CUSTOM & CREATIVE
No cookie-cutter research projects here!
We bring creativity to scientific insight about the real lives of people they hope to engage — customers, workers, and end users.
We blend ethnographic research and design research techniques to gather perspective-shifting insights. Our approach is designed to broaden perspectives, explore possible futures and identify needs that can drive true innovation, market differentiation, and business growth through leading market research methods.
We support client teams with needs across insights, innovation, design, and marketing functions. Our projects have different strategic focuses from anticipating futures, identifying new opportunity spaces, advancing concepts, or refining go-to-market strategies.
Where will we be in 5, 10, 20 years? Anticipate and explore the fuzzy future of front end innovation questions.
What messages are we sending? Bring audiences to life to inform effective marketing and communication strategies.
What is the lay of the land? Gain a holistic understanding of a landscape that teams can draw insight from for years to come.
How can we get it right? Access the viability and desirability of experiences, concepts and prototypes to inform iteration and successful product launches.
What should we be solving? Uncover user needs and inspiring new ideas to fill innovation pipelines.
What if we need to move quickly? Agile programs propel teams forward in short, targeted sprints with focused learning or facilitation goals.
The consumer and end user is at the heart of all research. In order to stay relevant and successful, brands and the leaders that drive them need to understand their consumers from every angle. As researchers, our mission is to uncover what makes these consumers tick, how they use and feel about various products or services, what they desire, and most importantly, we try to uncover the gaps and determine how to fill their unmet needs and find actionable insights.
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“It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there’s no knowing where you might be swept off to.”
― Bilbo Baggins (The Lord of the Rings)
All experiences in life, whether the perilous journey from The Shire to Mount Doom, or the casual trip to the corner coffeeshop, contain a multitude of tiny interactions and complexities. Businesses seeking understanding of these experiences (internal or external) often find the prospect of investigating/organizing the many potential pathways daunting. Indeed, for "dangerous business" like this, we like to turn to a higher authority...
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In a perfect world, brands would have unlimited resources including the time and money to design for and market to the whole population of potential buyers. With their own set of unlimited resources, ethnographers would set up camp in consumers’ homes for weeks at a time, collecting data on the minutiae of domestic life to create the richest data set. Unfortunately (or perhaps, fortunately), resources are not unlimited. Market Segmentation is often the best research answer to carving up the population into more manageable pieces in order to simplify the world of a company's audience. However, quantitative-only market segmentation often falls short of the hopes and dreams of teams when it comes to acting on the insights: oversimplification without accounting for the missing human elements.
Read MoreIf people do it, we study it. For over twenty years our cross-disciplinary team has collaborated across industries and across the globe. We have served clients in a variety of industries, retail, healthcare, food & beverage, technology, media, consumer goods, automotive, finance, insurance, education, lifestyle, hospitality, workplace, travel and B2B.