PROBLEM 

Social technology companies move fast. They have to. Operating in a fast-paced environment is the key to innovation and staying ahead of competitors. However, moving fast has the potential for missteps that can erode consumer trust. 

OPPORTUNITY 
Consumers are future blind, which is why we turned to experts. Generally speaking, consumers do not actively seek out information about new products, services, or trends, and may rely on familiar brands or products. Even if consumers are aware of new trends or products, they may be resistant to change or simply prefer the status quo. 

APPROACH 
To help a well-known social technology company contextualize the idea of what it means to innovate responsibly in a way that is future proofed, we hired a panel of experts to help us understand what’s needed to make people feel emotionally safe and secure when it comes to technology. 

But we didn’t just talk to experts in technology, we gathered a wide range of perspectives that were the “inputs” into this idea of responsible innovation such as privacy, wellbeing, diversity and inclusion, sustainability, and social good to name a few. For example, one of our experts we interviewed was a writer for National Geographic and an inaugural Rhizome fellow with Culture Hack Labs. One was a young TikTok influencer who covers technology and digital culture and writes advice columns for The Washington Post. Another was a Research Associate at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. 

KEY INSIGHT 
If this social technology company wants to be pioneers of responsible innovation, they need to hit the brakes and take a more intentional approach. Being truly innovative in this space means being committed to pausing, even when everyone else is racing ahead at breakneck speed. It's time for them to prove that they're dedicated to doing things right, not just doing them fast.

PROBLEM
A well-known retailer had ambitious growth goals. However, due to COVID-19, the joy of food shopping was replaced with boring “mission shopping”.

OPPORTUNITY
Boring categories need fun research. When shopping for groceries during the pandemic, consumers were on autopilot and didn't have a huge emotional investment in it. However, by infusing fun and creativity into our research assignments we could stimulate curiosity and benefit from more insightful and meaningful responses. Additionally, on the heels of the pandemic, consumer sentiment towards grocery shopping was still fairly negative. We needed the right framework in place to encourage open, positive, and constructive comments.

APPROACH
It’s often assumed that design thinking is just for UX designers creating applications. However, design thinking in market research is like having a superhero team-up to save the day! With empathy as our superpower, we were able to zoom in to understand our customers' pain points and needs.

To help this retailer understand and position their grocery department for the future in a post-pandemic world, we utilized a user-centric problem-solving approach that we call The Magic Wand. It’s a design thinking exercise that asks participants to imagine that they have a magic wand that can solve any problem they wish.

Participants completed a 3-day journaling assignment where they were asked to draw a picture showing what they would change or improve about their experience with this retailer and their grocery department and how they would use the magic wand to do so. This exercise helped remove the limitations of reality, where participants were free to imagine wild and unconventional solutions to problems, leading to more innovative and unexpected ideas.

KEY INSIGHT
There is an untapped opportunity to reimagine efficiency as fun. By integrating interactive and playful elements, we can “take back” grocery shopping and return it to an enjoyable and memorable experience, thereby revitalizing consumers' emotional connection with the process.

PROBLEM
All snacks play in the “we time” space, which a popular hummus brand wanted to compete in.

OPPORTUNITY
We need to understand the people behind the percentages. While quantitative data provides valuable information about consumer behavior, it cannot provide a complete picture of the motivations, attitudes, and emotions that drive that behavior. Understanding the people behind the data can also help to provide important context for interpreting the quantitative data. For example, demographic information can help to identify patterns or trends in the data that might be otherwise overlooked, while insights into consumer behavior and attitudes can help to explain why certain patterns exist.

APPROACH
Live audience discussions are an agile approach that allows us to have a live conversation with our audience on a broad level. Unlike traditional qualitative interviews, all respondents are asked questions in exactly the same way allowing for a reliable, quantitative read on what’s rising to the top. And unlike a traditional qualitative survey, all participants are answering questions at the same time, and we have the ability to pivot in real-time if needed.

We embarked on an exciting journey with this popular hummus brand to uncover the perfect personality and tone for different get-together moments that would make their brand the life of the party. We guided participants through a lively discussion that sparked a flurry of insights and ideas.

As participants answered the questions, we saw the data pouring in. The platform we used then segmented and analyzed responses so we could easily see the words and phrases that were most talked about to help ask smarter questions on the fly. We were able to dive into audience analytics during the live conversations and see how different segments of the audience reacted to certain topics of conversation.

KEY INSIGHT
Success for this popular hummus brand in this space is helping customers feel like life is one big playground, and they're the ones bringing the fun. This brand needs to show the world that they're all about living in the moment and thinking outside the box. Their role is to be the ultimate muse for their customers' fun time by organizing moments of pure enjoyment and providing endless creative ways to stay entertained.

PROBLEM
A well-known theme park had a ton of data, but they didn’t know what to do with it.

OPPORTUNITY
Companies don’t always need to be told what their brand is or what it should be. Every company has organizational intuition, which is a sense of where the brand should go. Contrary to popular belief, companies don’t always need to go outside of their walls and ask the customer what they need from them, sometimes companies just need to have the right types of conversations that will help pull institutional knowledge out of their heads.

APPROACH
The answers a company seeks might be staring it in the face, hiding in plain sight within its own organization. Asking them to bring their own assignment, can help arm teams with some simple, practical guidelines and tools for digging deeper on their own. Essentially, the goal is to create a forum for discovering what that institutional knowledge is in the moment, so they can re-apply these techniques in the future.

To help this well-known theme park position its 30th anniversary of its Halloween Horror Nights, we set up frameworks and prompts to show internal teams the path so that they could walk it themselves. We helped them leverage current research to start exploring “unknowns” and other interesting insights that could arise. Using the newly uncovered insights, we helped them generate some rough, potential messaging territories that were then refined into more fully articulated “platforms”.

KEY INSIGHT
This workshop helped the company to see that while most people bond over dinner, their customers bond over fear, and that Halloween Horror Nights is an intense emotional connection that bonds people together. This led to their ultimate strategic idea, “Those who scream together, stay together.”

PROBLEM
What do you do when all of the ideas you have are good ideas? While this was a good problem for a popular American website and provider of health information to have, we needed to uncover the best idea.

OPPORTUNITY
Sometimes it’s important to focus on the differences rather than the similarities when it comes to finding patterns in data. When we only look at what things have in common, we could miss some pretty crucial details that are hiding in the data. It's like when you're hanging out with a group of friends and everyone seems to be into the same thing, but then you find out that one person actually has a totally different perspective that could change the whole vibe. Same goes for data - if we don't pay attention to the nuances, we could end up making some big assumptions that aren't totally accurate.

APPROACH
Since all of the concepts tested were seen as appealing and unique, we used comparative text analysis to pull them apart and find the differences. It might seem counterintuitive to use AI software to uncover emotions, but that’s where things get pretty cool. The tool we leveraged uses fancy AI-powered language analysis to dig into any text source you give it. And what's even cooler is that it compares all that text to other stuff out there in the world, so we can see what's unique and what's not.

To help this company find its role in people’s lives when it comes to feeling and living better, we needed to understand the emotions behind what matters to them in the category. While all concepts were seen as compelling in our quantitative survey, some intuitively felt more emotional in nature than others. So, we analyzed all open-ended responses in the survey by running them through an advanced AI software.

What we found was that some concepts lacked a strong emotional response, while others provoked more powerful reactions.

KEY INSIGHT
While this companies’ key competitor, gives people universal truths about their health, they give people personal truths—And that the winning emotional difference among the various positionings came down to one simple idea: “You know yourself best”. In order for this company to unlock its full potential, the brand needs to help people to learn and grow rather than focusing on a certain outcome.