Brand strategy research that tells you which brand decisions are worth the money.

Most brand work runs between six and twelve weeks, though every project is scoped on its own terms. A semiotic read of one category moves faster than a positioning study across four markets with fieldwork in each. Tracking is different again, because it runs on a rhythm rather than to a deadline, and the first wave takes longest because that’s where the questions get built. We study the specific challenge first, then give you a timeline alongside the quote, and that’s the timeline we work to. If there’s a rebrand date or an agency briefing in the calendar, it shapes the plan from the start rather than turning up as a problem halfway through.

Every quote is built for the project, because the variables move a great deal. It depends on how many techniques the question needs, who we have to reach and how hard they are to recruit, whether that means consumers, B2B decision makers, clinicians or niche experts, how many countries, how many participants, how deep the analysis goes, how urgent it is, and what you need in your hands at the end. A semiotic study of a single category and a twelve month tracker across five markets are different projects with very different numbers. Most of our projects sit in the six-figure range. We scope after a proper conversation about the decision you’re making, and you get a fixed price and a timeline before any work begins.

Perception isn’t soft, it’s just often measured badly. Ask people directly what a brand means to them and you get a rationalisation, because people rarely have access to their own reasoning at that level. So we come at it from three sides at once. Qualitative gets at the associations people can’t articulate on request, through how they compare, sort and tell stories rather than through direct questioning. Social listening reads the language they use when nobody is asking, which is where new meanings appear first. Quantitative puts a size on it: how many hold each association, how firmly, and how it moves. Fused together, the three give you something you can put in front of a board, with the number and the reason for the number arriving in the same sentence.

Usually both, measured at different points in the same process. A tracker reports outcomes, and outcomes move last. Before preference falls, the vocabulary of the category shifts, then people start describing you with words nobody in your business would choose, and only then does the number follow. Sales feel that months earlier because they’re in the conversation. What we do is put the three signals on the same timeline, so a movement in the metric arrives with its cause attached and you can see how far upstream it started. Often the finding isn’t that the brand got worse, it’s that the question buyers are asking changed and the tracker kept measuring the old one.

We build on what you already have rather than starting from zero. The brand book tells us what you intend to mean, the tracker tells us what has already happened, and the agency knows how to execute. What tends to be missing is the piece in between: what your brand actually means to people right now, in their words, and why the category reads it that way. That’s the gap where expensive mistakes tend to happen, because a rebrand briefed on intent rather than on evidence is a large bet placed on an assumption. Closing that distance is the work, and it usually makes the agency better rather than replacing it, since a brief built on evidence is a brief they can execute against.

It reads the system rather than the opinion. People are fluent in the codes of their category and can rarely describe any of them, in the same way that you speak your language without being able to state its grammar. Ask someone why a typeface feels trustworthy and they’ll invent a reason on the spot, sincerely. Semiotics goes at it from the other end, looking at what the category has trained people to expect, which conventions are still doing work and which have been adopted so widely they have stopped meaning anything. That matters most in two situations: when your work keeps coming out looking like everyone else’s and nobody can say why, and when the same message performs completely differently across markets. Neither of those has an answer that a respondent can give you directly.

Both, and the connection between them is what the firm is built on. We call it insight-led strategic intelligence because research earns its cost when it makes the strategy sound. A real understanding of the category, the culture and the people in it is what separates a positioning that holds up from one that sounds good in a room. So you get the evidence and what to do with it: which position you can credibly take, what to say and what to stop saying, which brands in your portfolio are doing a job the others can’t, which conventions to keep and which to break. The point of all of it is that your company loses less time and money going in the wrong direction.

Abdo López and Norah Walsh lead every project in person, from the framing session to the final reading, and everyone working alongside them is senior, with more than a decade in the field. Around that core we build the team for the project. The right specialist for a luxury category isn’t the right specialist for financial services, and the right partner for fieldwork in Mexico isn’t the right one for Singapore, so we select the experts, the partners and the technology that fit the question, the technique, the country and the industry. There’s no handover to a junior once the contract is signed, and that’s the main reason we stay small.