoing community
• Based on spontaneous conversations
• We recognise patterns in the ‘big qualitative data’
• We combine these with trends

With such a forward-looking view, you are able to develop concepts which fulfil the constantly evolving demands of your customers. Long before the competition do.

In order to make thus method a success, there are 6 Key Success Factors, which we can explain further individually:

• The right process: the perfect start by fine-tuning who does what within the research
• The right people: ensure that you have enough people contributing to generate sufficient information
• The right motivation: 6 motivators
• The right big qualitative data: create sufficient information and utilise it in the correct way
• The right customer knowledge: no open doors, but bring new insights
• Stakeholder engagement: ensure that stakeholders on the customer side are included in the research

Would you like to know more about Foresight Streaming? No problem. Christian de Jong is Marketing & Product ManagementExpertise Manager. He will be able to tell you everything you need to know about the latest methods and technologies we use to help our clients grow.