Introducing Hot Space
Hot Space: A new approach to insight reveals influencers tell us more than we think.
Introducing Hot Space a new offering from Savio AI for marketers looking to connect their brands and products to consumers making sense of newness and innovation.
A Hot Space is an unoccupied space in markets characterised by innovation, being a new category or typically serving new-to-category consumers. The Hot Space is a place in the market where how consumers are thinking about it is not how the market presents it. This dissonance leads to consumers not finding what they want and brands missing sales. Hot Spaces are massive opportunites for marketers.
A great example is how Octopus Energy changed the language around green energy and electric vehicle charging.
We've been piloting Hot Space and have had great feedback. Now we're sharing it with you to see what you think. It's pretty wild, so hang on!
Influencers are massive.
Consumers use online influencers to help them shop new or unfamiliar categories. Influencers and their advice help knowledge-seeking consumers shape their goals, priorities and journey into the market.
Triangular relationships online.
Globally, influencers connect with millions of consumers about thousands of categories continually introducing and helping their readers and followers make sense of newness and innovation. In parallel successful influencers build reach by aligning with their audiences’ outlook and worldview as well as being a bridge to their sponsors websites and outlets. The relationship between consumers, influencers and brands can be seen across the web.
We don't know what we don't know.
As consumers we may have an aim like "get an electric car" but answers to questions like how?, where?, when?, how much?, and even why? often elude us. These answers stand in the way of certainty about which? To eventually know which one is best for us we increasingly turn to long-form content blogs and other influencer content to help begin our thought and action process.
Forth and back.
Data shows consumers consuming this content are dipping in and out of the various websites mentioned or linked to by the content itself. Yes, that's how it works! This process of checking forth and back mirrors the tightening-up of consumers' understanding of the market and what they're actually looking for. It ends with shortlists and eventually selection.
Signs and symbols read by an AI that sees.
Using OpenAI's Vision model, our trained AI collects publicly available information from the web and infers the consumer mind-states created by influencers. With these in its mind our AI explores brands’ websites; their imagery, content and language as well their offerings and prices, alongside business performance data. Put together these reveal Hot Spaces.
The Intelligent Mirror.
Our early work on Hot Space revealed that consumer engagement with brands' website content was a reflection of the preferences and expectations that had been developed through their exposure to influencers. By shaping and guiding novice consumers' mind-maps, influencers had given consumers a rapid auditing tool to appraise potential providers' websites and other content. Powerfully, this showed that brands that did not convey and communicate key elements did not connect with consumers and were less successful than if they did.
On reflection, there were also salient topics and needstates being created, echoed and reinforced by influencers (and the process of influencing) that were not being served by any brands. These clearly have demand and salience but were not being catered for. We called these opportunties Hot Spaces.
The insight for insight.
Traditonally, to explain and improve brand performance in the purchase process, I would have asked consumers to explain themselves via some form of research. We could see now that consumers' thoughts about their choices, the purchase process, the brands, their motivations, etc. etc. were not well-formed at all. Therefore, asking someone in this process to do a survey, with its inbuilt certainties and pre-made schemas, would generate a lot of random, noisy data and false signals.
Discovering influencers are the explanation meant we no longer needed to ask consumers direct questions in order to help clients improve performance. We can find Hot Space by looking in an intelligent mirror powered by AI.
The story of the first Hot Space.
In one project we processed over 50 blogs and influencer sites that focussed on a specific luxury travel destination. This content, in multiple languages, totalled over 80m pageviews. We developed a map of the market that contained 12 discrete dimensions each with a nuanced description and context. We used this context to review 89 individual resort websites. Our tool then detected if each of the dimensions was present in a minor, major or dominant capacity or absent. We then lined up comparable pricing data for each of the resorts. And from here we ran a huge compute to determine which dimensions were table stakes, differentiators and value cues. The result was uncovering a Hot Space: Luxury Learning Experiences. This dimension was largely absent from the market but where present, significantly correlated with premium pricing. With this finding achieved, we were the able to go back into the sources to verify the Hot Space. The scene was then set to move forwards into brand development, primary research validation or further refinement using AI.
You might say: "There's nothing new here".
Maybe, but we've never got to here from there. This is how AI is changing what insight is and what it can achieve with clients' time and money.
Hot Space is valuable.
Hot Space is what people want but isn't there. It's discovered through a psychological, symbolic and semiotic reading of how newness is explored and experienced by consumers. This approach avoids the pitfalls of traditional quantification and research by remaining at the richer level of desires, language and imagery throughout the entire process. This richness makes Hot Space an ideal starting point for creative teams and brand marketers who are looking to ideate, position, launch and manage consumer innovation. It's also far faster, cheaper, easier and arguably better unless you're prepared to boil the ocean.
Some uses for Hot Space.
SEO and website content
Product or brand positioning
New product development (NPD)
Market sizing and segmentation
Digital strategy
Influencer strategy and selection
Hot Space is also new, right?
So far we have used Hot Space in three projects: Luxury Travel to bucketlist destinations, fancy watches and financial services (pensions). We are now moving on to electric vehicles, smoking alternatves (vapes, etc) and high-end electronics. There are many more to consider. Can you think of one?
