The robust nature of their methodology, their pragmatic approach and ability to meet our tight deadlines made the team a pleasure to work with and delivered an output that really helped to inform the development of the brand, visual identity and communications style.
Louise Elstone, Head of Member Acquisition, Esporta
Methodology
We see methodology as critical to the generation of useful outputs. We offer a wide range of approaches from in depth/day long creative workshop sessions and ethnography, through to semi-quantitative methods, such as qualitative hall test days and telephone surveys.
Recruitment
We specialise in finding hard to reach audiences, whether that means socially excluded people – like homeless people, or socially privileged people – like millionaires or senior professionals.
Depending on the project, we decide whether to use a specialist agency or to co-ordinate or conduct recruitment ourselves.
We work to ensure that interviewers use relevant free-find techniques to recruit the people we need to talk to. For example, they might approach individuals on their own territory, via local community/national organisations or by advertising locally, depending on the project in question.
We conduct some of the most challenging recruitment ourselves, if we feel that this will improve the quality of response or will help the research process in any way. This is often the case when we conduct research among stakeholders, as we find that we find that stakeholders are more likely to agree to participate if we take the initiative and make direct contact with them.
Communication
We are conscious of the need to convert what is often very detailed, dense insight into succinct, easily digestible and memorable formats for the core team and also for dissemination across the business.
It may be that standard verbal/written formats, such as Word documents or PowerPoint reports/presentations, are appropriate to communicate the results of the findings to the core research team on an ongoing basis.
However, alternative approaches we use include
- Designing a range of different formats for different audiences, including topline exec summaries for Board members/simplified reports for dissemination via existing networks, eg intranet
- Designing best practice guidelines or tool kits
- Generating stimulus to support written/verbal formats, eg edited audio/video clips or collages to illustrate key points
- Running workshops across the business to help stakeholders develop ways of embedding findings into their working practices
An example of one of our edited videos »
Below is an example of one of our collages
Follow-up
Given the often strategic nature of our research, we focus on following up on findings so clients can embed insight into their day to day work. We often facilitate client workshops to examine anything from the overall business implications of a segmentation, right through to the detail of how it could affect an individual’s roles and responsibilities. We maintain longstanding relationships with clients so we can respond on an ad hoc basis to issues that emerge throughout the period of findings being integrated into working practices.
Recent projects
Examples of projects we have conducted recently include
- Understanding what triggers people to eat less fat
- Improving communications services for people with hearing impairments
- Exploring why women don’t join the Army
- Segmenting VW’s most valuable customers
- Assessing a communications campaign aiming to tackle teen pregnancy
- Evaluating Grupo Santander’s stakeholder communications