According to data from the 2024 Social Media Trends report by GWI, consumer behavior has undergone significant shifts. While staying connected remains a driver, these platforms have evolved into essential tools for market research and product discovery. The industry is witnessing a profound change: social media is now a critical space for identifying patterns in consumer interests.
Key motivations driving B2C relationships now include finding inspiration for products (27%), finding items to purchase (26.2%), and engaging with favorite brands (22.1%). For businesses and companies, these insights are crucial for making informed strategic decisions and driving sales. Consumers are looking beyond transactions; they seek innovation, design, and values, requiring brands to adapt their marketing strategies.
Most notably, Gen Z is redefining the future of search. Social media has overtaken traditional engines for brand and product research, a long-term trend that forecasting helps identify. For the fashion sector, Instagram remains a powerhouse for spotting emerging trends, driving growth, and providing a competitive advantage. Understanding these changes is the first step for businesses to align with the market and anticipate what will come next.
Social media-based trend forecasting
So if consumers can glean so much information from their favorite brands on Instagram, there’s no reason brands can’t do the same from their customers.
Using data drawn from social media, brands could know more about their audience’s geography, age, interests, values, style, and more. At Heuritech, we do exactly this, and we take it a step further by pulling out trends and products from the data we collect from Instagram. This combination of consumer and trend data presents a major edge to brands’ collection creation — all based on the power of social media. But how does it all work?
Left: Images from Heuritech’s database
Defining consumer segments on social media
The first step in Heuritech’s forecasting process is defining consumer panels, or segments, from social media. We have three major consumer panels: edgy, trendy, and mainstream.
- Edgy: These consumers adopt a look or product far before it arrives on the popular radar, and they seek styles from small or emerging brands.
- Trendy: These consumers keep up with new and desirable brands, styles, and products and tend to wear trends when they’re at the peak of their popularity.
- Mainstream: These consumers follow along with major styles and products once they’ve reached peak popularity and engage more passively in fashion.
These three panels are based on tens of thousands of public accounts which are either hand-picked or AI-built by us from Instagram. Each panel contains approximately 50K Instagram accounts from the geographies we cover, as well as 400K Weibo accounts from China. These panels are also regularly updated so as not to incorporate data from inactive or irrelevant accounts.
Applying our image recognition technology to social media images
Once we’ve defined and refined our consumer panels, we then move onto analyzing the images themselves in order to pull out trends, styles, and products. Heuritech does this by using our in-house computer vision (or image recognition) technology, which was created by our two co-founders with PhDs in Artificial Intelligence, Tony Pinville and Charles Ollion. And to ensure consistent precision, our data experts constantly improve and innovate upon this technology.
We apply this technology to an image, upon which it analyzes every element from color, to shape, to fabric and print. Over 2000 details can be drawn from any given image with our computer vision technology, and the data can be cross-referenced with consumer segments, geography, and seasonality.
Our scope of work currently includes Clothing & Shoes.
- 6 Clothing categories: Tops, Dresses, Skirts, Pants, Shorts, Outerwear, Shoes
- 4 Shoes categories: Sneakers, Boots, Dress Shoes, Sandals
For each category, we are able to detect precise attributes. For instance:
- For Outerwear: Shapes, Fits, Hood type, Lengths, Pockets type,…
- For Dress Shoes: Shape, Back type, Closure, Heel height, Heel type, Toe shape, …
Furthermore, we also detect macro trends, applicable to any category:
- Colors: warm tones, beige, pastel pink…
- Fabrics: leather, knit, ribbed knit, …
- Prints & patterns: dots, animal, leopard, …
For instance, our experts recently defined Long Bags from our edgy consumer panel for the Winter 2022 season in Europe. This early-stage trend was able to be detected by the expert eyes of our fashion team, and then further supported by historic and real-time data thanks to our AI technology.
For niche and emerging trends, this combination is often how Heuritech is able to be so accurate in its trend and product analyses. And with a database of about 120 million posts for our Trend Forecasting platform alone, our technology and our experts have a lot to go on.
Forecasting trends with accuracy
To transform raw data into actionable market insights, Heuritech applies a proprietary forecasting toolkit. By combining seven distinct algorithms, this tool allows businesses to identify patterns and predict consumer behavior with 90% accuracy. This advanced analysis helps brands anticipate how trends will change and creates a clear understanding of emerging shifts.
In 2024, following years of research and innovation, we enhanced our capability to provide long-term trend forecasting up to 24 months in advance. This strategic step enables fashion companies to align their design processes with future market demands. By making decisions based on these insights, brands can optimize product development, secure sales growth, and maintain a competitive edge in the industry.
Actionable analysis with social media based trend forecasts
The final step in our social media based trend forecasting is delivering actionable data. To succeed in a competitive industry, fashion brands need advanced tools to interpret insights from platforms like Instagram or Weibo and apply them to their strategies. This analysis empowers companies to make decisions based on evidence, aligning their collections and marketing with real market changes.
Our metrics include, but are not limited to:
- Consumer segmentation: Edgy, trendy, and mainstream consumer panels help brands to understand and make decisions based on existing or aspirational audiences.
- Geography: Trend and product data is specific to each geographical region (Europe, France, the United Kingdom, the US, the Middle East, China, South Korea, Japan, India, Brazil, Taiwan, Thailand, Singapore, Malaysia, Philippines and Indonesia) for brands’ adaptability to their various markets.
- Seasonality: Insights like optimal launch times and high seasons allow brands to avoid missing big trends and avoid including declining ones.
- Growth: A trend or product’s visibility on social media compared to the same season the year prior gives brands a legible view of a trend’s popularity or decline.
- Magnitude: A trend or product’s potential market demand during the season of interest helps brands to judge a trend’s future demand.
- Age segmentation: Age insights are based on the adoption rate of the trend considered within each age range (16-25 ; 26-35 ; 36-45 ; 45+).
Beyond these metrics, we provide inspirational examples and moodboards to support innovation and design. This combination of qualitative and quantitative research offers a 360° view of industry changes that might be missed by a simple manual search. With this strategic intelligence, brands can better understand consumer needs and ensure sustainable business growth.
AI and human expertise makes the power of our trend forecasting
At Heuritech, we pride ourselves on integrating cutting-edge artificial intelligence with deep fashion expertise to deliver predictive analytics with unparalleled precision. Our dedicated team consists of machine learning specialists who continuously improve our algorithms. Alongside them, our fashion analysts and forecasters bring industry insight and intuition, enabling us to contextualize the data and identify trends that are not just statistically relevant but also culturally resonant. This synergy between AI and human expertise allows us to deliver accuracy in trend forecasting, setting a new standard for the industry.
For fashion brands, social media is a true gamechanger for consumer insights. The numbers alone are impressive: as of January 2022, Instagram reported at least 1.478 billion users around the world. The sheer volume of users globally is evidence enough of the goldmine of data within these platforms, providing new, unfiltered insights each day.
Indeed, consumers express their favorite styles and their strongest values intuitively, through posts, likes, and hashtags that reflect their honest opinion. This is the major advantage of social media based trend forecasting: the data we pull from Instagram, Weibo, and more is taken directly from the source: the consumer.
These insights are unbiased, reliable, and in real-time. Instinctive information like this offers brands data on what consumers do, rather than simply what they say, which is often what we find in typical consumer sources such as social listening and organized surveys.
To access data which reveals how a certain product is performing on the market, or how a type of consumer feels about a particular trend, or even how a certain style is being adopted in one geography versus another — these insights are truly invaluable for a brand, big or small. With the power of artificial intelligence and human expertise, it’s possible to demystify the market and create better collections.
