After hand sanitizers and face masks, the next hot commodity to peak in a wave of products that have become exponentially in-demand as a result of COVID-19 is plexiglass: a microtrend that had pretty much no mindshare over the past 3 years, and then all of a sudden started generating noise towards the end of March 2020 - as can be seen in the screen grab from NWO.AI:
The graph represents the "Impact Score", which is a metric that combines the mentions of Plexiglass in social media, news articles, TV as well as interest captured via search engines into one unified metric. At any given point in time, the Impact Score is your go-to score in order to gain an understanding of the mindshare occupied by any microtrend. Full historical Impact Score and Sentiment for Plexiglass is available here: https://nwo.ai/signal/discover/plexiglass#
On analyzing the context words surrounding the mention of Plexiglass (premium feature), we can determine the key demand drivers shaping the exponential growth.
Some of the demand spaces that are growing exponentially are as follows:
- Barriers, shields and dividers
- Plexiglass installation service providers
- Grocery store checkout stations as key demand drivers
- Plexiglass cleaners
In May 2020, DollarTree announced that it was installing more than 16,000 plexiglass shields at store checkouts. This is 30 days after NWO.AI generated an alert about a significant deviation in the Plexiglass Impact Score.
COVID-19 has accelerated thousands of trends that are worth leveraging. NWO.AI tracks 20 Million (this figure is growing by the day) microtrends and generates predictive alerts regarding anomalous behavior. Are you ready to get ahead of the game? Reach out for a demo and we can help you better understand your category and ways to approach it.