Foresight Factory launches Business Decision-Making Platform

Foresight Factory, the predictive consultancy, has launched its new Collision platform for enterprise consumer brands. Collision is said to be the world's first decision-making platform to leverage machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) technology to correlate consumer trends with commercial behaviour to identify first-mover and fast-follower opportunities, as well as areas of potential risk.

Designed to enable global organisations to make informed business decisions, Collision's data intelligence is based on highly accurate, industry- and business-specific predictive data, identifying where future consumer needs meet real-time marketplace opportunity for big brand incumbents and their regional markets.

The launch is the latest milestone in Foresight Factory's evolution from consumer insights provider to business decision-making partner, offering strategic foresight based on future data-led predictions – not merely past or current trends. Foresight Factory has over 200 brand customers who will have the opportunity to benefit from the newly-launched Collision platform.

Powering growth in a ‘never normal’ landscape

In a perma-crisis world, growth is a huge pressure point for global consumer brands. For many industries, from FMCG to retail or travel to automotive this means being able to predict consumer needs several years into the future to meet challenges including lengthy product development cycles, disruption to supply chains, increased competition for consumer attention and capital investment decisions.

It is also becoming harder for larger, established incumbents to sustain a leadership position, partly because there are so many new players and models entering the market, and partly because they struggle to gather the relevant insights to enable them to pivot and be bold.

Collision provides the solution, answering various common enterprise business challenges, including:

What are the short- and long-term growth opportunities for my business, and how can I take a longer-term view of planning?

How can I be more agile in response to market shifts, as well as being able to predict them accurately?

How can I reduce the risk in business decision making - what are we not seeing coming?

Consumer brands today cannot simply react to culture, they must create it. But how can they know what to do for their future consumer when they can't speak to them yet? Collision helps businesses identify movements that could change or disrupt consumer behaviour, enabling them to deeply understand and react to the needs, attitudes and behaviours of their future customers - and act accordingly.

Meabh Quoirin, Co-founder and CEO, Foresight Factory says: "We want to show enterprise B2C brands new, more effective ways of working – we're not just peddling the zeitgeist with articulate flair. Businesses need deep commercial insight combined with consumer trends data to feel confident in their future strategy. The new Collision platform will help our clients be more agile and able to shape and anticipate what's coming."

Cutting to the Chase - AI and dynamic trends help to confidently shape a brand’s future

Collision's unique and proprietary features include the decisive AI Engine and the Dynamic Trends Framework.

Collision represents the ultimate collaboration between human and machine: while the Foresight Factory team crunches robust proprietary data sets to identify key consumer trends, the platform’s unique AI matches them to real-time commercial activity (such as new product launches and campaigns) to identify relevant opportunities and risks to the business. By crossing commercial data with consumer trends, Collision can clearly identify ‘white space opportunities’ - where businesses can take the lead on an as-yet unsatisfied consumer need - and opportunities for ‘fast followers’, which might not be brand new spaces but which still offer options for differentiation.

Foresight Factory’s new Dynamic Trends Framework delivers real time insights on all consumer trends and commercial activity that is directly relevant to the brand, so the organisation can keep pace with its shifting environment and competitor landscape. Collision’s deep personalisation capability means each framework is unique to the individual organisation’s challenges and opportunities, offering local market as well as globally relevant insights and enabling them to embed consumer trends into their ongoing strategy.

Christophe Jouan, Co-founder and CEO, Foresight Factory adds: "AI is only as good as the data it is fed and the people who use it.  With the launch of our new Collision platform, our aim is to deliver an antidote to the insights industry via 'simple complexity,’ combining human expertise with a unique approach to AI and ML data-crunching to help brands get to the heart of what matters.”