Introducing Cadence
Cadence is what a strategist reads when the decision is already moving. KWL reads the behavioural signals that shape markets as they move, so a brand can see not only what happened but what the market is doing while there is still time to act on it.
What it reads
Every quarter Cadence reads the same signals in all eleven markets: what people search for and watch, the tone of the news around them, what households say, what they actually buy and book, and what brands are putting behind all of it.
What it reads
Consumer surveys
Retail volumes
Accommodation activity
Search & app charts
Advertising activity
News tone
Household rates
Unemployment rate
eight signal families · every market · every quarter
Each signal is read on its own terms and never blended into another. Each market is read against its own history, not against a European average.
What comes out — one relationship, Spain, August
Eurostat sts_trtu_m · ES · 2026-08 against the same month a year earlier · both legs the same instrument
Every figure is traceable to a public source you can open yourself. And where a series goes stale, Cadence withholds it rather than print it as current: HICP inflation is withheld in all eleven markets this quarter, and every edition says so.
We translate those signals into a clear behavioural read of each market, so strategists, marketers and insight teams can respond while decisions are still being made.
How to explore
The same evidence, at three depths. Start where the question is.
Cadence Report
One market, read in full.
Six chapters on a single market: where it sits against its own history, what moved this quarter across retail, finance and travel, and the evidence chapter stating what each observation does and does not establish. Yours permanently, in the browser and as a PDF.
Cadence All Markets
Eleven markets, and the comparison between them.
Every country report, the European Control Room that reads across them, and the quarter-on-quarter history that makes a movement legible as a movement. New editions arrive while the subscription runs, and the Skill brings all of it into the AI assistant your team already uses.
Cadence Enterprise
Cadence, shaped around your organisation.
Everything in All Markets, in a private instance: white-label, single sign-on, and markets, sectors or integrations built for the questions your teams actually ask. Scope is agreed rather than chosen from a list.
01 · One market
A market is rarely doing one thing. Households can be cautious while what they actually buy keeps rising; a sector can be busy while the brands inside it are not. A Cadence report separates those, chapter by chapter, and shows the measurement behind each one — so a claim in a meeting has a source behind it.
France — straight from the live edition
Every figure below is read from the France edition object, the same one the report renders. The household indicators carry their own Eurostat vintage — shown on each — while the brand evidence is the quarter’s frozen basket. Two different clocks, both stated, neither averaged into “this quarter”.
Consumer confidence
-18.4
own mean -13.5 · below
2026-09
Savings intent
10.2
own mean 0.8 · above
2026-09
Big-ticket intent
-2.4
own mean -1.4 · below
2026-09
Eurostat level and gap to own long-run mean
Eurostat measures the volume of retail sales, calendar adjusted and deflated, so this is goods moved rather than money taken. It is a market-level series and says nothing about any individual retailer.
Eurostat tour_occ_nim / tour_occ_arm realised nights, same month a year earlier Q3 2026
02 · All eleven
The useful question is rarely what Europe is doing. It is whether what you are seeing in your market is the continent, a handful of countries, or only you. The Control Room reads the eleven on one footing and answers that: where they repeat, where they split, and where two independent measures of the same market disagree.
Europe, Q3 2026 — straight from the live control room
Three readings as published, with the markets each one applies to and the instrument behind it. Where a reading could only be measured in some of the eleven, it says so: the markets a comparison does not cover are part of the comparison.
What moved
3 of 11 markets changed position this quarter
Ireland (below par, deferring → below par, holding), Sweden (at par, deferring → at par, holding), France (below par, holding → below par, deferring).
Eurostat confidence and big-ticket intent
What is shared
Confidence sits below the market’s own long-run mean while big-ticket purchase intent holds at or above its own in 4 of 11 eligible markets
Spain, Ireland, Italy, Portugal.
Eurostat consumer confidence and major-purchase intent
Where the signals disagree
Big-ticket purchase intent is holding at or above the market’s own norm while its news coverage is among the most negative in the set
Sweden. Two independent observables pointing different ways; Cadence reports the disagreement and infers nothing from it.
Eurostat big-ticket purchase intent vs own long-run mean · GDELT news coverage tone, 56-day mean
The set it reads across
A market is not cautious because it scores below Germany. It is cautious because it is below itself. Austria, Belgium, Germany, Spain, France, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal and Sweden — each read against its own long-run norms, the same way, every quarter.
→ consumer confidence vs its own long-run mean
↑ big-ticket intent vs its own mean
Eurostat consumer confidence and major-purchase intent gap to own long-run mean Q3 2026
Every market read against its own long-run norms, on the same two measures, in the same quarter. The spread is the finding: 4 markets sit where household confidence is below its own norm while intent to make a major purchase is not.
A plan built for one quadrant does not travel to another, and no European average would show you which quadrant you are in.
Both are survey measures and record what households stated.
03 · The Cadence Skill
Your AI already knows Europe.
Connect Cadence to Claude or ChatGPT. Ask questions about European markets in your own words, explore the evidence and follow the findings back to their sources. It answers for the markets your subscription holds, and where the evidence will not carry a claim it says so and points at what does.
You Is online pulling away from the rest of retail anywhere in Europe?
Consulting Cadence Skill… europe_picture · market_read
Assistant
In 3 of 7 eligible markets, total retail volume and online volume moved in opposite directions this period: Germany, Spain and Italy.
Spain is the clearest of the three. Total retail volume −0.6% year on year while online +7.3%, both legs the same Eurostat series and the same month, so the gap is a measurement rather than two sources disagreeing.
The four markets outside that seven are not zeros: Austria, France and Poland publish their two legs for different months, and Ireland's online leg is not published this period.
Eurostat sts_trtu_m · VOL_SLS · 2026-08 · both legs Eurostat sts_trtu_m VOL_SLS, same month per country, opposite signs
Markets outside the eligible set, and why
You Which brands are actually running advertising in France right now?
Consulting Cadence Skill… market_read · movers
Assistant
Six of the French retail brands Cadence observes are running advertising in the last 45 days: Leclerc, Carrefour, Intermarché, Auchan, Lidl and Monoprix.
BNP Paribas is observed in the same basket with none running, which is an observation rather than an absence of data.
Cadence does not join this to attention. Per-brand search movement is withheld this quarter, because repeated measurement did not reproduce it at publication precision, so there is no league table and no advertising-against-attention comparison to give you.
Presence, not volume. The creative count the collector returns is capped, so it is not published as a measurement.
Google Ads Transparency · FR · 45-day window · advertiser presence by domain
You How much of the music chart is domestic, and where does that differ most?
Consulting Cadence Skill… league · market_read
Assistant
Italy 76.6%, France 58.9%, Netherlands 0.0%. Those are the measured domestic-artist shares of the eligible chart.
They describe the chart measurement and nothing beyond it. They are not a reading of national taste, and they establish nothing about whether locally voiced creative would travel in one market and not another.
The measure is not published everywhere: 3 of the eleven markets withhold it this quarter because too little of the chart weight resolved to a citizenship.
Position-weighted over a trailing year, and only the part of the chart whose artists resolve to a citizenship. The resolved share is on the receipt.
Domestic share: Wikidata citizenship (P27) only, position-weighted · trailing 365 days to 2026-09-30 · 91.3% of chart weight resolved
04 · What it will not say
The machinery above could answer almost anything asked of it. What makes it worth having is that it does not. Where the evidence will not carry a claim, Cadence says so and points at what does — here, in the Skill, where the question arrives in a reader's own words and the refusal has to hold up in the same sentence.
Which market is trading down hardest to discount grocery?
Withdrawn
Trade-down is not measured. What is observed is relative search attention between a discounter and a named incumbent grocer within one market, which does not establish that anyone bought anything.
Instead europe_picture → shared[discounter_relative_attention], with its denominator and its scope.
France · finance · Q3 2026 — asked what changed
What changed is the rate path the sector sits inside: Household mortgage rate 3.2% (+0.19 pts YoY), Consumer credit 5.99% (-0.04 pts YoY), 2026-08 (ECB Data Portal · MIR · FR). Per-brand search movement is not part of that answer: the brand attention layer is withheld this quarter, because repeated measurement did not reproduce per-brand movement at publication precision. Worth checking in your own data: whether your acquisition or switching numbers move with that rate path.
Evidence
Cadence describes how a market is behaving now. It does not forecast what a market will do next — we tested that bridge five times, pre-registered, and published every result including the failures.
Every figure carries its source and its period. A sector read is a Finding where the evidence supports classification, Observed where the measurement is publishable and its interpretation is not, and Withheld where the evidence will not carry the read at all and is named rather than estimated.
Withheld is narrower than it sounds. This quarter it applies to the head-to-head comparison between named brands in Retail and Finance, not to the sectors. Both still publish category volumes, advertiser activity and the brand movements that clear a stricter bar — the comparison is withheld, the sector is not.
The tests, including the failures → How a market is measured →
Cadence Enterprise
All Markets sells Cadence as it is: eleven European markets, three sectors, the quarter as published. Enterprise is for the organisations whose question falls outside that. A market we do not yet publish. A sector that needs its own evidence contract. A read that has to live inside your own stack rather than ours.
Everything in All Markets, in a private instance: white-labelled, behind your single sign-on, with the Skill answering for your scope rather than ours.
What bespoke actually means here. A new market is a data stack, not a switch. Every signal has to be sourced, checked against that market's own history, and receipted to a public source before a single figure publishes. A new sector is harder still: it needs its own entity basket and its own eligibility contract, because what counts as representative evidence differs by sector, and forcing a new one through an existing formula would mean publishing a read nobody can defend. That work is why Enterprise is a conversation rather than a plan you select.
The bar does not move. A private instance never publishes a claim the public editions would withhold. Enterprise buys you more scope. It does not buy a lower standard of evidence.
Talk to us → Tell us the market, the sector or the system. We will tell you what the evidence can carry, and where it cannot.
Every market opens with a preview — the read, the findings that carry it, and the sources behind them. Nothing to sign up for.