How To Track Consumer Trends and Behaviour : Abhishek Ganguly

Leader – Abhishek Ganguly

When you are in a business, you always track consumer sentiment because that’s where how you work through with the business really depends on, because you have to be extremely consumer-centric, in a consumer business. And that same thing holds true for my business in sportswear.

So throughout whether it is by seeing:

1. What kind of product choices consumers are making.
2. What kind of usage behaviour consumers have with those products? But overall,
3. How is the consumption pattern moving?
4. What kind of channels they are comfortable shopping in?
5. What kind of price points they are comfortable shopping in?
6. How is the shift like in our industry?

For example, today we see big traction around sports adoption in India, right?

• People are getting more attuned to playing sports.
• People are doing more fitness than ever before.
• There are more marathons than ever before.
• Women are doing different types of fitness activities, whether it is yoga, callisthenics, pilates. So a lot of new fitness forms coming in. So there are changes and movements that are happening today in our industry, which are quite dramatic.

And the way to track that would be not just to look at what the consumer is buying, which of course is a given. You look at data for that, but you also track what are the big, cultural changes that are happening, which are impacting the industry. So that’s something that we do at various points. But most importantly out of this is the right attitude towards being, consumer-centric, because if that is ingrained in oneself, as a professional or as a team or as an organization, I think, one does know where to pick things from.

There are various ways in business that one tracks this, one is that you look at historical data, and also you do predictive analysis through your consumer and product and see whether you have the product and market fit and what’s the pricing fit for it. And you use tools around that.

A very, very important and very relevant tool for us is also social listening and social listening tools are extremely important because the world has really changed in the last, I would say even two, three, four years because consumers are expressive today. Consumers are not shying from expressing their opinions on social media. And one needs to really find the best way to listen and sift through that data and this has become very, very important. Also because we are in the fashion business, tracking fashion trends is extremely important.

That’s the future, and that’s where fashionability is moving and that has its own gamut of activities that one needs to do to track that trend. So I would say that it is not one way of tracking consumer behaviour, but there is a multitude of activities that one needs to do to do this well. And that’s very clear that consumers trends, consumer behaviour, the pattern of consumption are changing so fast. It’s not just the product and the price at which they are consuming today. It’s also the way they are consuming content, the way they would like to today engage with brands.

It’s so different from how it was 5-10 years back. And that’s become a very, very traditional way of approaching because things have really become very different. I would say in the last 5 years. The amount of changes I have seen in this in the last 5 or even last 3 years, has been more than what I’ve seen in the last 15 years. So that is the speed of change that is happening at the consumer end. And I think all successful brands are extremely over-indexed on their penchant for following the customer and their behaviour.