We make it a point to track broad economic, social, political, and scientific trends and developments that ultimately serve as a context for our conceptual work. We've broken down these topics into some main categories below, with a brief explanation of each:

Customer Power
Customers, not companies, are driving the economy. They're becoming better informed, more demanding, more impatient with poor service and quality, and their global purchasing power is growing all the time.

Women's Power
The movement of women into the work force in industrialized and developing countries was the biggest and most disruptive social and economic shift of the twentieth century. Women's political and economic influence is still growing considerably. But this is still largely a hidden story, and the implications of it are not fully understood.

Information Markets- the Wisdom of Crowds
Groups and markets are usually more intelligent than any single individual member. Aggregated data from diverse, independent, decentralized sample groups is a much more reliable source of facts upon which to base strategic marketing decisions than what most traditional research provides.

Death of Brands
The value of traditional premium brands has been declining - they're becoming commodities. Brands that are responsive to customers are the new value brands.

The Brand/Profit Chain
Brands are the missing link in the service/profit chain, because they're all about what customers think and expect before they become customers, before they engage in repeat purchases, or before they refer brands to their friends. The Brand/Profit chain focuses on profits and loyalty over raw numbers in market share and sales

Brand/Expectations/Experience Cycle
Brands are part of a cycle of customer expectations, experience, and referral. Customer research has largely ignored customer expectations as an element in brand perceptions. but we find it to be particularly important.

Death of Traditional Marketing
Advertising and marketing practices evolved in the 20th century as a way for manufacturers to find markets for products, and services were seen as marginal. In the 21st century, this model has been outdated for many years, and wide scale change is overdue. Companies now want and need more performance-driven marketing, as much advertising was ineffective and difficult to measure. And effective, relevant, ongoing customer research is more now important than ever.

WOW - the new WOM
"Word-of-Web" is today's word-of-mouth. People are generating "buzz" in written form on a unprecedented scale and speed. This buzz is searchable, measurable, and dynamic. It is the fuel for many new and hybrid forms of marketing (such as social networks, buzz agents, viral, and search engine optimization) that rely on technologies that use natural language processing, statistics, probabilities, machine learning, pattern recognition and artificial intelligence.

Choice Overload
The rapidly growing number of product/service choices confuses customers, drains companies, and impacts economies in ways that few are predicting or tracking.

Human Universals
People have a discrete set of behavioral and cognitive attributes that transcend cultures. This idea has many implications in the global economy on the level of communications, product design, localization, standards, technology, and ergonomics.

Evolutionary Nature of Thought
The study of how customers think and behave is driving the emergence of new scientific disciplines. The underlying mechanisms of thought itself appear to exhibit evolutionary behavior, which means that companies must create communications that work within the existing cognitive and behavioral limits of customers, rather than attempting to force or determine these limits.