Success Stories
Four years ago, we had a big epiphany.
Innovation and marketing research techniques are typically used to gain an external view of customers. However, we saw an opportunity to help clients take those techniques a step further – to look inwardly to solve strategy, offering, operations, customer experience and even innovation problems.
Most clients turn to us when they feel cut off from their customers and employees by the usual corporate hierarchies. They feel removed… powerless. They know something is wrong, but they can’t articulate “why.” And, if they haven’t grasped the root of the problem with depth, they can’t possibly solve it.
Moreover, our clients are brilliant problem solvers.
Listen up: you don’t need a team of consultants to come in and tell you what to do. All you need is someone to bring you closer to the problem - to show you the unadorned truth of the matter.
You need more than just inspiration: you need specifics. You’re smart. You’re courageous. You’re disciplined. You’ll know what to do from there.
That’s why we use an exploration toolkit of marketing and innovation research techniques to spark clear thinking and inspire change in pursuit of commercial impact. You’ll never gain insight and clarity from behind a desk. So, we venture out into the field and explore people, places and things through ethnography, behavioral observation and empathic design. (We’re also plenty comfortable with quantitative data, as well.)
Here are a few of our recent success stories:
strategy & business model transformation
We used ethnography (i.e. behavioral observation) to study the driver experience for one of the largest logistics companies in North America. We then applied our insights to help our client (and their consultants) align a major digital transformation initiative around driver needs. We also studied the impact this transformation will have on our client’s customers, as well.
Through the use of an online community, we studied product users for a tech startup in order to not only design the right buying experience – but to also build out the marketing, sales and product team structures that will drive offering adoption.
We helped a Washington DC-based trade association identify the immediate and long-term repercussions of Amazon’s entry into the retail pharmacy industry in order to devise a competitive response strategy that can be executed by the trade association’s members.
Product offering & cx evolution
A rapidly growing fast-casual restaurant brand needed a way to study how their culture and brand influences guest experience. They also needed someone to help them apply their unique culture as an anchor amidst rapid store growth. To do so, we seamlessly integrated research teams into the daily operations of our client’s restaurants – both front and back of house – to explore how their brand, culture and service delivery model impact employee and guest experience. Our work helped our client scale from 30 to 100 stores with confidence.
We tapped into an online community to help a luxury automobile manufacturer concept test their next-generation crossover SUV.
In order to give R&D teams (at one of the largest CPG companies in the world) the inputs they needed to reengineer an underperforming product offering, we utilized a cutting-edge AI-driven focus group platform (that allowed us to dialogue with hundreds of category users) to uncover vulnerabilities in competing offerings.
Innovation platform design
We helped one of the largest electricity producers in the United States build a formal innovation program that informs new offering ideation by gathering insight from its customer experience touchpoints.
To help them prepare for the automobile retail environment of the future (over a 10-year horizon), we partnered with the strategy and innovation team at one of the largest automobile manufacturers in the world to conduct a futures research and scenario planning study.
Culture & employee retention
We used ethnography (i.e. behavioral observation) to help an oil field services technology manufacturer understand how its culture drives performance. We then worked with the client to establish the guardrails that will protect the core of its business (and employee engagement) amidst rapid growth.
We worked with one of the largest automobile reconditioning services in the country to study opportunities to solve crucial employee attrition challenges. Through behavioral observation and ethnography, we helped our client understand its employees with depth in a way that drove not only heightened employee retention and performance over time, but better customer satisfaction as well.