“What do you do?”
What do you do? is the question we all get asked and probably usually answer by describing what we don’t do… Like, “no, not advertising not PR either”.
We inspire action and drive growth for companies that offer products and services to people.
We usually work for people in the marketing department or a brand owner or for their advertising agency. Marketing people, Branding people. Market research people. Foresight people. Strategy people. Among others. Helping them solve problems and make sh*t happen.
Check out the video below, or read on to see what we’ve done recently, and how and why we do it.
What We’ve Been Up To – Sept 2022 from The Sound on Vimeo.
What we’ve been up to:
- Tech – Innovation + Foresight. We explored how people buy/sell goods and services to inform the development of a new peer-to-peer marketplace platform.
- Food & Bev – Brand + Portfolio. We spoke with loyalists and lapsed drinkers to identify the equities and liabilities of a wine brand to help stem the decline and drive growth.
- Tech – Brand + Portfolio Strategy. We explored use cases, key need states, and pain points of global mobile phone users to inform and inspire communications.
- CPG – Innovation + Foresight. We spoke with Tweens about their frozen dessert experiences to help drive innovation.
- Tech – People + Culture. We illuminated the Jobs to be Done (JTBD) of on-demand shopping to guide comms strategy for an online grocery delivery and pick-up brand.
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… but they don’t often describe the question that really matters. So, putting time and effort into really understanding where we need to get to is important… but 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 and what they’re actually doing how will you communicate with them effectively? How can you make them happier, solve their problems, or come up with innovations they will like? They simply aren’t the same as our clients, for lots of reasons. Whether you are talking to them, watching them, or analyzing data about them – remembering that they are real and working really hard to understand them and connect with them is critical,
- Honest Collaboration. It’s our style and part of our process. It’s 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 and making sure what we deliver takes the business forward, always.
- Beautiful Simplicity. Everything is about action and outcomes. 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 and 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 (including focus groups and 1-2-1 interviews), and quantitative research. We work online and in person. And we work to understand people, segments, and culture and bring them to life for our clients in way that is memorable and impactful.
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 :).
