Uncovering the motivations and communication needs of your customers, allowing you to better align your marketing, customer service, and other understanding and materials to:
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increase ROI
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improve loyalty
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enhance message resonance
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build better relationships
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amplify satisfaction
Insights for Smart Decisions
From single pulse-point surveys to multi-year longitudinal projects, we specialize in voice-of-consumer insights
Our experience has the breadth and depth you'd expect from a seasoned research team with experience in all levels of qualitative and quantitative research.
The hallmark of our work is actionable results that transform your ability to make informed decisions.
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Market Behaviors & Motivations
Understand how a population thinks and acts, what motivates their behaviors, and the key aspects of a product or subgroups culture.
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Business-to-Business
Distributors and professional service providers face unique challenges when working to build efficiencies into their understanding and alignment with the needs of retailers.
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Branding & Employee Perceptions
Beyond the image you intend to convey via your branding plan are the two audiences which determine your success: the public and your employees.
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Program/Training
Making sure your programs strongly resonate with the needs of employees and customers helps to ensure keen participation and education.
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Campaign Specific
Many times a specific challenge or question is the focus of our research. One of our specialties is revealing targeted answers to tough questions.
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Consumer Focused
A grab-bag of highlights as many of the questions we receive surround creating a better understanding of how consumers across categories think and feel.
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Secondary
For some projects a secondary review of existing data and fresh reporting are all that is necessary to give answers to the questions which are being asked.
Everything we do is centered on getting to the motivations that drive human behavior.
To get there, we employ a variety of methodologies, each carefully selected to align with the specific needs of your project. While every project is unique, we do have a series of tools and beliefs which will give you some insight into how we approach new challenges.
Academic Depth with Business Grounding
One of the aspects that drives us is an innate curiosity about how humans interact and make decisions. Our backgrounds are in psychology and communication and the lessons these fields serve as a foundation upon which we build our approach.
We know that years of research have proven certain truths about how humans communicate, socialize, and make decisions.
Consider, for example, how we breakdown the way in which relationships and expectations are formed:
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We form identities based upon our experiences and interpretations of those experiences*
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Each new experience adds to our bank of knowledge about what others expect from us*
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We come to associate objects, words, and brands with meanings in our memory banks, forming a triad of connections regarding perceptions**
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In addition to our need to fit in socially, we also have a need to maintain a unique sense of self*
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Our sense of self and need to fit in socially constantly work to find balance*
Our research focuses on revealing what people's communicative expectations are, how they communicate, and what they expect from an interaction.
The key to advancing knowledge and communication lies in understanding what is going on in the volley of communication between you and your employees or customers. Our interviews focus on your category, business, or key issue under examination, allowing you to take our insights and weave them into your communication and planning for maximum impact and resonance.
+ Pearce, W. B. and Cronen, V. E., Communication, Action, and Meaning: The Creation of Social Realities, Praeger, New York, 1980.
**Ogden, C.K. and Richards, I.A., The Meaning of Meaning, Harcourt, Brace, and World, New York, 1946.
* Mead, G.H., Mind, Self, and Society, University of Chicago, Chicago, 1934.
The Right Approach Makes All the Difference
Each question or challenge helps to shape the best method of discovery. We consider:
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what is being asked
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the types of knowledge that already exist about a market or client
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the goals/intended outcomes of the research, and
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budgetary/time considerations.
No matter what the question/challenge, just a few of the tools we have at our disposal to craft the ideal research approach include:
Qualitative Tools
Focus on engaging market members deeply, often in the environments in which they already work, live, or travel. These tools provide rich insights that are usually themed into lists of core psychological and motivational drivers of the market.
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Ethnographic Immersion
Researchers enter the culture with the skill of a chameleon, blending into their surroundings while keeping a keen eye and ear out for the rules, habits, patterns, and tendencies which make the culture tick.
Gives light to insights which are rarely revealed in interviews or other direct communication environments.
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Shop-Alongs/Observational Shadowing
Take place in and around the places where decisions and communication naturally occur.
For example, much of our work in healthcare involves observational shadowing in waiting rooms and exam room corridors. This type of approach can also include ride-alongs with mobile clinics or sales force members or literal shadowing of key team members or customers to understand how products and services fit into daily routines and needs.
In consumer packaged goods, this involves shop-alongs, where researchers shadow consumers on visits to stores and in aisles, gathering point-of-decision insights.
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In-Depth Interviews
Participant-focused conversations that primarily listen to what participants are sharing and allows them to direct the discussion, guiding them with structured prompts.
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Focus Groups
For challenges where group dynamics will enhance rather than detract from depth of understanding.
Quantitative Tools
Approaches which allow us to engage large statistically valid samples of target populations and get answers to questions for which a core set of variables is known.
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Questionnaires/Surveys
Design and engagement of non-biased questionnaires with insightful questions across a variety of administration media.
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Experimental design
Assesses behavior prior to an intervention to gain a baseline measure of behavior, introduce the intervention, and then assess post-intervention behavior. If the change in behavior from pre- to post-intervention is significant, then we can say that the intervention likely created the change in behavior. You can be even more assured in your conclusions if you run assessments in a parallel control group that is not exposed to the intervention.
Qualiquant Tools
A blended research approach offering the depth of qualitative insights with the breadth of quantitative coverage. Usually portions of the research will focus on qualitative data, while others will focus on quantitative.
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Sandwiching
By sandwiching the methodologies deeper insights and cross-conclusions can be drawn from the collective data. In most situations, the quantitative instruments (especially front-end pieces) are administered to a larger set of respondents than the subset that receive the full sandwich treatment. In this way connections and confirmation between data sets is possible, while depth and variety of insights are built.
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Staged Intent
Allows one or more areas of research to be completed as milestones rather than conclusion points. As insights from one stage of the research are developed, they direct and allow for more targeted design of the next stage of research. In almost all cases of staged intent design a mix of quantitative and qualitative insight pathways are incorporated.