Our Key Tenets

Qualitative research and strategy for brands, products, and categories.

What We Do

• Brand identity and positioning
• Category, consumer, and cultural insight
• New product innovation and messaging platform development
• Creative development and evaluation
• Focus groups and in-depth interviews, in the US and internationally

Human Insight

A brand is made and remade out of the meanings people give it, and of the emotions and associations those meanings carry. It is a living mythology, made by humans, for humans.

Starting Point

Before we talk to anyone, we want to know the category: who is in it, how people already understand it, and what in the wider culture is bearing on it. We design the research around that.

Creative Engagement

As consumers we rarely decide by reason alone, so our methods reach for the images and archetypes people carry rather than the opinions they offer. Personification and projective exercises are central to the work. We developed much of this method with Dr. Alan Hamilton.

Language Models

We use language models in some of our interviewing and analysis, on established platforms and in studies of our own design. We also study the models themselves, with the same projective methods we use with people. They do not replace time spent with people.

The Report

Every project ends in writing. The report says what we heard, what we think it means, and what we would do about it. Then we take it to the people who will use it. They seldom want the same thing from it, and we stay until they are working from one picture.

Categories and Markets

We have worked across packaged goods, media, financial services, retail, technology, the arts, startups, nonprofits, and social and environmental initiatives. We work deeply in many categories and many markets, and we move between them on purpose. The toolkit is the same everywhere: a way of understanding individuals, competitive contexts, and cultures. Every new environment strengthens it, and strengthens our reading of the cultural moment.

Client Relationships

Many of our client relationships have lasted a decade or more, and some more than twenty years. For thirty years we have followed brands as the categories around them change. About 30% of our work is international, and each study is designed so the same question can be asked honestly in different cultures and the answers compared.