What We Do

Uncovering Whitespaces for a Better Future

Helping a window treatment company with uncovering whitespaces, their dimensions, and positioning statements to guide the development of a more refined brand promise.

Understanding Category and Brand Truths

Igniting Empathy Through Personas + Experience Maps

Illuminate key segments and their shopping journeys for a predominant food and drug company to inform communications, design, innovation, and strategy.

Unearthing Innovation Opportunities

Unearthing innovation opportunities for an international retailer's loyalty program to drive incremental membership growth.

Testing Positioning in a Wild New Market

Driving differentiation and engagement in a new-to-the-world marketplace. Our client was launching a much anticipated NFT platform to bring communities and marketplaces together. Crafting a compelling market position in a hyper-fluid, decentralized category is as daunting as it sounds...

Understanding the Core Target

Helping a leading car manufacturer establish itself as a future-forward brand by getting up close and personal with its core target. Where once the brand had centered itself on playing up its underdog status; its new goal was to redefine itself as a transformative leader of tomorrow, putting inspiration at its center.

A Workforce to be Reckoned With

Helping a leading platform understand Gen Z's professional mindset in order to attract, retain, and support Gen Z. However, Gen Z poses a challenge. They have a very different relationship with social media and have entered the workforce during a time of significant change.

Winning with Loyalty

Immersing in the relationships people have with subscription, membership, and loyalty programs to equip the marketing and sales teams of a leading tech company for meaningful conversations across fourteen distinct advertiser categories.

Understanding the Shopper Journey

Illuminating the shopper journey across key social platforms and verticals to establish benchmarks for today and provide guidance for product and feature development for tomorrow.

Understanding the Target Audience

A leading sports drink brand wanted to build empathy and brand loyalty by learning how to articulate the differences between its target segments. It wanted to debunk any myths or stereotypes associated with those segments, and then teach their team how to get into those different mindsets.

Building a Winning Proposition

Understanding suffers’ needs, expectations, and pain points to accelerate innovation in tackling airborne allergens. Stepping back and revealing what allergens even mean to people and how they currently combat them, before building a credible and relevant proposition to blast those germs away!

Refreshing a Leading Drinks Brand

Once upon a time, a leading Mexican drink brand was the ‘main character’ on the shelves of Mexican homes and bars, but lately, it had lost its way and become a ‘side show’ to Tequila and Mezcal.

Gaining Competitive Advantage

Our clients needed to continue to separate themselves from their competitors in a way that created clear brand distinction and inspired owners to move beyond product focus to a more holistic approach to their pet’s well-being.

Maintaining Category Leadership

With new trends and knowledge impacting how and what people feed their pets, our client wanted to better understand what were the core drivers and motivations for considering to switch to ancestral petfood - what offerings were resonating and what what driving consumers to try it.

Driving Brand Growth

Our client had visions of making their dry dog food brand more distinctive within the category. They needed our help determining the range of their brand, building its architecture foundation, attracting new customers, and innovating in a way that's relevant to both current and new consumers.

Innovating for the Future

Is there enough demand to support an additional natural brand in Southern Europe? Is there enough differentiation between the new and existing natural brands within the portfolio to prevent cannibalization? Is the new brand’s positioning relevant and resonant? Identifying demand spaces and differentiation in pet food!

Increasing Market Share

To better understand and inspire our client's new segment it was important to learn more about them and to build a detailed and actionable narrative of their lives, attitudes, and motivations to drive the new segment, understand how to really speak to them, and make sure the strategy and innovation pipelines were aligned.

Protecting Market Share

Our clients needed to continue to separate themselves from their competitors. They needed to create clear brand distinction and inspire owners to move beyond product focus to a more holistic approach to their pet’s well-being.

Google: Rethinking Readiness

The future of data-driven marketing is to go beyond transactions to also deliver meaning. In our latest collaboration with Google we helped them define deep consumer needs and understand what people expect of brands today.

Innovating for a Further out Future

A luxury apparel brand wanted to ensure they faced the next decade head-on. What should they anticipate and plan for to not only survive, but to thrive?

Dating App Research

After several years in market, a Dating App realized that India had fewer users on their app as compared to other parts of the world. And this was especially true of female users. The brand wanted to get a better sense of how dating is approached in India..

Understanding Fans Beyond Transactions

Helping a sports brand gain a better understanding of fans beyond the box office and transaction figures, to drive engagement.

Connecting Brand and People

Connecting brand and people means practicing empathy and immersing your brand in your customers' daily lives to gain firsthand experience. One of the best ways to practice empathy is to experience it with your target. This sports drink brand signed up to do just that, getting out of the office and into their consumers' everyday lives; taking a walk “in their shoes.”

Creating Breakthrough Innovation for Healthy Foods

With that, one of the pioneer brands in the kombucha space needed help seeing into the future. To grow the category, and define what the gut health space has the potential to become, it needed to first reimagine its portfolio strategy—from product centric, to needs driven—and then craft its pipeline for success.

Illuminating a Teen Audience

Helping a major athletic brand uncover ways of more meaningfully connecting with two core teen segments by better understanding how they differentiated from their adult counterparts.

Elevating Segmentation with Aldo

ALDO’s product development team needed to understand the lifestyle, tastes, and preferred designs across the spectrum of product archetypes for their key segment that could keep them inspired season after season.

Positioning Global and Local POVs

This client asked us to help them explore and carve out value propositions for three new growth markets across Asia. By learning about the region’s local cultural nuances and social media landscape, we could help them cement their place in culture through future product innovations and marketing campaigns.

Positioning Tech and Food

A food delivery service app wanted to understand what their new offering should stand for and why consumers should believe in it. It was critical not only for the team to understand what makes this new offering different from our client’s main business, but also what value it brings to consumers.

Capturing and Keeping Viewer Attention

A popular TV network had recently completed a quantitative segmentation and needed our help further dimensionalizing its core audience to help shape its content and marketing strategies.

Rebuilding Relevance

In light of the shifting expectations for beauty and skincare today, a suncare brand with deep roots in traditional sunscreen was on a mission to stay relevant and strengthen its global presence by refreshing and updating its understanding of its target audience.

Enhancing The In-Store Experience

A cult cosmetics brand with an eye on global expansion asked The Sound to help optimize its free-standing store experience to appeal to the needs of a coveted audience––Make-Up Junkies.

Humanizing Big Data

Humanising and bringing big data to life in a vast country such as India is often a long and expensive process — but not as challenging as predicting the direction of this fast-growing economy.

Elevating Events

The world’s leading events organizer was holding too many events to truly understand what makes each one special and different.

Advertising Campaign Development for Diamonds

In today’s modern culture focused on experiences over possessions, the diamond industry was losing relevance to a younger generation — and sales — at a staggering pace.

A Modern Look at Masculinity

After a start-up razor company got acquired by a major corporation, it was time for them to grow up a bit, and to move beyond being just a cheap razor company.

Building A Nimble Innovation Pipeline

Having such a nimble, iterative approach to innovation leads to ideas that can quickly proceed to creative and product development briefing

Looking to the Future of Business Travel

Crowne Plaza, one of the largest hotel brands in the world, was on a mission to position themselves as the true challenger brand in the heavily-saturated, often-cookie-cutter world of business travel.

Designing Future Living

Quintain, a major property developer in the UK, were given planning permission to develop 5,000 new homes in London, with a focus on the future

Embracing the Unexpected

A sausage company with flavor was born out of a desire to do things differently — using creativity and imagination to come up with unexpected combinations.

Refreshing A Brand

After a decade of chasing every beverage trend that came around, a stalwart elixir brand of the 90s found itself on tough times — completely unsure of what it stood for (with the lagging sales to match) and without any sort of clear path forward for the future.

Making a Segmentation Sing

Pandora came to us, wanting to do a really smart, modern-day segmentation … not just a numerical prioritization of who they should go after, but a living, breathing, inspiring piece of work for everyone in the company to rally around.

The Bare Truth

A huge global manufacturer of cleaning supplies realized they had a blindspot in the company’s robust understanding of home, bathroom, and hard surface cleaning. Specifically, the behind-the-curtain experience of those humans who bathe and clean… at the same time.

Transforming a Brand

An iconic footwear brand – best known for being sturdy, functional and enduring – came to us to help them understand a new target audience and their relationship outdoors.