Our Approach

Where we can help

We are committed to building first class relationships with our clients. We believe this means listening to our clients and providing the relationship they want. Overall you will find that our approach to both your project and the way we work together will bring the maximum possible benefit from any market research we undertake.

• Audience Research

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  Our approach to audience research strives to be as inclusive as possible, moving beyond more traditional definitions of, and approaches to, audience research to provide a more rounded picture of interactions across the full range of channels.

• Branding & Advertising

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  We have comprehensive experience in conducting branding research and advertising tracking.

  There are very few in business who would disagree that creating a strong brand (whether it be a product brand or corporate brand) can drive business success in the competitive markets of today. Market research can provide invaluable qualitative and quantitative data on the brand and the market in which it operates to enhance strategic and tactical decision making in the future.

  We also have the capacity to effectively investigate more specific issues such as the relative strength of corporate branding and product.

  We recognise that each company’s brand is unique and therefore offer a bespoke branding research service. However, with all our surveys we ensure that we design research that is action orientated. Your findings and consultative recommendations enable businesses to make the changes and improvements, which will have the most impact on the strength of their brand.

• B2B

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  We have specialist expertise in carrying out research projects within business-to-business markets. With extensive experience of helping companies in a variety of ways, and our reputation for quality extends to areas such as:

  • Branding
  • Customer satisfaction
  • Pricing research
  • New product development
  • Market entry
  • Acquisitions work
  • Marketing communications research
  • Opinions and attitudinal surveys

  We offer a bespoke service to business market research with no ‘off the shelf’ packages to sell, and utilise both qualitative and quantitative techniques. We work with businesses in a variety of ways to find answers to marketing problems. Our approach is to work with you in an interactive way to ensure that the research answers the questions that you want answering:

  Defining The Problem
  To ensure that research collects data in the right area it is vital that we define the problem correctly. What are you trying to achieve? Who are you trying to influence? How does the product work in terms of its technical attributes? Who are your key competitors? Many of our B2B clients do not have in-house research departments to help them write a market research brief which outlines what they hope to achieve from the research. In the absence of a brief, we can take on this role for you, and ensure that the research has clear objectives and provides you with answers to your key questions.

  Upfront Workshops
  If you have multiple decision makers who are geographically dispersed, or are an organisation for whom it is vital that everybody inputs into the process, we find that upfront workshops can help. These provide an opportunity to define the problem in more detail, and ensure that everybody involved is happy with the research going forwards.

  Understanding Technical Products
  A key concern for many clients runs something like the following, ‘Our product is very technical, and we need to ensure that you know what you are talking about in front of our customers’. When talking to your customers, you can rest assured that we understand your products and can converse with your customers. At the start of the research, we ensure that we ask the right questions to familiarise ourselves with your product. Together with our knowledge across and within a variety of sectors, this enables us to discuss your product in an intelligent and informed manner.

  Action Oriented Results
  We never just leave you with a presentation filled with data that you have to interpret yourself, but will ensure that you are clear about what you have to do moving forwards.

  If needed, we can also conduct Back End Workshops to help disseminate findings, or to discuss taking the results further.

• Consumer

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  We have substantial experience of conducting consumer market research for a number of private sector, public sector and voluntary organisations. We have conducted both qualitative and quantitative consumer market research across a wide range of markets and including a number of hard to reach consumer audiences.

• Customer Insight

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  Customer insight market research is a key element with our offer. We have extensive experience in helping organisations understand their customers’ needs, measure satisfaction and identify priorities for improvement – all of which are closely linked to improving customer satisfaction and loyalty, which affect the bottom line and repeat business.

  We offer a bespoke customer insight and satisfaction service with no ‘off the shelf’ packages to sell. We take the time to completely understand your business so that we can deliver targeted, actionable customer insight research which is both feasible and effective.

  Our findings enable businesses to understand their customers – their motivations, lifestyles, attitudes and preferences – and then to make the changes and improvements which will have the most impact and ensure that our clients meet their long term aims.

• International

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  International market research is a field in which we are particularly experienced, having carried out insight projects on a global scale for both public and private sector organisations on almost every continent. Many of these projects have involved carrying out market research for companies looking towards international expansion, and have focused on understanding the business context and demand for a single international market, whilst others have been completed on behalf of major multi-nationals looking to ensure their workforce feels part of something international – market research can help understand the key barriers and enablers in both situations.

  In addition, we also have experience conducting global market research projects in several countries simultaneously. This is useful for large multi-nationals wishing to standardise their offering across several different marketplaces, or to understand the differing expectations of consumers or clientele who are located at different points around the world.

• Needs Based Research

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  It has long been recognised that it costs less to retain existing customers than to attract new ones. It would seem to be obvious that if you fully understand what customers want from you, and are then able to provide it, you cannot lose – customers will be happy, buy more and be profitable.

  In essence, effective customer relationship management ensures that the customer or service user feels that they are important, valued and that their needs are at the heart of your organisation. Through much of the customer satisfaction research that we have conducted, we have found the reality is often very different.

  Whilst in reality it is impossible to tailor your product and service for every single customer separately, it is vital that customers at least feel that they are important and that their needs are being met. We find that a successful customer satisfaction or customer needs project can help to re-address this balance and ensure that customers feel that their needs have been met.

  To fully understand customer needs, we feel that there are 5 key stages (and we work with clients in all of these areas if needed):

  • Get key process owners involved upfront.
  • Ensure you know what is important to the customer before you measure customer needs.
  • Ensure that data is actionable.
  • Measure both tangible and intangible aspects of customer needs.
  • Putting actions into place and measuring performance over time.

• Product Development and Proposition Testing

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  We typically use a staged approach to product development market research and testing research:

  • Stage 1:
    Qualitative research with the target market, using interactive and projective techniques to generate ideas and understand needs
  • Stage 2:
    Qualitative proposition testing to examine the appeal of proposition elements and benefits – can also identify ‘hooks’ that should be used in positioning the proposition
  • Stage 3:
    Quantitative market assessment to measure the appeal of the product (overall and for specific proposition elements). It is also important to build in segmentation to identify most interested market segments and help targeting and tailoring the proposition
    
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  In addition to the primary research stages outlined above, we also often carry out initial desk research to put the findings in context – e.g. by understanding the size and dynamics of the market, and the competitive landscape.

  We have carried out product testing research both in UK markets and numerous overseas markets.

• Reaching hard to reach groups

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  These days it is relatively quick and easy to gather views from a representative sample of UK consumers, whether this is through online, telephone or in-street surveys. New technology has certainly made this process quicker and more efficient. However, from time to time it is important to gather the views from those who, for whatever reason, are not easily accessible through these traditional channels. Those who do not have access to the internet, a fixed telephone number or are less likely to be found in busy streets or shopping areas.

• Stakeholder Research

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  We have extensive experience of carrying out research with a broad range of stakeholders/opinion formers – these consultations are often complex in nature.

• Website Research

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  All successful websites are designed so that they are user friendly and meet customer needs. In addition, for sites to be successful they must be found. What’s the point of having an excellent website if your customers can’t find it?

  Through our knowledge and expertise, we are not only able to offer website evaluation research (which many other agencies also offer) but in combination we are also able to recommend specifically targeted methods to optimise your site so that you can increase the number of visitors using it on a daily basis. An investment ultimately worth undertaking as more visitors = more enquiries/sales.

• Workshops

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  Our directors have carried out workshops with both senior decision makers and operational staff across a broad range of leading public and private sector organisations.

  Front End Workshops
  Workshops at the start of a project can be tailored towards getting key staff and stakeholders on-board with the research. In a workshop situation, we can take time to explain the thinking behind the research, the methodology, and to talk to people involved about what they want to get out of the research.

  This helps engagement with the research and can also make staff and stakeholders more accepting of the research findings, and more likely to act on the results.

  Back End Workshops
  Our senior staff are experienced in delivering action planning workshops to disseminate research findings, tailoring the results by audience (for example, topline figures for board members, more detail for staff on the ground). Rather than simply presenting results, we recommend interactive sessions where staff themselves generate ideas for acting on the results.

  This type of activity can be invaluable in helping organisations to set action plans and prioritise actions – by setting actions assigned to individuals, you avoid the research getting put in a cupboard and not being used, thus putting its value into action.