Approach

Belonging or Independence… Safety or Risk?

The analytic approach is grounded in belief that consumers connect most strongly to brands that fit their emotional and social needs.

Brand stories are often assessed against a proprietary model that provides framework for researching, understanding, and analyzing people on two key dimensions: their social orientation toward either belonging or independence, and their emotional orientation toward either risk/activation or safety.

This model is grounded in decades of research in the social sciences on personality typology and archetypes.  It is also reinforced and enriched by more recent findings in neuroscience on fast- and slow-brain processing of stimuli.

Our qualititavive research often uses imagery to help consumers express both conscious and unconscious attitudes, behavior and preferences.  Specific exercises are custom-­developed, based on the project’s objectives.  The research is designed to help consumers reveal the stories that help them define and ascribe meaning about themselves, their affiliations, their values, their lives.

The output includes both narrative and visual content.  We devote time to extracting the deep significance of what was discovered and bringing it to life so that the brand team can use it effectively.