Our projects fall into three broad categories. These categories pretty much follow how an organisation develops or refines a product, service or customer experience. Where we work depends on the project’s requirements but we can follow each step sequentially for larger assignments or just one or two for ad hoc projects.
"How is our brand performing?"
Let's be honest: numbers often get in the way of the message. That's usually because value isn’t created by producing hundred slide presentations.
The real irony is that even with all that content, real understanding remains elusive.
We're different. For us, quantitative data and analysis is about telling stories and getting to the heart of the opportunity for our clients. And getting there quickly.
Performance measurement projects are quite often commissioned separately from the contextual or innovation work we do. Either way, as classically trained researchers, we still apply the same rigour of research design, great fieldwork and careful analysis to every project to produce the kind of outputs that focus on decision makers’ needs – a focus on the purpose not the process of research.
"How do customers feel about what we do today?"
Quality of customer experience:
Businesses must orchestrate memorable events for their customers - that memory often becomes the product - the "experience”. These assignments are designed to see where a brand’s customer experience works well and where it needs to change. These projects are about far more than just measuring satisfaction – the most effective incorporate data from secondary sources to make a link between how a customer feels and business success, identify opportunities to change what exists today and often involve supplementary qualitative research to build a depth of understanding
"What is it about our offer that pushes customers to competitors?"
Engagement with the proposition:
These projects track market awareness and usage of a brand, product or service. Usually through on-going studies, these projects often incorporate measuring the impact of marketing communications.
"What emerging needs can we identify?"
How much time do we spend understanding our assumptions? Probably not very much – after all, we’re busy doing our day jobs – setting goals, running projects, managing people and so on.
The problem with assumptions is that by definition they are invisible from view. Everyone holds ideas about the world but often without a full awareness of what these ideas are or how they can make us vulnerable. In the absence of concrete and unified thinking, things can go downhill. Very quickly.
Our assignments here are about seeking clarity, and challenging assumptions.
"What threats do we need to understand?"
Market understanding: Quite often people don’t know why they’re doing the things they do or why they think the way they do – they just do. More often they show us what outcome they are trying to achieve and this often provides great insight to pursue new avenues
Here we deep dive into people’s lives to understand and prioritize stated and unmet needs as well as broader attitudes and behaviours. These can be used to help develop segmentations to assist with targeting.
"What trends do we need to consider?"
Cultural context: Culture is often where essential knowledge lies. Culture contains the things we need to know about the customer. It is about embedded, deeply assumed knowledge - things that people can find hard to articulate. These projects explore local market or broad segment dynamics and opportunities.
"How can we build a concept that addresses customer needs?"
The innovation and refinement projects we undertake are about helping our clients develop a prescient, evidence based but creative view of tomorrow’s opportunities. Fuelled by customer insight and guided by external factors (for example technology, demographics, market trends, competitor activity), we work on assignments from improving what exists today to developing completely new products and services.
This process needs customer insight – it’s the fuel for innovation. Whether we generate it ourselves or use what already exists in the client’s business, we exploit it to create new ideas that deliver real value for customers and the brand.
"How do we make our idea better?"
Proposition development: Henry Ford said, ‘If I'd asked people what they wanted, they would have asked for a better horse’. He was right; customers are notoriously bad at coming up with new ideas so we don’t ask them. We use the right stimulus (customer insight) combined with business planning, workshop sessions and concept visualisation to deeply understand and show new possibilities that are rooted in commercial reality. These ideas focus as much on the experience of buying, transferring, using, upgrading or disposing as anything else.
"How can we get the messaging for this new service absolutely right?"
Proposition testing: we use tailored, sensitively designed approaches to generate customer feedback to concepts and refine them. These evaluations are far more than ‘do you like it?’ Our approach explores each concept against a pre-agreed set of criteria such as value created, comparison with alternatives and fit with brand.
This can also involve running entire beta-launches from end to end.
"How do we make our idea better?"
Taking propositions to market: This is where we establish how best to take propositions to market by (re)-articulating customer value, positioning and messaging refinement
