Approach

International

We are experts at running multi-country studies, and there’s hardly a country we haven’t worked in. We have an informal network of like-minded research partners, with whom we have close relationships spanning many years.

We’ve lived and worked abroad, speak most European languages between us, which means that we have a well-developed cultural sensitivity and understanding: we won’t shoe-horn findings into a UK perspective just because they don’t fit.

Similarly we like to run the UK leg of global projects for agencies around the world, providing them with rich, local insights and using our cultural sensitivity to explain why the UK might be that little – or big – bit different from their own. Our long-standing relationships with well-loved research partners around the world show how much they value our insights.

NPD

We love NPD, but it’s not good for our waistlines! We’ve had samples of products from chocolate and cheese to ice cream and frozen pizzas hanging around our offices, and more often than not, the temptation has been too much.

Thankfully, we’ve also worked on diet and weight control, green cleaning products, and a host of other non-food categories as well. We’ve developed a 360 ° methodology for evaluating new product launches, including pre and post task exercises.

Packaging & Design

We regularly help brands across a range of categories develop new or tweak existing packaging, and are able to recruit consumers who are not designers per se but who have more of an eye for design in addition to the average consumer. We have found that this adds value to the research and the overall findings.

Creative Hothouse

Sometimes a tricky strategic problem calls for a little creativity. We’ve done things as diverse as taking clients to the Comedy Store for an evening, running internal client ideation sessions to harness existing knowledge and running role reversal sessions – where consumers sit behind the glass and comment on what the clients believe about them! ( It’s quite enlightening – you should try it sometime!)

Whatever your issue, we’ll try and find a solution which gets to the heart of the matter and leads to unravelling some of the mysteries of consumer behaviour and attitudes.

Retail

We have accompanied consumers on literally hundreds of shopping trips: in supermarkets, convenience stores, high end department stores, clothing stores and pharmacies, across a broad range of consumer goods from high end cosmetics and champagne to cereals and fruit juice.

This has enabled us to immerse ourselves in in-store behaviour, the decision-making process, the role of promotions and drivers of influence to optimise our clients’ merchandising approach.

Advertising

It’s not just because we like Don Draper from Madmen that we do a fair bit of advertising development, from early stage strategic & creative development through to final checks on finished film.

We work for both direct clients and agencies, and don’t tread with hobnailed boots over the agency’s carefully crafted work. We regularly continue the dialogue online or by phone once the groups have finished, to see what sticks in consumers’ minds a week later, as often subsequent impressions can be immensely valuable.

Online

We’ve always believed that the best insights are found through multi-layered projects, comprising several different research approaches. Online qual, bulletin boards, blogs and vlogs are all part of our tool-box. Zoom has become the new normal, but we’ve long been championing the reach that going online gives you, speaking to participants in every corner of the globe – many not usually reached by qualitative research.

We find qual boards especially useful for longitudinal studies and NPD– where we can expose consumers to a new product over a period of time to allow them to overcome the natural resistance to something new. (Remember, early research on the mobile phone judged it to be a dead duck!) Likewise for creative advertising development… a little time to mull on the ideas can lead to fresh insights.

Recruitment

Not many qual agencies talk about this, but we feel very strongly about it. If you don’t have the right respondents, you most definitely won’t get the right answer. Any qual researcher or client can spot a respondent who doesn’t buy the products they say they buy, or doesn’t hold the attitudes they claim to hold. So important did this seem to us that in 1999 we launched Saros, our sister company, to do qualitative recruitment differently.

They have gone from strength to strength since then, now boasting an unrivalled membership. With tight controls about frequency of participation, Saros provides access to high quality fresh respondents, most of whom have never participated in research before. Now we have sparky, interesting, engaged respondents in our groups, who genuinely have something to say.