Zeitgeist Analytics: Measuring Business Influence

CBC Dragons’ Den
CBC’s Dragons’ Den has helped encourage the collective Canadian entrepreneurial spirit.

How could your business influence the business community and society around you?

As part of my consulting work, I sometimes advise Dragons’ Den, the wildly popular CBC television show in which investors listen to pitches from entrepreneurs and some incredibly lame would-be entrepreneurs.

Recently, Dragons’ Den asked me to help them measure the impact the show has had on Canadian business and society in its six years on air.

That was a toughie. They have viewership numbers, of course, and probably a total of how much money the Dragons – investors – have doled out over the show’s lifespan. But the “impact on Canadian society”? How does one measure that?

My answer: You can’t. (At least, not in strictly numerical terms.) This is another area that involves another kind of measurement.

Let’s call it Zeitgeist Analytics.

I believe that understanding the Zeitgeist, or intuiting how society around you is thinking, is essential in business today.   

For example, I reported to Dragons’ Den that, when it arrived on the scene in 2006, the Canadian career Zeitgeist leaned toward getting a traditional education then securing a job with a large and safe corporation.

In 2011, the mantra is to start your own business. So many people have followed this path, partly due to Dragons’ Den’s highly entertaining method of training in the basics of entrepreneurship and its overt championing of the entrepreneurial way.

Today, millions of Canadians – nearly three million alone are listed as “self-employed” by the Canada Revenue Agency – are operating businesses. Many more entrepreneurs aren’t included as self-employed because they hold titles in an incorporated business.

In essence, we’ve become a nation of entrepreneurs.

That was my reading of how Dragons’ Den has helped foster the current Canadian Zeitgeist.

Zeitgeist Analytics could be helpful in your business or job. This is more than simple trend spotting or cool-hunting; it’s a sensitivity to changes in how the world around you currently feels, thinks, and acts  – or will act soon.  

For example, green businesses are probably a result of informal Zeitgeist analysis because they grew out of passion and recognition that the thinking is shared by increasing numbers of people.

So the question becomes, What could Zeitgeist Analytics do for your business or job?

How would you benefit from a stronger sensitivity to what the people in your industry, neighborhood, town, or age cohort are thinking and feeling?

And what kind of impact would that make on your business and the society around you?