We’re jumping on the band wagon: Ins & Outs for 2024

Now that we’re over half way through January (and it’s now socially acceptable to stop saying “Happy New Year”), we thought we would hop on the social media trend of ‘Ins and Outs’ to take a look at the 12 months ahead.  

In their recent team meeting, Incite’s Consumer Practice discussed their hopes and dreams for the year ahead. Harvey Barr was on hand to make a note of what the team are excited about. Below he shares their personal and professional Ins and Outs for 2024.

In: Category Entry Points (CEPs) 

Fizzing on every marketeer’s tongue is how to unlock the mental moments of availability for their brand. Understanding CEPs can help improve messaging, create customer loyalty and boost sales, and mapping them against competitors and portfolios an effective way to highlight your brands strengths and weaknesses. So forget year of the Dragon, 2024 is year of the CEPs!

Out: New news on sustainability 

Despite being on the radar of every project and brief for the last few years, finding an approach to sustainability that can significantly move the dial is difficult. A lot of the early thinking is really promising, but the concern comes with whether it has the legs to truly make an impact. The priority should lie much more towards execution and implementing known and established ways to be sustainable rather than creating new ways to be sustainable.

In: Face to face workshops 

The productivity and energy benefits of being in the same room as colleagues and stakeholders has been welcomed back with open arms! Yes, there are some other logistical hurdles (such as getting all the right people in the right place at the right time) but the results are far superior. Not only from actually working together in the session itself, but all those little breaks helping to foster those strong team relationships. And who can forget the copious amounts of snacks one brings to keep energy up.

Out: Virtual workshops 

Not out of choice, but with Covid-19 restrictions our workshops all turned to online. While we certainly made them work (and tools like Miro will certainly be here to stay across other areas of our work), we’re now saying so long to the anxiety around virtual breakout rooms and the serious brain fatigue you can only get from looking at a screen for 8 hours straight.

In: Meaningful application of AI tools 

We now have the tools and more clearly defined use cases at our disposal for how AI can finally meaningfully impact our work – from building AI generated chatbots that allow us to ‘speak’ to our customer segments, to making small efficiencies in how we analyse open-ended survey responses. Here at Incite we are just starting to tap into the potential of our strat7.ai and AI-generative tools, leading us to confidently feel this is the year you can finally expect AI to start living up to the hype.

Out: Just talking about AI and ChatGPT 

We’ve all spent a lot of time talking about the potential of AI to transform our lives and revolutionise our ways of working. But the extent to which we have actually benefitted from AI in our everyday work to date has been relatively limited. But as tempting as it is to keep talking about what’s going to happen down the line, a whole lot of it is about to happen right now! Careful or you’ll miss it…

In: Simple deliverables 

Over the past year here in the Consumer practice, we have noticed a lot more requests for deliverables that are clear and simple, and can easily be shared with a wider non-research literate team. Making a simple and actionable story out of complex data is a great way to improve the potential of research to make a difference in the business.

Out: Self-service platforms

By contrast, we’ve noticed a gradual shift away from deliverables that require the wider client team to be able to “self-service”. A lot of the businesses we work with tend to already have enough platforms to engage with to the point where familiarising themselves with another doesn’t make much sense. So on that basis, self-service is out!

Personal Ins and Outs from the Consumer team:

Madeline:

• In: Doing new recipes from existing cookbooks
• Out: Buying any more cookbooks

Harvey:

• In: More stretching as I seek to mobilise what doctors have previously declared immobile
• Out: Coming up with an excuse to not warm up before exercising

Lisa:

• In: Wearing the eclectic mix of jewellery that I’ve assembled more regularly to rekindle happy memories of being on holiday
• Out: Ignoring my shoes in the bottom of the cupboard and only wearing my DMs, trainers and slippers

Charline:

• In: Not just talking about generative AI but actually using it.
• Out: Using «“hmmm” too much when moderating.

Carolina:

• In: Making my own Kimchi – eating it as a snack, as a side dish or simply to spice up a meal!
• Out: Brewing kombucha – I always end up brewing for too long so its turns to vinegar (great for ginger shots though!)

Katy:

• In:  Making everyone feel that they are the most beautiful girl/boy in the world
• Out:  Making my family feel that the dog is my favourite

Stefan:

• In: Fixing the roof
• Out: Emptying buckets

Lucinda (honorary Consumer team member)

• In: Left leg
• Out: Left leg (then shake it all about)

If you have a knotty business challenge you want to tackle in 2024, please do get in touch.