Qualitative

Our team is known as ‘The Hothouse' for good reason. Our goal is to provide a faster and richer insight process, to reveal and probe consumer opportunities and facilitate commercial understanding of people's key drivers, subconscious motivations and behaviours.

We are fortunate to have a highly creative and experienced team who can generate original approaches to research questions embracing a range of techniques including:

• ethnographic approaches including observation, video clinics, online observation, etc
• focus groups, in depth, paired depths and so on semiotic analyses
• conflict groups, which force consumers to make the kind of choices that they do in real life, useful in ethical, emotive or complex issues
• mass groups up to 25, to generate quali-quant findings rapidly, or to view ‘herd effects'
• diary, video diary and other formats
• retail laboratory and accompanied shopping
• telephone and web based discussions and indepths
• online in depth work to track discussions over sustained periods of time.

With qualitative research, the skill is not just in creating programmes that will generate understanding, but ones that will create that understanding at the heart of the client organisation. Clarity of purpose, a shared vision and high levels of energy are important in taking work back into the business: we can involve your teams in research and moderate workshops / action planning, up to board level. So for example, we can develop insight programmes to enable your own teams to have the insights, especially useful in innovation and positioning work.

Our work is primarily in brand-centric tasks such as new product development and improvement, communications and brand strategy/ architecture and development. Naturally we work across the piece from U&A, customer and brand segmentation, concept and communications development and shopper behaviours.

Global reach

Much of our work is international. We have qualitative specialists in 54 countries to provide a consistent approach and standard of research through many different cultures.

Case studies

Understanding store preferences

Footwear is an unusual sector, so when a footwear retailer asked us to evaluate their stores in terms of layout and customer navigation, design, ambience and staff, we recognised the need to observe consumers first hand. Accompanied shopping trips provided first-hand knowledge of how people went about shopping for shoes, and how well the store in question was able to meet their needs, by comparison with competitors.

Establishing the primary needs of consumers in shoe shopping was followed by recognising the impact of the store look /service. For example, 'mood' designs that were placed above fixtures were rarely noticed, whereas offering a range of unusual, funky designs that others did not, was very effective.  This was followed by vox-pop interviews  with ordinary customers in store recording ‘gut' reactions on real shopping trips - rational and irrational!

Small is good for international ISP

One of the world's leading international internet service providers wanted to understand more about how small businesses used and regarded the internet. With our own viewing facilities in Paris, Hamburg, Milan and Warsaw and our own specialist qualitative moderators in each country, we were able to provide integrated research for a range of small business owners with different levels of internet usage.

A process to ‘iterate' the concepts from group to group, managed directly with the client enabled them to develop a new suite of services aimed specifically at SMEs in an exceptionally short period of time.