Customer inspired futures.

A co-created approach to foresight 

We believe that customers are the most inspiring force in business.
Co-creating with customers helps companies uncover latent growth opportunities (and existential threats). As Emily Weiss, founder of $1.8 bn Beauty Industry disruptor, Glossier, said: “our community brings us new ideas we could never have imagined ourselves.” As competition intensifies, it is a strategic imperative to get ahead of customers’ emerging needs and desires. 

C Space’s Arenas Programme is just one of the customer-inspired ways we help our clients explore their competitive landscape and understand what’s next for their brand. Arena Thinking grounds perspectives on the future in durable human truths, allowing us to credibly model the future by focusing on what deeply motivates people and what those motivations can unlock.

Our multi-disciplinary Program includes the very best customer, brand and industry experts, offering a unique view on emerging opportunities and pointing to differentiated strategic advantage. A co-created lens on emerging competition, viewed through the eyes of customers and experts, our Arena Approach puts human motivation at the heart of the competitive landscape. 

Our customer inspired futures highlight opportunities for customer inspired growth.

Conditions for Change

The intersection of emerging technologies and evolving customer expectation creates a more fluid competitive landscape, which world-leading academic Rita McGrath has termed an Arena.

Competitive Arenas are defined by the consumer motivation that’s common to them, rather than by category or industry construct. By viewing opportunity and competition through the lens of Arenas, brands can create permission to enter new categories, or get ahead of disruption.

In our Arena Program, we explore evolving customer expectation with consumers and new technology and market trends with experts. We combine these viewpoints to inspire credible market opportunities emerging from these fluid competitive Arenas.

Looking for Possibility: Arena Collectives 

Our Arena Collectives are a multi-disciplinary network of 150 customer, brand and storytelling experts from C Space and our sister agency Interbrand. Each Collective is focused on exploring different human motivations, tracking their evolving relationship to culture and technology, and co-creating the commercial opportunities they can inspire.

At the heart of each Collective is a vibrant and thriving online insight community of 504 (extra)ordinary people in China, Germany, India, Japan, UK and the US, with whom we explore these human motivations, desires and needs. Launched in 2020, we’ re on first-name-terms with many of these folk, which means we get deep, we get creative, we share secrets… and sometimes we just talk celebrity crushes. All with the aim of building the kinds of strong relationships that make for richer insight.

Each Collective also works with a group of opinion formers, industry experts, sociologists, psychologists or anthropologists, who help us open the aperture of our thinking and point us to the most relevant technological and cultural trends.

We triangulate these findings to ensure scalability and overlay our brand benchmark data, which we’ve gathered by surveying over 100,000 consumers over 6 years, and which proves that what’s good for customers is good for business.

With these inputs, we co-create credible, differentiated customer-inspired futures that lead to customer inspired growth. To find out more about our approach, get in touch.

C Space Arenas

Customer Inspired Futures.

In partnership with

Play

More than just a battle for attention, Play is the beating heart of acultural revolution. 

Express

More than how we make ourselves look good, Express is a renaissance of “me”.

Move

More than simply how we get from ‘A’ to ‘B’, how we live is how we move.

Connect

More than just connectivity, Connect is about the human truths driving our desire to connect.

Thrive

More than surviving, thriving is believing you’re getting better at living.

Dwell

This work explores how customers are living today, where they live and why they live there.