Retail & Consumer _________________________________________________
The world is becoming increasingly connected. Consumers are paying more and more attention to what other people buy, how they behave, what they think.
Understanding how these connections work and how to influence the spread of behaviour across these networks, is becoming crucial to successful strategy, in both the commercial world and in terms of public policy.
Volterra, and our director Paul Ormerod, are amongst the world leaders in developing techniques to extract actionable knowledge from these social networks. Turning information into knowledge you can use in your business, in your design of policy.
Questions we can help answer include:
- In your market, how important is social influence in determining sales and success compared to the more traditional, 'objective' factors like price and advertising?
- Is this influence changing over time?
- How important are mentions on blogs in your market?
- If social influence matters, how does it spread?
- How can policy best achieve desirable social ends?
In new product markets, if social influence matters, we can identify potential winners and losers at a much earlier stage than can conventional techniques.
Cutting edge research both at Volterra and around the world has shown decisively that the idea that there are a few key 'influentials' in any market is often completely wrong. The network structure may be totally different to this.
Money spent on trying to identify the 'influentials' can be money wasted.
The analysis behind all this is highly technical. But at Volterra we operate on the principle of complete transparency. No black boxes! Clients are always able to access the computer code we use and be given non-technical explanations of our results.
