Trend Analysis: A Game changer for your innovation strategy

Are you looking for ways to understand your customers, their behaviors, likes, dislikes, and requirements to deliver products and services as per their needs? Trend analysis is an essential part of every business to drive innovations. It helps businesses understand the needs and desires of their customers and products and services.

What is trend analysis?

Trend analysis is based on an idea of what has happened in the past and gives an idea of what will happen in the future. It also involves the comparison of business data over the period to get enhanced business outcomes or identify economic patterns. Analyzing emerging trends ensures that your content strategy evolves and continues to attract your target audience to product development, as well as predict what consumers want. To create a plausible and detailed picture of the future, trend analysis proves to be a powerful tool for strategic planning.

What is the importance of trend analysis in business?

More than 95% of organizations suffer from a data-decision gap, or the inability to bring together internal and external data for effective decision-making. Organizations face several challenges due to this gap. Trend analysis helps businesses to navigate uncertainty and plan for growth. It gives significant proof to assist better decision making around enterprise’s extended term strategy as well as ways to futureproof their business.

In addition, it helps enterprises to understand how their business has done and predict where its current operations and practices will take it. It will give enterprises ideas about how they might change things to move their business in the right direction.

Enterprises can use trend analysis to improve their business by:

• Identifying areas where the business is performing well and duplicating success
• Identifying areas where the business is underperforming
• Providing evidence to inform decision making

A few metrics to measure trend analysis

Key performance indicators study

This study tracks against what an organization has recognized as its own measures of success. This could be anything from expanded sales deals, a decrease in assembling expenses, technology incorporation or upgradation, or even improved market share. For instance, technology assessments provide organizations with an understanding to guide technology strategy formulation and research and development (R&D) planning.

Financial trends examination

Financial trends straightforwardly affect business execution and are measuring deals such as cost of goods, income, and net benefit.

After comparing business data and finding trends, organizations can make a strategy to deal with new trends in a way that helps them to reach business goals.

What is an innovation strategy, and how can it be applied to business decisions?

Innovation strategies differ from numerous business techniques since it is difficult to forecast the processes, duration, and effects of the innovation. Organizations need to understand how their resources will be used to meet a business’s target for innovation, value delivery, and competitive advantage. The incorporation of advanced technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), including machine learning (ML) and natural language processing (NLP), and business intelligence (BI) helps organizations improve data visualization, output accuracy, and data-guided insights.

Here are some BI tools organizations can use to develop business strategies:

 

Companies providing advanced business trend analysis tools are continuously updating their offerings and helping organizations in understanding their value proposition which explains how organizations are uniquely qualified to meet or exceed customers’ expectations. It also helps in monitoring competition and establishing long-term goals.

Read More: Technology sector outlook and trends in 2023

Some parameters for organizations to consider while building strategies:

• Analysis of a business technological environment 
• External difficulties and opportunities
• A distinctive advantage that the company will have after strategy deployment

Here are a few examples of excellent innovation strategies –

• For the past several years, Samsung’s innovation strategy has focused on mobile devices, wearables, and other consumer electronics. In recent years, the organization’s innovation strategy has been to diversify its portfolio. Its R&D division is now investigating digital health, autonomous mobility, security, infrastructure, Internet of Things (IoT), AI, ML, data-center infrastructure, and a variety of other topics. Samsung is also deliberately investing in several external projects to revamp its brand and businesses.

• Apple was known for outsourcing R&D initiatives rather than focusing on product rebranding and development. The company recently revised its strategy to begin developing capacity in-house through internal accelerators and acquiring startups with their line of operation.

How trend analysis manages innovation?

Trend examination became an amazing tool and led organizations to numerous innovations, improving their performance and future strategies building. Some of the powerful trend-tracking and analysis tools are listed in the table:

Organizations need to identify business opportunities to gain a competitive advantage for both products and marketing. Trend analysis tools can help organizations in tracking current market trends, and data analysis, and convert them into future strategies.

Comprehend customer needs

Organizations need to thoroughly investigate current technological trends. Technological trend analysis gives organizations a comprehensive picture of what consumers are responding to, in what amount, and for how long. The detailed analysis enables the innovation team to understand consumer trends and build an effective development strategy for the organization’s future product or service.

Recognize new business opportunities

The alignment of trend analysis data with the company’s goals helps organizations to create customer-centric products. Moreover, it might disclose trends that can be applied across all business segments and departments. For example, an automotive company can analyze emerging transformative trends in the industry by comparing all competitor’s data and move towards developing hybrid vehicles in line with or improving their capabilities.

Follow changing market dynamics

Organizations need to gather and examine technology trends to track changing market dynamics. A thorough trend analysis provides an evaluation of the situation to understand the reason for the product’s dropping and subsequently look for suitable alternatives.

Trend analysis may be important to professionals in finance, economics, and business. Innovations allow companies to function, work, and develop in an ever-changing environment. Platforms such as Google Trends, YouTube, and Hashtagify are providing trending tools that will provide organizations with real-time data and identify opportunities.

For over two decades, global corporations have been collaborating with Netscribes for detailed research-based trend analysis to understand market movements and plan for growth-based implications of future trends. The insights helped them develop effective marketing and business expansion strategies. For a detailed analysis of the emerging technologies that could impact your business, write to us at info@netscribes.com.

Based on insights from Urvashi Sethi, Manager, Research and Information, TMT.