You Won’t Find Your Future in Focus Groups...
To Find Game-Changing Insight, You Need to Look for Game-Changing People: The Rebels, the Outsiders, the Freaks. So, Who Are You Learning From?
The Insights That Will Help You Outthink, Outmaneuver, and Outgrow Are Hiding in the Hearts and Minds of Passionate Outsiders That Traditional Research Casts Aside.
Ready for What’s Next?
The brands I’ve helped explore and activate their futures:
Traditional research traps you in an echo chamber of familiar voices saying Get me out of this f*cking focus group type things. In today’s market, the riskiest thing you can do is limit your own potential with conventional research that is only capable of delivering you conventional thinking.
The Old Way
Cookie-Cutter Recruitment
Low quality respondents, who have nothing better to do at 3pm on a Thursday, cycle through your research giving you answers they think you want to hear so they can make a few bucks.
Backward-Looking Research
Studies that hopelessly chase growth and innovation through conversation with everyday consumers who embody the status quo. Insights built only through the lens of past experiences.
Shallow Exploration
Familiar and surface-level answers from respondents who have no real connection to your topic of interest. No passion, and no skin in the game. No depth of perspective or expertise.
Momentum-Killing Research
Over-engineered projects lag behind the pace of your business, delivering insights too late and leaving the door open for unnecessary debate and confusion.
The New Way
Obsession-Driven Recruitment
Authentic and passionate people, hand-picked because your topic isn’t just something they occasionally think about - it’s what they obsess over and have built their lives around.
Future-Focused Research
Insight built from people who are actively shaping tomorrow instead of passively consuming the present. Anticipate opportunities before the mainstream even sees them coming.
Deep-Dive Dialogue
A collision of informed perspectives. Quickly get right to the heart of things, as respondents collaborate and explore your burning questions from their diverse vantage points.
Momentum-Building Research
Research that delivers exactly what you need, when you need it. No time wasted. Just enough research so that you can confidently continue to innovate and grow.
Qualitative Research Meets Strategic Foresight.
Navigate Thorny Challenges
Explore your critical yet out of reach questions from multiple, highly-informed perspectives that provide you with deeper understanding.
Anticipate Change
Forward-looking insights that allow you to anticipate and capitalize on emerging trends before they become mainstream.
Command Attention
Rally your team and capture the attention of your internal stakeholders with powerful stories from compelling and authentic respondents.
Disruptive Innovation
Identify stronger innovation opportunities and find competitive advantage through deeper insight into what is happening in the world around your brand.
Quick Wins & New Points of Differentiation
Move rapidly in response to challenger brands, or find quick wins in product categories where you need to make an impact.
Faster Insight to Action
Maintain your momentum with agile research designed to get you insight quickly, so that you can focus on moving forward and pursuing untapped opportunity.
“We Shape our tools and, thereafter, our tools shape us.”
The tools of traditional research were designed for another era. They force you into over-simplified and surface-level conversations that aren’t up to the task of delivering the insight needed to succeed in today’s environment.
This approach is different.
We bring together panels of highly-qualified respondents, who have a lot to say because they have skin in the game.
Through iterative rounds of structured debate and dialogue, our panels tackle complex issues, offering up nuanced and forward-looking insight into your most pressing challenges.
A Proven Method.
Our approach is based on the Delphi method, which has been used in forecasting and policy-making for decades to develop nuanced views on topics, even where there is controversy or ambiguity.
Diverse Perspectives.
We deliberately bring together diverse groups of people to explore your topic from different, highly-informed vantage points: Content creators. Edge Cases. Experts. Prosumers. Rejectors. Superfans.
Confidence and Foresight.
Academic research has shown that the method we use has a 5:1 accuracy advantage compared to other approaches to forecasting. Our team also relies on cross-impact analysis and other foresight-based tools to give you a truly forward-looking perspective.
We’ll talk about your unique business challenge, and how we’d approach it.
Then, we’ll follow-up the conversation with a sampling of people we’d recommend recruiting into your bespoke panel.
How it works:
Whether you’re grappling with a declining brand, looking to understand change in the world around you, or seeking new innovation opportunities, every project comes together in four steps:
1 Framing the Study
We’ll begin with a workshop to dig deep into your business challenge, your working theories about what’s behind it, as well as your hunches and hypotheses about potential paths forward.
The purpose of the session is to frame our exploration, and to make sure we come away with a comprehensive understanding of what you need to uncover and want to do next.
2 Assembling the Panel
We identify and recruit a diverse panel of people, with highly-qualified opinions about the change or topic you’re looking to understand.
Whether it's content creators, prosumers, or superfans, the goal is to find people with a lot to say, because your topic is deeply connected to who they are as people, what they’re obsessed with, or passionate about.
3 Facilitating the Panel
Three or more waves of conversation between panelists about your topic of interest.
Respondents first provide their individual perspectives on an initial question set.
In each wave that follows, a facilitator provides an anonymised summary of responses from the previous round, the reasoning behind peoples’ judgments, and follow-up questions to help further develop the people’s perspectives.
4 Insight to Action
As the panel moves forward, people revise their individual responses and challenge one another, based-on the debate and dialogue.
As the project comes to a close, we move toward a nuanced collective view of your topic and critical questions.
Our team assembles an comprehensive and actionable report that helps you take a forward-looking deep dive into your challenge and key questions.
Pricing
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Basic
Framing Session to define your research questions and outline your hypotheses.
3 Round Panel w/ up to 5 Highly Qualified Participants.
Detailed reporting outlining the collective view of the panel on your topic and key questions.
Deep-dive into areas of agreement and disagreement.
Cross-Impact Analysis & Future-focused POV of your topic and key questions.
Opportunity Assessment & Recommendations.
Starts at $15K USD
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Standard
Framing Session to define your research questions and outline your hypotheses.
3 Round Panel w/ up to 10 Highly Qualified Participants
Detailed reporting outlining the collective view of the panel on topic and key questions.
In-Depth Portraits of up to 5 Study Participants and their unique perspectives.
Deep-dive into areas of agreement and disagreement.
Cross-Impact Analysis & Future-focused POV of your topic and key questions.
Opportunity Assessment & Recommendations.
Starts at $35K USD
Hi. I’m David, and I’m all about helping brands and organizations pursue better futures.
After working in agencies and consultancies for 15 years, I found myself frustrated because it felt like the tools being used to understand the world, and build for the future were out of date and focused on the wrong things. So I left, and started doing things differently.
When it comes to research, and how it's actioned, I think too much time is spent in search of perfection, prediction, and over-optimization. In our efforts to get things right, we often get things wrong: We prematurely shelve good ideas, We arrive at mediocre conclusions that don’t take us anywhere new, and we often fail to really understand what’s going on beneath the surface of change in the world around us.
Instead, I think all we need is just enough research, coupled with creativity, imagination, and foresight. Just enough, so that we can confidently envision better futures, and them and move toward them.
If that resonates with you, I’d love to talk.