Although PayPal is a very strong consumer brand through its key product service it is also in effect an ingredient brand or partner brand,  enabling transactions for a number of partner brands. PayPal wanted to develop a global plan to form key global partnerships and wanted consumer evidence to sit at the heart of things.

Together with PayPal we created a target list of potential partners to research.

Our in-depth consumer research provided key pain points and proof points to establish which partnerships would be the most effective.

A set of hypotheses were then validated and measured in a survey to provide the business with key insights.

Our work helped PayPal form strong partnerships with Spotify, Wish, Starbucks and Etsy and the marketing initiatives that followed.

Following rapid growth of their user base for PayPal’s core payment product, PayPal started to focus on growth through acquisition, that would complement and add to an emerging suite of financial tools for users.  As this was a new territory for PayPal it asked us to help research a number of potential brands and find the best option through a consumer lens.

We compared Honey to several alternative providers across several key markets to provide PayPal with essential SWOT analysis.

In addition, we tested the likely increase in engagement/use of PayPal customers through extensive real-world simulation research and A/B testing.

Honey was acquired in 2019 for $4bn, the largest acquisition in PayPal’s history, with our research being a strong foundation for the decision making.

As TV dramas continue to increasingly surprise and delight audiences with their quality, breadth and sheer inventiveness, Sky, along with other broadcasters, has to fight hard to ensure its content stands out and reaches the right audience across all its platforms. Marketing need insights into the hooks that drive a show’s appeal and clear guidance on how to position new and returning series to attract the best possible audience, and needs this level of understanding to be provided cost and time efficiently for multiple shows a year.

A short term online community approach allows us to work closely with the different target audience groups for each new show testing a range of positioning and exploring all the elements in detail – and has led to highly effective campaigns including Lucky Man, Jamestown, The Tunnel, Riviera, Britannia and of course Game of Thrones. Our work has also helped to identify optimum content, tone and pace for channel and genre promos as well as providing understanding of box set viewing behaviour.

A tried and tested approach delivering highly actionable findings for the relevant teams has become a regular way of working for Sky, and has provided confidence in adopting creative direction that is known to land effectively with the desired viewer groups. 

When Formula 1 was bought in 2017 by Liberty Media, it had one clear ambition, to make every F1 race like a Superbowl event. It recognised it had to create a new fan-centric brand proposition and elevate the product.

Armed with experience in other sports such as tennis and football, we trotted the globe mapping out fan experiences in different markets and identifying what elements make for a great fan experience in the context of Formula 1.  We have used mobile ethnography, in-person-depths, surveys, communities and neuroscience to get to a clear set of recommendations over time around fan experience.

Much has changed over the last 5 years, from a new brand identity, to a whole new look and feel of both fan zones and corporate hospitality with much greater emphasis on entertainment for fans throughout a race weekend. Pre pandemic F1 saw its attendance levels rise 10%+ year-on-year and along with a stark increase in satisfaction levels, a stronger likelihood to return. The brand is now much stronger with an influx of younger and newer fans, with social media engagement and TV viewing up significantly.

In 2017 Samsung had created a new strategic unit to help lead the product roadmap. Central to this approach was a recognition that consumers would more and more seek ecosystems and multi-device experiences. Samsung asked us to look at how it should approach their roadmap from a consumer standpoint.

This research was multi phased and very complex as we wanted to study consumer electronics usage on a day-to-day basis, identify key pain points and create a prioritization around areas of opportunities.

For months we followed consumer behaviour through mobile ethnography and established online communities to engage and understand consumers in key global markets.

Being a hardware manufacturer, Samsung was used to approaching innovation from a product standpoint, not a from a consumer emotional needs perspective. Our research, internalised via an interactive insights portal, brought to life what consumers really want, their frustrations and work arounds in terms of technology. This provided a clear hierarchy for roadmap development. One of the key actions from this research is that Samsung now develops products more in-conjunction with content and software partners, and it reintroduced laptops globally after realising the potential from an MDE experience.

The LTA’s mission is simple, build the connection and enjoyment that young people have with tennis to increase regular participation. Their challenge to us was to deepen understanding of school age kids in the UK and their relationship with sports.

Kids are notoriously hard to research but with the help of our network of providers we are able to speak to 700 kids across the UK every month and have been doing so for over 2 years.

Each month we monitor participation, routes into and drivers & barriers to tennis and a range of other sports.

We also reserve space for reactive questions for this under-researched audience, keeping an eye on trends in culture and sports which impact their lives.

Youth participation forms a key metric of the LTA’s performance and our extensive, granular data set allows for advanced analysis to inform strategy and target setting.

As the UK’s biggest free streaming service, All4 are constantly looking to improve the user experience. Current UX methodologies provide a snapshot in time, usually of a specific feature. All4 challenged us to devise a way to track usability over time, removing content from the equation and with the added flexibility to diagnose areas for improvement.

USER tracking:

1. Qualitatively exploring usability in the VoD context, leveraging our ongoing All4 Community

2. Measuring All4 and competitors on our derived Usability territories using a tailored System Usability Scale

3. Tracking performance over time both at the overall and specific Usability territory level

As part of a product-led strategy, All4 teams now know where they stand in the ultra competitive VoD landscape on the elements of the platform they can control – product not content – and have a mechanism to identify how their interventions impact usability over time.

Vanish is one of the largest global brands of the Reckitt Benckiser portfolio. The brief to us was to come up with new and fresh angles to renew their marketing campaigns. They wanted us to find connecting trends around the world that could feed a global campaign, yet be unique and relevant for key local markets.

We conducted online diary research in several global countries to identify key habits of consumers around laundry.  By looking across markets it enabled us to identify where consumer needs and wants overlapped but where behaviour and attitudes perhaps differed.

Following this we created several co-creation communities in various markets to work with consumers on exploring their needs, pain points in more detail and developing ideas and solutions.

In a final phase those ideas and solutions were then robustly tested to enable us to recommend a direction with confidence.

Our work led to a totally new approach for Vanish, where marketing is no longer focused on how well the product works but how Vanish helps to make clothes last longer. A successful global campaign was launched on the back of this research.

One of the largest producers of shisha in the world wanted to expand geographically and at the same time diversify its portfolio through innovation.

First of all we helped the brand clearly define a brand strategy by understanding the different types of consumers it currently reaches, and could reach across global markets ranging from Iraq, Egypt, Russia and Spain to Brazil, North America, China and India. Using in-person research, communities and surveys we built the consumer understanding and market dynamics to create a multi-dimensional segmentation, with in-depth targetable knowledge of current and potential customers.

Secondly, we helped define the product roadmap by providing consumer insights to feed into category extensions, as well as developing new products and a new category.

The brand has experienced its best growth in the last 5 years, with a clear product and marketing plan based around consumer understanding.  Their core business, now benefiting from a new brand identity has experienced rapid international expansion. We are currently helping this brand with becoming first movers into a totally new category.

A US based Buy Now, Pay Later start-up wanted to position themselves as thought leaders in the payments sector. They saw insight as an opportunity to stand out, boosting industry recognition through genuinely insightful PR and supporting retailer negotiations with robust proof points.

Leveraging our existing knowledge of the payments sector, we worked closely with stakeholders to identify trends and find a unique angle to generate industry interest. Constantly challenging ourselves to bring ‘new news’ and counter conventional wisdom, we have now run several bespoke surveys as part of an ongoing program of research.

Our insights have formed the basis for co-written articles with leading industry publications, provided robust evidence for sales pitches with potential partners and helped to grow the profile of the company.

Recent acquisition by another BNPL firm has cemented their status as thought-leaders in the sector.

Visa Europe wanted to develop new credit and debit card propositions for the mass affluent segment in a pan-European initiative covering established and emerging markets. Other than demographics very little was known about the target segment and Visa urgently needed to better understand its characteristics and needs. The complexity was further compounded by numerous regional banking partners. 

A replicable hybrid methodology for each market starting with a broad-scope quantitative  survey to identify sub-groups within the mass affluent segment. This was followed by qualitative online research in micro-communities of 60 – 100 participants to establish attitudes, wants and needs; and to co-create ideas for potential card propositions. In the final stage online focus groups were used to  fine-tune the card propositions that had been generated by Visa through the original input of the participants.

Visa, in conjunction with regional partners, have introduced a range of new credit and debit card propositions and innovations in countries across Europe including Sweden, Italy, Turkey, Poland and Romania. The research findings and co-creative input from participants helped to shape aspects of the design and marketing, core finance proposition, incentives and loyalty schemes, online services and value-add innovations of the cards that were eventually released, and the process may be repeated for further markets in the near future. partners and show how the ideas work in practice. 

To provide detailed consumer insight to support creative initiatives designed to bring Jack Daniel’s closer to its target market in situations beyond the pub or bar. Travellers were identified as a key target group and we were tasked with looking for opportunities for JD to connect empathetically with people in the travel retail environment before boarding their planes.

We used a mixed method approach of online forums pre and post travel and mobile depths during  journeys to connect with travellers at all stages of planning and experiencing their trips to uncover opportunities to connect. By immersing ourselves in the whole process and finding the stress points in international travel we were able to identify those circumstances where the brand could offer support and smooth the way in potentially stressful situations.

Our insight into the travelling experience and the needs people have informed the development of a series of promotions and other activities for the Jack Daniel’s brand in travel retail, all designed to demonstrate empathy. Detailed illustrations of individual travellers provide support when introducing the initiatives to partners and show how the ideas work in practice.