Early spring feels extra springy around The Sound – like fresh air flowing through our virtual hallways. Our recent client conversations and projects seem to have one overriding theme – GETTING FRESH to inspire action and drive growth.
Our clients are searching for fresh ideas, hot insights, novel approaches, and creative energy – yet human truths feel more elusive than ever. The pressure is on every research initiative to deliver outcomes. So we’re serving up meaningful learnings like it’s our job! The big ones too… the ones that demystify human behavior, reveal blindspots, and create category-level impact.
Check out this little video or read on to see what we’ve done recently.
What We’ve Been Up To – March 2023 from The Sound on Vimeo.
What we’ve been up to:
- We illuminated the motivations and mindsets of a global automaker’s key segment to inspire compelling communications that help impact sales.
- We facilitated foresight workshops for a member services org to develop a future-proofed innovation pipeline.
- We explored people’s lives and shopping journeys for a major supermarket chain to help inform engaging marketing strategies that drive growth.
- We illuminated the reasons why people abandon items in their online shopping cart to develop strategies that prevent revenue loss.
- We developed a healthy 3-5 year innovation pipeline for a major snack brand to fuel growth and leapfrog the competition.
How we inspire action and drive growth:
Our process is very simple. We think simple is good if it makes things clear and helps get you to what you need to make things happen. There are only 4 steps:
- Smart Interrogation. We get asked lots of questions and get sent lots of briefs. Surprisingly, often they don’t describe the question that really matters. So putting time and effort into really understanding where we need to get to is pretty important. It helps to know where you’re starting from too.
- Fearless Empathy. Understanding people is at the heart of everything we do. If you don’t know what the people who are buying your products or services are really like, what they’re really doing and most importantly why, it’s pretty hard to make good decisions about how you communicate with them… or what you can do to make them happier, or solve their problems, or come up with innovations they will like. One of the biggest challenges? The real people out there just aren’t the same as the people who are our clients. For lots of reasons. So, whether you are talking to people, watching them, or analyzing data about them, remembering that they are real people and working really hard to understand them and to connect with them is critical.
- Honest Collaboration. It’s our style and part of our process. How we work in a team, how we work with people, and how we work with clients. Questioning, challenging, re-working, and story building. Trying to get to an answer that works. Making sure what we deliver takes the business forward. Always.
- Beautiful Simplicity. Everything is about action and outcomes. So we work hard to distill things down, bring things to life, and make analysis smart, but not overly complicated. We use film and design (among other things) to capture and create emotion. We run activation workshops all about the next steps. Anything we can do to inspire and drive growth. Because, frankly, a project without action is a total waste of time and money.
So, we do big data analysis and one-on-one interviews. We do lit reviews and social listening. We do brand strategy and portfolio analysis. We do innovation and foresight. We do market research. Both qualitative and quantitative. And we work to understand people, segments, and culture.
All to inspire action and drive growth (aka make our clients more successful). Oh, and we have a lot of fun along the way. Life is short and work can be way too serious :).
