What is microculture/insight card maturity and population?

What is microculture/insight card maturity and population?

Our Predictive Anthropology Platform’s microculture algorithm gives insights and innovation teams a clearer line of sight on how microcultures are growing in relation to the macroculture we're studying.

On our Predictive Anthropology Platform, insight cards are measured as microcultures using this same metric. In custom reports, our anthropologists identify microcultures using our ethnographic methodology.

In other words, microcultures are a subset of conversations contained within a macroculture, centered on a shared belief.

You can think of them as niche sub-cultures of the overall culture of study.

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We size each Microculture as a component of the macroculture. Which means that in scenarios like the one illustrated above, we size each microculture based on how relevant it is within the cultural universe of the macroculture in which it exists and is examined.

Microculture maturity

When determining the maturity of a microculture, we zoom in on the overlap between the consumer culture identified by the macroculture and the one identified by the microculture. We do this so we know which microcultures are the largest, growing the fastest, and showing the most room for innovation, disruption, or stability relative to the macroculture we care about.

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That’s why the current and predicted microculture maturity are always less than the predicted macroculture maturity: they are relative to it. In the above example, the microculture of natural remedies is growing within the macroculture of gut health, so the role of natural remedies in the context of gut health cannot surpass the culture of gut health itself.

By comparing different microcultures within the same macroculture, we have a crystal clear line of sight on which meanings are poised to dominate the macroculture narrative.

Microculture population

Microculture populations are similarly as a subset of the macroculture’s population.

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In the above example, we can see that over 31M of 52M consumers expected to be involved in the gut health conversation over the next 1-2 years are particularly interested in healing their gut health naturally. This tells us that natural remedies play an oversized role in the broader conversation on gut health, capturing over half of the total addressable population.

Prioritizing Microcultures or Insight Cards

Prioritizing microcultures is now incredibly easy.

First, is the macroculture growing?

✅Yes, it’s growing

❌No, it’s volatile

We can now better answer questions of prioritization, offering a clear way forward in terms of pinpointing short to long term innovation opportunities and responding to the future of a trend.