Driving growth through human intelligence
There is a technical definition of human intelligence: Human intelligence is a mental quality that consists of the abilities to learn from experience, adapt to new situations, understand and handle abstract concepts, and use knowledge to manipulate one’s environment. We think this is key for driving growth in the world of marketing.
Obviously we also mean intelligence about humans, both qualitative and quantitative data used to inform decisions and build plans and strategies, for brand owners.
Our clients are people in the marketing department and also people at in advertising agencies. Marketing people, Branding people. Market research people. Foresight people. Strategy people. Among others. We help them solve problems and make sh*t happen. Inspiring action and driving growth.
Interested in knowing more about what we do and how we do it?
TLDR: Watch this little video on recent projects.
What We’ve Been Up To – Jan 2023 from The Sound on Vimeo.
Some recent projects?
- Helping drive trial of a graphic design platform by understanding people’s needs developing visual content.
- Testing and helping improve a major media outlet’s advertising campaign idea.
- We illuminated core drinkers of an enhanced water brand to inspire communications for all of 2023.
- We explored potential brand platforms for a gaming app to drive growth of a new audience.
- We tested a global whisky brand’s latest advertising campaign idea to optimize ahead of its launch.
So how do 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 sits behind the request. What decision needs to be taken? Or what does our project need to deliver? Or what happens ‘next’. 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 the 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 research, and quantitative research. We do ‘Jobs to be Done’ projects. Map motivations and illuminate segments. Create shopper journey maps and work out how to improve consumer experience (although we would rather talk about people than consumers). Run workshops and breakthrough sessions and activation sessions.
You get the picture.
We always, always work to understand people and culture. Because we think that is a ‘must have’ for great marketing.
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 :).
Written By:
Simon Dannatt
With over 200 years experience, Simon joined The Sound from Cello where he was President of Cello USA and CEO of the Value Engineers US. With his English accent and silver fox hair he's known affectionately around the office as 'the old English man with grey hair'. Claims to have a limp from running marathons but we think it’s a war wound.
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