Srijan Sanchar

Member
February 2, 2026

A Market Foresight Tool Based on Emergent signals

A Market Foresight Tool for When Demand Signals Don’t Yet Exist

Most marketing and foresight practitioners are trained to read signals that already exist—customer data, adoption curves, price sensitivity, stated needs, and market size projections. These tools work well when markets evolve incrementally. But they struggle when markets form suddenly, leapfrog expectations, or collapse despite strong technical promise.

This market foresight tool is designed for precisely those moments—when conventional demand indicators are weak or misleading, yet strategic decisions still need to be made. It helps teams anticipate where markets are likely to emerge, not just how large they might become once they do.

Moving from Market Forecasting to Market Formation

Traditional foresight asks, “How big could this market be?”
This tool asks a more fundamental question: “Is this market structurally forming at all?”

Instead of treating demand as a given, it examines the conditions that make demand inevitable. It looks at how aspirations, narratives, capabilities, and constraints align—or fail to align—over time. When these elements converge, markets form rapidly. When they don’t, even well-funded innovations struggle.

For practitioners, this shift is critical. It moves foresight upstream—from reacting to market signals to understanding how markets come into being.

Aspiration as a Leading Market Indicator

One of the key insights behind this tool is that aspirations move before demand. Changes in identity, values, social norms, and future expectations often precede changes in purchasing behavior by several years. Traditional market research usually captures these shifts too late.

This tool treats aspiration as a leading indicator, not a soft or qualitative add-on. It systematically maps emerging aspirations—what people want to become, avoid, protect, or signal—and tracks how these aspirations gain momentum across different groups and geographies.

For marketing and foresight teams, this offers early visibility into markets that are not yet measurable, but are already taking shape.

Mapping Probable Market Emergence Pathways

Aspirations alone do not create markets. They must intersect with feasibility—technology readiness, cost trajectories, infrastructure, regulation, and cultural acceptance. This tool connects aspirational signals with these real-world constraints to generate probabilistic market formation pathways.

Rather than producing a single forecast, it lays out multiple scenarios:

markets that are likely to emerge quickly,
markets that need enabling conditions,
markets that are technically possible but socially fragile,
and markets that appear promising but are structurally misaligned.

This helps practitioners prioritize where to act now, where to wait, and where not to invest attention at all.

Narrative Coherence as a Market Filter

Many innovations fail not because they lack demand, but because they lack a coherent story—for users, regulators, partners, or investors. This tool explicitly tests whether a market makes sense as a narrative.

Can people easily explain why this product exists?
Does the value proposition align with social expectations and ethical norms?
Can the market be defended under scrutiny?

By applying this narrative and causal lens, the tool filters out markets that may look attractive on spreadsheets but are unlikely to survive public, regulatory, or cultural pressure.

What This Enables for Practitioners

For marketing leaders, the tool supports earlier and more confident market entry and positioning decisions, especially in emerging or ambiguous categories. For foresight professionals, it strengthens the bridge between long-term trends and near-term strategic action.

It is particularly useful for:

deep-tech and frontier technologies,
regulated or high-trust industries,
sustainability and climate-linked markets,
new categories where customers cannot yet articulate “needs.”

In all these contexts, the value lies in reducing false positives and spotting inevitable markets sooner.

Designed for High-Complexity Futures

As markets become more AI-mediated, personalized, and regulated, the ability to explain why a market exists becomes as important as measuring its size. This tool is built for that reality. It supports transparent reasoning, scenario comparison, and defensible strategic choices—qualities increasingly demanded by boards, regulators, and society.

It does not replace market sizing, customer research, or execution planning. Instead, it sits before them—helping teams decide which futures are worth preparing for in the first place.

In Summary

This market foresight tool helps marketing and foresight practitioners move:

from demand tracking to market formation insight,
from late signals to early indicators,
from reactive forecasting to proactive sensemaking.

In environments where uncertainty is high and conventional data is thin, it offers a disciplined way to see which markets are quietly becoming unavoidable—and which are not.