Global data exploration + machine learning for culturally charged commercial advantage | Powered by strat7.ai
01 August, 2021
Culture At Scale is a powerful new addition to how Crowd DNA pinpoints and tracks trends. Supported by the advanced NLP, AI and machine learning capabilities of strat7.ai, we tap into the sheer size and incredible pace of the online conversation, presenting future scenarios and defining credible opportunities.
Culture At Scale is called on by brands across a broad set of categories – media, tech, apparel, alcohol, retail, finance and beyond. It combines the creativity and intelligence of our analysis and consultancy with the trustworthiness of significant data sets.
Culture At Scale provides three products:
1. Crowd Signals | Tracking where culture is headed
2. Crowd Spaces | Deep diving into category and occasion
3. Crowd Voices | Listening to those influencing change
Tracking where culture is headed
Crowd Signals interrogates online sources to provide highly evidenced foresight of where culture and consumers are moving next. We illuminate emergent, and sometimes barely visible, signals within broader trends.
Typically, Crowd Signals is used to underpin always-on trends programmes, allowing clients to track how their brand, products and experiences are, or are not, demonstrating cultural relevance.
Analysis tools:
Trend Mapping: plotting signals within a trend on an axis, based on co-occurrence and clustering techniques
Trend Trajectories: tracking the speed of change of emergent signals and more dominant themes
Visual Analytics: unpacking the imagery and visual codes behind a signal
Linguistic Evolution: understanding how language is shifting within a wider theme
How we use Crowd Signals:
Urban Futures: 18 month trends programme making sense of cultural shifts to inspire the creation of a high profile city of the future; with opportunity areas identified through cluster analysis and their movement tracked over time
The Cultural Conversation: analysing billions of tweets for Twitter, creating a thought leadership initiative running for three years (and counting), and based around six macro themes, 18 trends and hundreds of drivers therein
Deep diving into category and occasion
Crowd Spaces brings scale to semiotic principles, providing highly immersive takes on occasions and consumer engagement with categories, supporting our clients with fresh ideas, stimulus and recommendations for innovation, brand positioning/activation, creative and comms development.
It’s a super-powered form of executional guidance, designed for modern day brand needs, and deployable either by market or globally.
Analysis tools:
Topic Mapping: plotting a theme, or space along an axis based on relevance and co-occurrence
Visual Analytics: unpacking the imagery and visual codes within a space
Linguistic Evolution: understanding how language is evolving
Semiotic Enrichment: fusing what the data tells us with nuance and further quality control
How we use Crowd Spaces:
Reimaging Mobility: uncovering the conversation around in-city mobility and sustainability across five markets to help reposition and future-proof the brand communications of a leading automobile designed for urban driving
Liquid Lipstick: investigating beauty category product benefits, emotional cues and pain points via exploration of social and review data
Listening to those influencing change
Crowd Voices leverages conversation topics, hashtags and imagery, tracking cultural change over time through those making it happen. We build out a corpus of relevant micro influencers across categories, trends and location.
This is typically supported by layering in articulations from KIN, our global network of 1,000+ cultural insiders. Crowd Voices reveals new sector and brand innovations, lifestyle trends, and fresh manifestations to inform creative ideas, market localisation and brand activations.
Analysis tools:
Audience Clustering: building out a corpus of relevant voices
Keyword Capturing: querying and monitoring keywords and hashtags
Linguistic & Visual Analytics: drawing out the nuance of language and visuals
How we use Crowd Voices:
Fashion Forward: identifying a leading-edge style cohort that’s receptive to drop culture; enabling a world famous brand to connect with their culture, shopping habits and visual cues in the launch of a new product/experience
Next Gen Wealth: global analysis of the future of high net worth for a major banking group, pinpointing the audience and defining new markers in how they relate to wealth and define premium and luxury experiences
Culture At Scale is part of Crowd Signs – our team and specialism dedicated to unlocking future potential, and situated across our offices in London, Amsterdam, New York City, Singapore and Sydney.
Crowd Signs also calls on trends analysis, semiotics and KIN – our 1,000+ global network of experts, creators and connectors.
Underpinned in all cases by our strategic capabilities and core ambition of providing culturally charged commercial advantage for our clients, we blend these approaches to best meet each specific brief.
Our Culture At Scale work, like everything at Crowd DNA, is rooted in collaboration with our clients – workshopping the best methods mix and refining the Culture At Scale products in a bespoke and iterative fashion.
1. Source Data: strat7.ai crawls 100,000+ publicly available data sources (social media, blogs, news, reviews, and forums). GDPR and TOS compliance is assured.
2. Clean & Translate: collate, clean and organise data sets. Translation to English in conjunction with local market analysts.
3. Bespoke NLP Analysis: strat7.ai design of custom NLP algorithm to group topics by co-occurrence clustering, producing five-eight themes/topics based on the conversation.
4. Data Enrichment: our trends analysts and semioticians conduct analysis on spaces from data; visual and linguistic cues analysed.
5. Activate: develop strategic recommendations and deliver findings via clear and revealing outputs with visualisations to evidence key points.
Culture At Scale is supported by strat7.ai – a specialist service within the STRAT7 group. Primarily developed by Crowd DNA and analytics specialists Bonamy Finch, it uses unstructured online data from social, forums, search, review sites, client sales and behavioural sets, merging thousands of sources, and leveraging AI and machine learning for speed of analysis.
+ Bespoke global online sources
+ Meticulous data cleaning
+ Advanced NLP, AI and machine learning
+ Supporting data-driven consultancy across STRAT7 agencies
To find out more about Culture At Scale, and how we are using it to meet a range of brand, product and experience challenges, please get in touch with Crowd DNA Signs & Socialise director Jo Hatch.
01 August, 2021