Market demand can be kept surprisingly simple. It is: 

• How many buyers 

• What they choose 

• How often they buy 

That is not a model. It is a sanity check. It also helps you ask better questions. 

Are more people buying in the category, or is the buyer pool shrinking? Are we being chosen more often than before, or are competitors taking the win? Are people returning to us, or moving on to other options? 

The most useful step is linking those outcomes to how buying actually happens. Demand is not shaped in one place. It builds across a small set of moments that show up again and again across categories, in other words, the moments that matter: 

• Exposure is what people take in over time, the passive contact that builds familiarity and associations. 

• Trigger is what makes the category relevant in a given situation, a need, a context, an occasion. 

• Purchase is where choice happens in the moment. 

• Experience is what happens after, and what gets carried forward. 

Over time, you often see a rhythm that is easy to recognize in real life. People absorb, then respond, then choose, then integrate. As an insight leader, you can use that sequence to locate what is changing without jumping straight to a single “brand score.” 

If a brand is being absorbed less, you often see it first as weaker presence in people’s minds. If fewer people are responding to category cues, you can lose buyers before you lose volume. If a brand is chosen less often at decision time, share tends to follow. If the experience stops reinforcing repeat, you see it in drifting frequency and rising switching risk. 

This is the practical bridge between consumer research and demand outcomes. It is also why Delineate puts so much emphasis on clear, decision-ready data. If you cannot tell where the change is happening, you cannot manage it. 

Consumer signals become most useful when they define who is likely to buy, in what situations, and what might change their behavior. 

That is where the Delineate approach becomes directly relevant to market demand and opportunity. It moves the conversation from broad audiences to specific prospects. 

In practice, you are trying to get specific on four things: 

• the need state 

• the occasion context, including usage and purchasing contexts 

• the trade-offs people are making 

• the substitute set they consider 

When you can describe those clearly, you can define a group of people who are realistically in play for the category and for your brand, not just a demographic segment that happens to be large. 

This matters because “how many buyers” is rarely a fixed number. It expands and contracts based on situations. In some categories, buyers come in through routines. In others, they come in through events. In others, they come in through moments of stress, convenience, reward, or social signaling. When you map those occasions properly, you get a clearer view of where growth can come from. 

It also helps you spot opportunities and risks that can get lost in traditional tracking. Some usage and purchasing occasions can be growth pockets for a specific brand. You may have strong equity, but still be under-chosen in a particular context, or less challenged by competitors in that moment than you assume. The reverse is also true. Some occasions can be quietly threatened by new entrants or even new subcategories that change what people reach for, without it showing up clearly in top-line measures until later. Seeing those shifts early is part of why focusing on the moments that matter is so valuable from a business point of view. 

This also connects to practical questions insight leaders get pulled into all the time: 

• Ability to try often comes down to who is open, who is reachable, and what barrier sits in the way. 

• Likelihood to repeat is usually shaped by what has to be true for the experience to fit into someone’s life. 

• Risk of churn often shows up as shifting perceptions and a narrowing gap between you and the alternatives people are considering. 

On sizing, it is worth being modest. In many CPG contexts, sizing starts with total population and category incidence, then gets refined by the situations and segments that matter. It is often a useful estimate, not something you pretend is precise. The value is less about claiming a perfect number and more about creating a shared view of where the opportunity sits and what would unlock it. 

For insight leaders, this is the moment where research stops being descriptive and becomes operational in the best sense of the word: it clarifies who matters, when they matter, and what would change outcomes. 

The most useful tracking is not “every metric you can collect.” It is a small set that tells you what changed, where, and against whom. The Delineate point of view is that the signal needs to be clear enough to support decisions, not just reporting. 

A helpful way to structure this is to look at what you measure at each point in the journey, and what it can explain. One reason trackers lose trust is not that asking questions is pointless, but that many trackers end up asking the wrong questions, of the wrong people, in the wrong time window. The fix is usually to get closer to real occasions and recent experience, not to add more generic brand statements. 

Exposure 

Exposure is about whether the brand is being noticed and remembered in the category. In practice, the useful signals are the ones that tell you whether the brand is becoming easier to recall in the situations that matter, and whether recognizable cues and associations are building over time. 

This connects to the idea of mental availability, often defined as the likelihood a brand is thought of or noticed in buying situations.  

For insight leaders, this is often where early movement shows up, especially when demand shifts are being driven by communications and competition rather than distribution mechanics. If you are losing mental presence, it tends to show up here before it shows up in volume. 

This is also where clarity matters. If you cannot explain what “stronger presence” means in your category, you end up with vague brand talk. The job of Delineate in this stage is to keep the readout consistent and comparable so changes are real changes, not noise. 

Trigger 

Trigger is where demand becomes real life. It is the context, need, or occasion that pulls someone into the category. This is the most direct bridge to “how many buyers,” because it shapes who is in-market at all. 

The most valuable signals here tend to answer: 

• Which occasions are driving category entry right now? 

• Which are growing, shrinking, or changing shape? 

• In which situations are we relevant, and where are competitors winning? 

This is also where purchase and usage occasions matter. People often buy because they can picture the usage moment. When you understand those usage moments, you can see why some needs pull demand toward you and others pull demand away.  

This stage is also where the “retailer and shopper” perspective can be useful without drifting into operational forecasting. It is about shopping context and missions, not inventory. People behave differently when they are doing a full weekly shop versus a quick top-up. They behave differently in-store versus online. The shopping environment changes what they notice, what they consider, and what they default to. Insight teams can often measure those dynamics through structured questions and consistent tracking, then bring that context into planning conversations. 

Purchase 

Purchase is where choice plays out, and it does not always behave the same way. A practical lens is to ask what is driving choice in the purchase moment. In some categories it is brand-led. In others it is brand plus activation. In others it is activation-led. And sometimes it is mostly price and availability-led. 

That question matters because it changes what you should expect from communications, promotions, and brand building. It also helps avoid a common mistake: treating every category like it is won purely through persuasion, when in some moments the deciding factor is simply whether the brand is easy to choose and easy to buy. 

For Delineate, the value at Purchase is not claiming to predict store-level conversion. It is diagnosing whether choice is moving because brand preference is moving, because activation is moving, or because value signals are changing.  

Experience 

Experience is what people take forward. It shapes whether the brand becomes a default next time, or whether someone starts looking around. 

The useful signals here are the ones that show: 

• Are expectations being met? 

• What is becoming a reason to come back? 

• What is becoming a reason to switch? 

For insight leaders, this is often where early warnings appear for repeat and churn risk. The headline business can still look “fine” while experience signals are quietly eroding and switching pressure is building. 

Across all four stages, the most practical habit is to keep signals comparative. It is not just “are we up or down,” it is “what changed versus whom, and in which moments that matter.” 

You can still use supporting signals like search interest or intention measures, but only as supporting context. They work best when they are interpreted through the consumer and competitor picture, not treated as truth on their own. 

Share of Search is a good example of a fast, comparable signal that can relate to market share movement in some categories, but it needs category context and it should not be treated as a universal rule.  

Purchase intention measures can also be useful in the right conditions, but their relationship with purchasing varies based on category, time horizon, and question design.  

Delineate provides diagnostics and decision-ready readouts that can be used inside planning and modeling work that already exists. Those inputs tend to be most useful in a few common situations. 

First, when the category is steady but choice is shifting. Sales can be slow to explain why share is moving. Consumer and competitor signals can show whether the movement is coming from relevance, perceived value, salience, or switching pressure. 

Second, when communications change minds before they change volume. Exposure and Trigger measures can move earlier than volume, giving teams a faster read on whether activity is doing anything meaningful. 

Third, when value perception changes. When “worth it” starts to weaken, switching risk often rises before it shows up clearly in sales. 

Fourth, when growth depends on specific occasions and prospects. If the growth plan relies on winning certain situations, you need measures tied to those contexts, not generic brand scores. 

When people talk about “feeding signals into existing models,” it often sounds complicated. In practice, it usually looks simple: 

• reducing tracking to a small number of stable drivers 

• keeping definitions and competitor sets consistent over time 

• mapping outputs to the level teams plan with, such as brand, portfolio, segment, occasion 

• showing movement clearly enough that people can use it without a two-hour explanation 

This is also where the Delineate test-and-learn mindset fits, as a disciplined way to test assumptions, compare changes over time, and avoid overconfidence in a single read. If you measure consistently, you can see what changes when media weights shift, when messages change, or when competitors get louder. That is a real advantage for insight leaders who need to advise action, not just report results. 

In many organizations, the “existing models” here include marketing mix modeling approaches used to guide budget and scenario decisions. Google’s Meridian is one example of an open-source MMM framework that companies can implement in-house.  

Consumer signals can sharpen planning, but only if teams trust them. 

The ways this breaks are predictable. Metrics drift in meaning over time. Small sample movement gets treated like a real market shift. Teams compare markets or brands that are not comparable. One headline signal gets over-weighted, whether it is search interest, stated intention, or a single tracker question. 

What keeps it credible is: 

• consistent measurement 

• clear definitions 

• simple confidence indicators 

• routine checks that ask whether patterns hold up over time 

• clear separation between what is observed and what is assumed in a scenario 

This is where the Delineate emphasis on quality controls and clarity matters most. The goal is not more data. It is cleaner data. Insight leaders benefit when the output is decision-ready: clear, stable, and honest about uncertainty. 

Most CPG businesses will always run operational forecasting for supply and execution. However, the gap is upstream: market plans that do not reflect changing needs, shifting occasions, competitor pressure, or weakening preference until it is already visible in sales. 

A practical way to close that gap is to treat demand as something that builds through Exposure, Trigger, Purchase, and Experience, and over time through Absorb, Respond, Choose, and Integrate. 

When you track those moments that matter consistently and compare them against competitors, you get a clearer view of where demand is being created, where it is being leveraged, and what needs defending. That gives insight leaders something they are often asked for and rarely given: a way to explain demand movement early, in plain language, with evidence behind it. 

Delineate helps teams track what’s changing in consumer demand and competitive pressure in real time, with strong quality controls and decision-ready outputs. If you want to see how this can support your planning, let’s talk.