IELTS CAM Inspired 13 - Reading Test 2 with Practice Test, Answers And Explanation
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IELTS CAM Inspired 13 - Reading Test 2 With Practice Test, Answers And Explanation
Passage
❓ Câu hỏi passage 1
Question 1 - 9
Complete the notes below.
Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer.
The History of Cinnamon
Biblical times
• was blended into
1.
used to anoint the body
• passed between people as a symbol of
2.
Ancient Rome
• burned to release its scent during
3.
The Middle Ages
• added to food, especially meat
• at a feast, a host used it to signal his or her
4.
• taken as a cure for
5.
and similar problems
The spice trade
• the plants were raised in
6.
• merchants moved it across land using
7.
• their overland journey ended at the coastal town of
8.
•
9.
was the city from which the spice reached the rest of Europe
Question 10 - 13
Do the following statements agree with the information given in the Reading Passage?
TRUE if the statement agrees with the information
FALSE if the statement contradicts the information
NOT GIVEN if it is impossible to say what the writer thinks about this
10
The Portuguese had come to dominate the buying and selling of cinnamon at Alappar before the year 1500.
11
In exchange for goods, the Dutch promised to defend the local ruler against the Portuguese.
12
A dwindling supply of trees in the wild drove the Dutch to plant their own.
13
The cinnamon produced under English control was of higher quality than that produced by the Dutch.
Passage
❓ Câu hỏi passage 2
Question 14 - 17
Reading Passage 2 has six sections, A-F.
Which section contains the following information?
Write the correct letter, A-F.
14
a reference to the extremely long span of evolutionary time behind the hormone
15
an observation that evidence formerly overlooked is now shaping new lines of enquiry
16
a statement that the hormone can harm our social dealings as much as improve them
17
an account of how work on the hormone shifted from a neglected topic to a crowded one
Question 18 - 20
Look at the following research findings and the list of researchers below.
Match each research finding with the correct researcher, A-F.
Write the correct letter, A-F.
List of Findings
A
Joris Halbertsma
B
Lieve Maartens
C
Elena Marchetti
D
Dania Röslund
E
Tobias Vasch
F
Priya Venkatesan
18
The molecule has been adapted for numerous roles over the course of evolution.
19
The hormone makes people who dread being rejected less inclined to work with others.
20
Men come to view names from their own nation more favourably than those from elsewhere.
Question 21 - 26
Complete the summary below.
Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer.
Oxytocin research
The earliest understanding of oxytocin and bonding grew out of work on animals: the hormone strengthened the pair-bonds that prairie form with a lifelong partner, and it brought out maternal care in ewes. In humans, a study led by Vasch found that a dose made volunteers hand over more to a partner who might not be honest, which seemed to confirm the hormone's good name.
Later work told a more complicated story. When volunteers were pitted against each other, the hormone sharpened their sense of if an opponent won. Other research showed that it improved emotion-reading only in people who were socially to begin with, while it could also leave individuals less towards someone they did not know. One suggestion is that oxytocin works as a mental , making people more alert to the social cues around them.
Passage
❓ Câu hỏi passage 3
Question 27 - 31
Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.
Write the correct letter in boxes on your answer sheet.
27
In the opening paragraph, the writer argues that managers, as a rule,
A
focus their efforts on the trends that are easiest to see.
B
dismiss as unimportant the trends closest to their main markets.
C
miss the deeper ways in which trends mould what buyers want and do.
D
read the data on consumer behaviour less accurately than they suppose.
28
The third paragraph suggests that Veranne was determined not to
A
copy the pricing moves its competitors were making.
B
keep its prices the same right across its range.
C
alter the overall character of its brand to suit the times.
D
damage the impression of exclusivity it had long enjoyed.
29
What does the writer say about the Living Lighter scheme?
A
It drew in a new kind of environmentally aware shopper.
B
It called for no change to what the company principally did.
C
Its chief aim was to inform customers about environmental damage.
D
It was not the first scheme of its kind the chain had run.
30
The writer implies that the approach Velos adopted
A
may at first appear an unrewarding way to spend resources.
B
carried a very high level of risk at the time.
C
was affordable only to firms of considerable size.
D
could not have been realised in an earlier era.
31
What set the Kineto apart from other games of its type?
A
It relied on technology originally created for sports equipment.
B
It was designed for youngsters hoping to become fitter.
C
It answered the worry that such devices encouraged inactive habits.
D
It capitalised on the vogue for richly coloured 3D visuals.
Question 32 - 37
Look at the following statements and the list of companies below.
Match each statement with the correct company, A-D.
Write the correct letter, A-D.
List of Findings
A
Brightloom
B
Velos
C
Grovemark
D
Veranne
32
It reframed a common concern about the risks of its products as something positive.
33
It discovered that its customers were ready to confront a difficult period with optimism.
34
It set up a customer rewards programme to make its sense of social responsibility visible.
35
It widened what it offered by teaming up with a separate producer.
36
It managed to avoid lowering the price of its principal products.
37
It took up a fast-growing trend that had emerged in a completely separate line of business.
Question 38 - 40
Complete each of the following statements with the best ending A-D from the box below.
List of Endings
A
work out which of the innovation strategies best suits your circumstances.
B
adopt the fuse-and-surpass strategy in order to unite the two worlds.
C
rely on a mix of strategies to keep hold of your existing customers.
D
reassert your brand's traditional values by means of the offset-and-reassert strategy.
When trend-related changes are beginning to affect your category, you should first
38
Where a trend exposes an unwelcome side of your category, you ought to
39
Where consumers' new concerns are moving increasingly out of step with what you sell, you should
40
DOL IELTS Đình Lực
21/10/2026
📖 Bài đọc passage 1
Bringing cinnamon to Europe
Cinnamon is the fragrant, sweet-tasting spice obtained from the inner bark of certain trees in the genus Cinnamomum, whose native range once extended across the islands of Southeast Asia. References to it survive from biblical times, when it appears in several books of scripture — sometimes as a substance blended into the ointments with which people's bodies were anointed, and sometimes as a keepsake exchanged to signal devotion between lovers and close companions. The Romans, for their part, would set cinnamon alight at weddings so that its perfume might drift through the air. Its most common role, though, lay in the kitchen and at the table. Wealthier Europeans of the medieval period seasoned their dishes with it — meat above all — while also using it to show those around them that they could afford so costly a luxury from the 'exotic' East. When entertaining, a host might set before guests a platter heaped with assorted spices, a display intended to advertise his or her status. Medicinal powers were credited to it as well, for it was regarded as a remedy for coughs and a range of other complaints.
As the Middle Ages drew to a close, Europe's rising middle class came to covet the trappings of aristocratic life, spices among them, and demand for cinnamon climbed accordingly. Handling the spice in this era were Persian merchants, who guarded the secret of where it came from so jealously that no rival could undercut them. Obtaining it from Sumatra, where the trees producing it grew, they loaded it onto mules and followed an overland route westward toward the Mediterranean. Their long trek finished at the port of Tyre. There, European traders who had sailed east to buy up supplies purchased the cinnamon and carried it home to Genoa; from that thriving commercial hub it passed onward to markets right across the continent. Because the caravans could deliver only modest amounts and Genoa held a near-total grip on the traffic, the Genoese were free to fix prices at extravagant levels. Steep prices and swelling demand together pushed other Europeans, eager for a share of the trade, to hunt for fresh sea routes to Asia.
Lured by the rich returns the cinnamon market seemed to promise, Portuguese traders reached the island of Alappar, in the Indian Ocean, during the closing years of the fifteenth century. Long before any European set foot there, the cultivation of the spice had already been organised by the local state. In the rainy months, when damp bark peeled away more readily, members of a community known as the Maruva would strip the bark from the plant's young shoots, rolling it as they worked into the curled 'sticks' by which the spice is still recognised today. This finished bark was then handed over to the king as tribute. Once they had arrived and found they had to raise output sharply, the Portuguese drove large numbers of the island's other inhabitants into slavery as cinnamon harvesters. A fort raised on Alappar in 1521 let them defend the island, cement a monopoly over the trade and reap enormous profits; late in the sixteenth century, for instance, a consignment carried the short distance from Alappar to the mainland could return ten times its cost.
Arriving off the southern Asian coast just as the seventeenth century opened, the Dutch resolved to unseat the Portuguese from their command of the cinnamon trade. They struck an alliance with Devangar, a kingdom in the island's interior, undertaking to shield its ruler from the Portuguese in exchange for tribute paid in elephants and cinnamon. The long-standing Portuguese monopoly was broken in 1652, when Dutch forces stormed and seized their trading posts, and by 1660 the Portuguese had been driven off the island for good, leaving the profitable trade in Dutch hands.
To safeguard their command of the market, the Dutch dealt with the local people every bit as harshly as the Portuguese had. Driven by the demands of greater output and Europe's still-rising hunger for the spice, they reshaped the way the islanders gathered it. Relentless stripping of the bark gradually left the island's stock of naturally growing cinnamon trees close to depletion. In the end, to make up for the shrinking number of trees left in the wild, the Dutch took to raising plantations of their own.
The English, in their turn, wrested the island from the Dutch in 1796. Once buyers in Europe came to tolerate a coarser grade of the spice, yearly production had, by about 1850, risen to roughly nine hundred tonnes. Cinnamon by that stage was under cultivation in other quarters too — elsewhere around the Indian Ocean and, further off still, in Brazil, Guyana and the West Indies. Holding any monopoly had thus become impossible; worse, the whole spice trade was slipping in commercial value, and would before long be overtaken by the swelling commerce in sugar, cocoa, tea and coffee.
The positive and negative effects of the chemical known as the 'love hormone'
A
A. Deep within the brain, the pituitary gland produces a hormone called oxytocin. Scientists' first clues about what this molecule does came not from people but from laboratory animals. In prairie voles — small rodents that pair up with a single partner for life — the hormone was found to cement the bond between mates, and in ewes it switched on the caring behaviour aimed at their newborn lambs. Human mothers, too, release it as they give birth, deepening the tie between parent and infant. Hardly any other chemical enjoys such a glowing reputation; 'the love hormone' is the nickname it has earned. A single inhalation, so the claim goes, leaves someone readier to trust, more generous and more willing to cooperate. That rosy picture, however, now needs correcting: a fresh round of research shows the hormone's influence shifting sharply from one individual and one setting to the next, and finds it can sour our dealings with others as easily as sweeten them.
B
It was in 2007 that oxytocin's part in human conduct came to light. Tobias Vasch and his team at the Rhineland Institute for Neuroscience in Cologne set volunteers a task in which they could hand over sums of money to an unseen partner whose honesty was not assured. Those given a puff of oxytocin from a nasal spray beforehand, the researchers found, parted with larger amounts than a group handed a harmless placebo. With that one experiment, the study of how the hormone shapes human dealings was born. 'For the best part of a decade it was a rather solitary line of work,' Vasch remembers. 'These days the field is crowded.' The investigations that followed reported that a dose left people more generous, sharper at recognising the feelings on other faces, and calmer in a disagreement. Such findings hardened the assumption that oxytocin reliably brought out the better side of our social selves.
C
Within a few years, though, clashing results began appearing. When volunteers in a study run by Dania Röslund of Fjordland University competed in a game, those who had breathed in the hormone took greater satisfaction in defeating their rivals — and felt a sharper sting of envy whenever a rival came out ahead. The hormone's effects, moreover, could pull in opposite directions according to the person receiving it. Priya Venkatesan of the Fenwick Medical School reported that oxytocin sharpened people's reading of others' emotions, but only among those who had been socially awkward to start with; in volunteers who were especially anxious, or easily wounded by rejection, it actually made them less willing to cooperate.
D
A further finding was that who we are dealing with alters what the hormone does. Work by Lieve Maartens at the Lowlands Institute of Cognitive Science showed that a dose of oxytocin could make people less, not more, obliging when the person across from them was a total stranger. At much the same time, Joris Halbertsma of the Randstad Behavioural Institute uncovered a streak of favouritism in those given the hormone: Dutch men, for instance, grew quicker to pair pleasant words with home-grown names than with foreign-sounding ones. Oxytocin, Halbertsma argues, pushes us to look after our own circle and guard it against threats from beyond. Rather than spreading warmth indiscriminately, the hormone seems to deepen the loyalties and prejudices we already hold.
E
Hints of these complications had, in truth, been there from the outset. Venkatesan has lately shown that in close to half of the studies already published, the hormone made a difference only to particular people or under particular conditions. Such results were once brushed aside; today they steer research along fresh paths, and a subtler picture of what oxytocin does is emerging. For Venkatesan, the way forward is to pin down the hormone's single underlying job rather than keep listing its apparently limitless effects. Several explanations are on the table, and they need not rule one another out: perhaps the hormone dampens anxiety and fear, or perhaps it merely prompts us to reach out for company. Her own view is that oxytocin works like a spotlight trained on social signals — the small shift of posture, the flicker of the eyes, the falling note in a voice — leaving people keener observers of those around them. That would explain why it nudges us to meet another's gaze and helps us name what others feel. Yet for anyone thin-skinned, or inclined to read the worst into every signal, the same effect could make matters worse.
F
That the oxytocin story has grown more tangled should come as no surprise. Creatures as different as octopuses and sheep all carry the hormone, and its lineage reaches back some five hundred million years. 'This is an old and very plain molecule that evolution has repeatedly put to new uses,' notes Elena Marchetti of the Adriatic Neuroscience Centre. 'Because it acts on ancient structures such as the amygdala, its fingerprints end up on almost everything.' Venkatesan takes the same line. 'At bottom oxytocin is probably doing a few very basic things; but once you add our more sophisticated thinking and the tangle of real social life, those basic processes can surface in quite different ways from one person, and one situation, to the next.'
Experts from the Halvorsen School of Management give advice to managers
Spotting the big trends of the moment is something most managers do well enough. Yet our work - across studies in several industries and hands-on collaboration with firms - has repeatedly shown that the subtler, deeper influence of those trends on what consumers want, think and do goes unnoticed by the very people running these businesses. Managers are especially prone to this blind spot when a trend looks marginal to the markets at the heart of their business.
In their innovation strategies, many firms simply leave trends out, or hang back to see what happens and let rivals move first. The mildest cost of doing so is the profit left on the table; the gravest is that a company may hand competitors the chance to remake the entire industry, putting itself in real danger. Two aims lie behind this article: to push managers toward a broader view of how trends might generate fresh value propositions within their central markets, and to offer guidance for helping market research and product development staff become sharper at reading trends and turning them to advantage.
The first, which we call 'extend and enrich', means building a product or service that keeps most features and functions customers already expect from the category, while grafting on new ones that speak to desires a major trend has stirred up. Consider the Juna line of handbags, brought out by the luxury house Veranne when the economy slid into recession in 2011. For more than six decades Veranne had stood for wealth and refinement, so the natural move in a downturn - cutting prices - was also the dangerous one, since it threatened to make the label look cheap. The company took a different path: a study of its customers found them keen to pull both themselves and the country out of hard times. Acting on what it learned, Veranne released the Juna bags at lower prices, giving them bright colours and a more youthful, playful character than the firm's usual designs. This new sub-brand meant Veranne could sidestep a blanket reduction in prices. Where many rival firms met the recession by simply charging less, Veranne read the shift in customers' outlook as a chance to innovate and reinvent itself.
The same strategy is visible in how the grocery chain Grovemark answered its shoppers' mounting worries about the environment. Ranked among the five biggest retailers in the world, Grovemark launched a scheme called Living Lighter, meant to show it took environmental protection seriously by drawing customers into activities with visible results. Shoppers earn points, for instance, whenever they reuse carrier bags, hand in cans and printer cartridges for recycling, or buy home-insulation materials. Just like the points collected on ordinary shopping, these can be turned into cash. Rather than giving up what it had always sold, Grovemark added these features on top of its existing business, threading a strand of environmental concern through its value proposition.
Bolder still is the strategy we term 'fuse and surpass'. Here a firm marries features of its current value proposition to others that respond to a trend's upheavals, and out of that marriage comes an experience so novel it can carry the company into a wholly new area of the market. Spending money and effort to fold a seemingly unrelated trend into what you already sell may, at first impression, look like poor value. Yet consider how the athletic-shoe maker Velos wove the digital revolution into its standing for high-performance footwear. Joining forces in 2007 with the technology firm Kestrel, it launched Velos Motion, a digital sports kit made up of a sensor that clips to a running shoe and a wireless receiver that links to the wearer's portable music player. Fusing what Velos had always offered recreational athletes with something for digital consumers, the Motion kit and its website carried the company beyond sportswear onto a new level of contact with its customers.
A third route, 'offset and reassert', calls for products or services that play up the values a category has always stood for, in a way that lets customers push back against - or briefly escape - whatever they dislike about a trend. The Kineto, a handheld video game from the Australian firm Brightloom, did precisely this. By reasserting the link between toys and active, physical play, it worked against the harm that digital gaming devices were widely believed to cause. In common with rival handheld games, it offered plenty of lively interactive titles, a full-colour LCD screen and sophisticated 3D graphics. Its distinguishing feature lay elsewhere: built into it was a pedometer that logged physical exertion - walking, running, cycling, skateboarding, stair-climbing - and awarded points for it. The child could spend those points on sharpening the various virtual skills the game called for. Released midway through 2010, the Kineto tapped into children's enormous appetite for video games while pushing back against the drawbacks, among them the association with too little exercise and with obesity.
Once you have worked out how trend-driven shifts in consumers' beliefs and behaviour bear on your category, the next step is choosing which of our three strategies fits. Should the category's core value proposition still hold meaning for the consumers a trend has touched, extend-and-enrich is the route that will breathe new life into it. Where analysis instead exposes a widening gap between your category and consumers' new preoccupations, the innovation must rise above the category and bring the two worlds together through fuse-and-surpass. And where features of the category clash with outcomes of a trend that people find unwelcome - a link with unhealthy living, say - the opening is there to counter those shifts by reasserting everything the category has traditionally stood for.
For a company, few things open up growth like a trend - be it technological, economic, environmental, social or political - that changes people's view of the world and what they expect of the goods and services around them.
Cinnamon is the fragrant, sweet-tasting spice obtained from the inner bark of certain trees in the genus Cinnamomum, whose native range once extended across the islands of Southeast Asia. References to it survive from biblical times, when it appears in several books of scripture — sometimes as a substance blended into the ointments with which people's bodies were anointed, and sometimes as a keepsake exchanged to signal devotion between lovers and close companions. The Romans, for their part, would set cinnamon alight at weddings so that its perfume might drift through the air. Its most common role, though, lay in the kitchen and at the table. Wealthier Europeans of the medieval period seasoned their dishes with it — meat above all — while also using it to show those around them that they could afford so costly a luxury from the 'exotic' East. When entertaining, a host might set before guests a platter heaped with assorted spices, a display intended to advertise his or her status. Medicinal powers were credited to it as well, for it was regarded as a remedy for coughs and a range of other complaints.
As the Middle Ages drew to a close, Europe's rising middle class came to covet the trappings of aristocratic life, spices among them, and demand for cinnamon climbed accordingly. Handling the spice in this era were Persian merchants, who guarded the secret of where it came from so jealously that no rival could undercut them. Obtaining it from Sumatra, where the trees producing it grew, they loaded it onto mules and followed an overland route westward toward the Mediterranean. Their long trek finished at the port of Tyre. There, European traders who had sailed east to buy up supplies purchased the cinnamon and carried it home to Genoa; from that thriving commercial hub it passed onward to markets right across the continent. Because the caravans could deliver only modest amounts and Genoa held a near-total grip on the traffic, the Genoese were free to fix prices at extravagant levels. Steep prices and swelling demand together pushed other Europeans, eager for a share of the trade, to hunt for fresh sea routes to Asia.
Lured by the rich returns the cinnamon market seemed to promise, Portuguese traders reached the island of Alappar, in the Indian Ocean, during the closing years of the fifteenth century. Long before any European set foot there, the cultivation of the spice had already been organised by the local state. In the rainy months, when damp bark peeled away more readily, members of a community known as the Maruva would strip the bark from the plant's young shoots, rolling it as they worked into the curled 'sticks' by which the spice is still recognised today. This finished bark was then handed over to the king as tribute. Once they had arrived and found they had to raise output sharply, the Portuguese drove large numbers of the island's other inhabitants into slavery as cinnamon harvesters. A fort raised on Alappar in 1521 let them defend the island, cement a monopoly over the trade and reap enormous profits; late in the sixteenth century, for instance, a consignment carried the short distance from Alappar to the mainland could return ten times its cost.
Arriving off the southern Asian coast just as the seventeenth century opened, the Dutch resolved to unseat the Portuguese from their command of the cinnamon trade. They struck an alliance with Devangar, a kingdom in the island's interior, undertaking to shield its ruler from the Portuguese in exchange for tribute paid in elephants and cinnamon. The long-standing Portuguese monopoly was broken in 1652, when Dutch forces stormed and seized their trading posts, and by 1660 the Portuguese had been driven off the island for good, leaving the profitable trade in Dutch hands.
To safeguard their command of the market, the Dutch dealt with the local people every bit as harshly as the Portuguese had. Driven by the demands of greater output and Europe's still-rising hunger for the spice, they reshaped the way the islanders gathered it. Relentless stripping of the bark gradually left the island's stock of naturally growing cinnamon trees close to depletion. In the end, to make up for the shrinking number of trees left in the wild, the Dutch took to raising plantations of their own.
The English, in their turn, wrested the island from the Dutch in 1796. Once buyers in Europe came to tolerate a coarser grade of the spice, yearly production had, by about 1850, risen to roughly nine hundred tonnes. Cinnamon by that stage was under cultivation in other quarters too — elsewhere around the Indian Ocean and, further off still, in Brazil, Guyana and the West Indies. Holding any monopoly had thus become impossible; worse, the whole spice trade was slipping in commercial value, and would before long be overtaken by the swelling commerce in sugar, cocoa, tea and coffee.
B. It was in 2007 that oxytocin's part in human conduct came to light. Tobias Vasch and his team at the Rhineland Institute for Neuroscience in Cologne set volunteers a task in which they could hand over sums of money to an unseen partner whose honesty was not assured. Those given a puff of oxytocin from a nasal spray beforehand, the researchers found, parted with larger amounts than a group handed a harmless placebo. With that one experiment, the study of how the hormone shapes human dealings was born. 'For the best part of a decade it was a rather solitary line of work,' Vasch remembers. 'These days the field is crowded.' The investigations that followed reported that a dose left people more generous, sharper at recognising the feelings on other faces, and calmer in a disagreement. Such findings hardened the assumption that oxytocin reliably brought out the better side of our social selves.
C. Within a few years, though, clashing results began appearing. When volunteers in a study run by Dania Röslund of Fjordland University competed in a game, those who had breathed in the hormone took greater satisfaction in defeating their rivals — and felt a sharper sting of envy whenever a rival came out ahead. The hormone's effects, moreover, could pull in opposite directions according to the person receiving it. Priya Venkatesan of the Fenwick Medical School reported that oxytocin sharpened people's reading of others' emotions, but only among those who had been socially awkward to start with; in volunteers who were especially anxious, or easily wounded by rejection, it actually made them less willing to cooperate.
D. A further finding was that who we are dealing with alters what the hormone does. Work by Lieve Maartens at the Lowlands Institute of Cognitive Science showed that a dose of oxytocin could make people less, not more, obliging when the person across from them was a total stranger. At much the same time, Joris Halbertsma of the Randstad Behavioural Institute uncovered a streak of favouritism in those given the hormone: Dutch men, for instance, grew quicker to pair pleasant words with home-grown names than with foreign-sounding ones. Oxytocin, Halbertsma argues, pushes us to look after our own circle and guard it against threats from beyond. Rather than spreading warmth indiscriminately, the hormone seems to deepen the loyalties and prejudices we already hold.
E. Hints of these complications had, in truth, been there from the outset. Venkatesan has lately shown that in close to half of the studies already published, the hormone made a difference only to particular people or under particular conditions. Such results were once brushed aside; today they steer research along fresh paths, and a subtler picture of what oxytocin does is emerging. For Venkatesan, the way forward is to pin down the hormone's single underlying job rather than keep listing its apparently limitless effects. Several explanations are on the table, and they need not rule one another out: perhaps the hormone dampens anxiety and fear, or perhaps it merely prompts us to reach out for company. Her own view is that oxytocin works like a spotlight trained on social signals — the small shift of posture, the flicker of the eyes, the falling note in a voice — leaving people keener observers of those around them. That would explain why it nudges us to meet another's gaze and helps us name what others feel. Yet for anyone thin-skinned, or inclined to read the worst into every signal, the same effect could make matters worse.
F. That the oxytocin story has grown more tangled should come as no surprise. Creatures as different as octopuses and sheep all carry the hormone, and its lineage reaches back some five hundred million years. 'This is an old and very plain molecule that evolution has repeatedly put to new uses,' notes Elena Marchetti of the Adriatic Neuroscience Centre. 'Because it acts on ancient structures such as the amygdala, its fingerprints end up on almost everything.' Venkatesan takes the same line. 'At bottom oxytocin is probably doing a few very basic things; but once you add our more sophisticated thinking and the tangle of real social life, those basic processes can surface in quite different ways from one person, and one situation, to the next.'
Spotting the big trends of the moment is something most managers do well enough. Yet our work - across studies in several industries and hands-on collaboration with firms - has repeatedly shown that the subtler, deeper influence of those trends on what consumers want, think and do goes unnoticed by the very people running these businesses. Managers are especially prone to this blind spot when a trend looks marginal to the markets at the heart of their business.
In their innovation strategies, many firms simply leave trends out, or hang back to see what happens and let rivals move first. The mildest cost of doing so is the profit left on the table; the gravest is that a company may hand competitors the chance to remake the entire industry, putting itself in real danger. Two aims lie behind this article: to push managers toward a broader view of how trends might generate fresh value propositions within their central markets, and to offer guidance for helping market research and product development staff become sharper at reading trends and turning them to advantage.
The first, which we call 'extend and enrich', means building a product or service that keeps most features and functions customers already expect from the category, while grafting on new ones that speak to desires a major trend has stirred up. Consider the Juna line of handbags, brought out by the luxury house Veranne when the economy slid into recession in 2011. For more than six decades Veranne had stood for wealth and refinement, so the natural move in a downturn - cutting prices - was also the dangerous one, since it threatened to make the label look cheap. The company took a different path: a study of its customers found them keen to pull both themselves and the country out of hard times. Acting on what it learned, Veranne released the Juna bags at lower prices, giving them bright colours and a more youthful, playful character than the firm's usual designs. This new sub-brand meant Veranne could sidestep a blanket reduction in prices. Where many rival firms met the recession by simply charging less, Veranne read the shift in customers' outlook as a chance to innovate and reinvent itself.
The same strategy is visible in how the grocery chain Grovemark answered its shoppers' mounting worries about the environment. Ranked among the five biggest retailers in the world, Grovemark launched a scheme called Living Lighter, meant to show it took environmental protection seriously by drawing customers into activities with visible results. Shoppers earn points, for instance, whenever they reuse carrier bags, hand in cans and printer cartridges for recycling, or buy home-insulation materials. Just like the points collected on ordinary shopping, these can be turned into cash. Rather than giving up what it had always sold, Grovemark added these features on top of its existing business, threading a strand of environmental concern through its value proposition.
Bolder still is the strategy we term 'fuse and surpass'. Here a firm marries features of its current value proposition to others that respond to a trend's upheavals, and out of that marriage comes an experience so novel it can carry the company into a wholly new area of the market. Spending money and effort to fold a seemingly unrelated trend into what you already sell may, at first impression, look like poor value. Yet consider how the athletic-shoe maker Velos wove the digital revolution into its standing for high-performance footwear. Joining forces in 2007 with the technology firm Kestrel, it launched Velos Motion, a digital sports kit made up of a sensor that clips to a running shoe and a wireless receiver that links to the wearer's portable music player. Fusing what Velos had always offered recreational athletes with something for digital consumers, the Motion kit and its website carried the company beyond sportswear onto a new level of contact with its customers.
A third route, 'offset and reassert', calls for products or services that play up the values a category has always stood for, in a way that lets customers push back against - or briefly escape - whatever they dislike about a trend. The Kineto, a handheld video game from the Australian firm Brightloom, did precisely this. By reasserting the link between toys and active, physical play, it worked against the harm that digital gaming devices were widely believed to cause. In common with rival handheld games, it offered plenty of lively interactive titles, a full-colour LCD screen and sophisticated 3D graphics. Its distinguishing feature lay elsewhere: built into it was a pedometer that logged physical exertion - walking, running, cycling, skateboarding, stair-climbing - and awarded points for it. The child could spend those points on sharpening the various virtual skills the game called for. Released midway through 2010, the Kineto tapped into children's enormous appetite for video games while pushing back against the drawbacks, among them the association with too little exercise and with obesity.
Once you have worked out how trend-driven shifts in consumers' beliefs and behaviour bear on your category, the next step is choosing which of our three strategies fits. Should the category's core value proposition still hold meaning for the consumers a trend has touched, extend-and-enrich is the route that will breathe new life into it. Where analysis instead exposes a widening gap between your category and consumers' new preoccupations, the innovation must rise above the category and bring the two worlds together through fuse-and-surpass. And where features of the category clash with outcomes of a trend that people find unwelcome - a link with unhealthy living, say - the opening is there to counter those shifts by reasserting everything the category has traditionally stood for.
For a company, few things open up growth like a trend - be it technological, economic, environmental, social or political - that changes people's view of the world and what they expect of the goods and services around them.
Spotting the big trends of the moment is something most managers do well enough. Yet our work - across studies in several industries and hands-on collaboration with firms - has repeatedly shown that the subtler, deeper influence of those trends on what consumers want, think and do goes unnoticed by the very people running these businesses. Managers are especially prone to this blind spot when a trend looks marginal to the markets at the heart of their business.
In their innovation strategies, many firms simply leave trends out, or hang back to see what happens and let rivals move first. The mildest cost of doing so is the profit left on the table; the gravest is that a company may hand competitors the chance to remake the entire industry, putting itself in real danger. Two aims lie behind this article: to push managers toward a broader view of how trends might generate fresh value propositions within their central markets, and to offer guidance for helping market research and product development staff become sharper at reading trends and turning them to advantage.
The first, which we call 'extend and enrich', means building a product or service that keeps most features and functions customers already expect from the category, while grafting on new ones that speak to desires a major trend has stirred up. Consider the Juna line of handbags, brought out by the luxury house Veranne when the economy slid into recession in 2011. For more than six decades Veranne had stood for wealth and refinement, so the natural move in a downturn - cutting prices - was also the dangerous one, since it threatened to make the label look cheap. The company took a different path: a study of its customers found them keen to pull both themselves and the country out of hard times. Acting on what it learned, Veranne released the Juna bags at lower prices, giving them bright colours and a more youthful, playful character than the firm's usual designs. This new sub-brand meant Veranne could sidestep a blanket reduction in prices. Where many rival firms met the recession by simply charging less, Veranne read the shift in customers' outlook as a chance to innovate and reinvent itself.
The same strategy is visible in how the grocery chain Grovemark answered its shoppers' mounting worries about the environment. Ranked among the five biggest retailers in the world, Grovemark launched a scheme called Living Lighter, meant to show it took environmental protection seriously by drawing customers into activities with visible results. Shoppers earn points, for instance, whenever they reuse carrier bags, hand in cans and printer cartridges for recycling, or buy home-insulation materials. Just like the points collected on ordinary shopping, these can be turned into cash. Rather than giving up what it had always sold, Grovemark added these features on top of its existing business, threading a strand of environmental concern through its value proposition.
Bolder still is the strategy we term 'fuse and surpass'. Here a firm marries features of its current value proposition to others that respond to a trend's upheavals, and out of that marriage comes an experience so novel it can carry the company into a wholly new area of the market. Spending money and effort to fold a seemingly unrelated trend into what you already sell may, at first impression, look like poor value. Yet consider how the athletic-shoe maker Velos wove the digital revolution into its standing for high-performance footwear. Joining forces in 2007 with the technology firm Kestrel, it launched Velos Motion, a digital sports kit made up of a sensor that clips to a running shoe and a wireless receiver that links to the wearer's portable music player. Fusing what Velos had always offered recreational athletes with something for digital consumers, the Motion kit and its website carried the company beyond sportswear onto a new level of contact with its customers.
A third route, 'offset and reassert', calls for products or services that play up the values a category has always stood for, in a way that lets customers push back against - or briefly escape - whatever they dislike about a trend. The Kineto, a handheld video game from the Australian firm Brightloom, did precisely this. By reasserting the link between toys and active, physical play, it worked against the harm that digital gaming devices were widely believed to cause. In common with rival handheld games, it offered plenty of lively interactive titles, a full-colour LCD screen and sophisticated 3D graphics. Its distinguishing feature lay elsewhere: built into it was a pedometer that logged physical exertion - walking, running, cycling, skateboarding, stair-climbing - and awarded points for it. The child could spend those points on sharpening the various virtual skills the game called for. Released midway through 2010, the Kineto tapped into children's enormous appetite for video games while pushing back against the drawbacks, among them the association with too little exercise and with obesity.
Once you have worked out how trend-driven shifts in consumers' beliefs and behaviour bear on your category, the next step is choosing which of our three strategies fits. Should the category's core value proposition still hold meaning for the consumers a trend has touched, extend-and-enrich is the route that will breathe new life into it. Where analysis instead exposes a widening gap between your category and consumers' new preoccupations, the innovation must rise above the category and bring the two worlds together through fuse-and-surpass. And where features of the category clash with outcomes of a trend that people find unwelcome - a link with unhealthy living, say - the opening is there to counter those shifts by reasserting everything the category has traditionally stood for.
For a company, few things open up growth like a trend - be it technological, economic, environmental, social or political - that changes people's view of the world and what they expect of the goods and services around them.
