Customer insight research when nobody pictures the same customer.

Often because they describe who people are and not what they’re trying to do. A persona built from age, income and a stock photo can’t tell a product manager which feature to build or a writer which sentence to open with, so it gets read once and filed. We build the groups on motivation, size each one against the real market so the choice has a number behind it, and write the personas in the language each team actually works in: what this group is trying to get done, what stops them, what they need to see before they act, and how to recognise them inside your own data from then on.

Every quote is built for the project, because the variables move a great deal. How many markets and languages, how many participants, whether the work is qualitative depth or a segmentation that has to be sized quantitatively across the market, how hard the audience is to reach, which is very different for general consumers than for a B2B buying committee, whether there is fieldwork in homes and shops, and what you need in your hands at the end. A round of depth interviews in one market and a segmentation sized across four 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.

Your data is very good at what happened and who did it, but it’s silent on why, because people rarely record a reason when they buy something. That gap is where expensive mistakes tend to live: two teams read the same dashboard and reach opposite conclusions, and both can defend the number. We start from the data you already have, show you what it can and can’t answer, and then go and get the part that’s missing, from the people themselves. At the end you also get a way to recognise each group inside your own systems, so the investment keeps working after we leave.

Most of the time people aren’t holding anything back; they simply can’t see their own habits from the inside, so what you get in a survey is the tidy version they can recall and justify. We work from three directions at once, starting with behaviour where it happens, in the kitchen or the shop or the office, because that’s where the real requirement surfaces. We also read what people say to each other when nobody is asking them anything, and we measure how common each pattern is, so a striking observation doesn’t become a strategy on its own. The uncomfortable answers tend to arrive in the second hour of fieldwork, not in the first ten minutes.

Yes, and that’s the part of the work worth paying for. A list of groups is a description. A recommendation is a decision, and it needs four things behind it: how many people are in each group, what they’re worth, how reachable they are, and how much of each one you already have. We size the segments quantitatively so the choice arrives with a number rather than an opinion, and we say plainly which group to go after first and why that one. You’re free to disagree with the recommendation, and you’ll be able to see exactly what it rests on.

However many your company can genuinely act on differently, which is usually fewer than the model can produce. The test is simple: if marketing can’t write differently for two groups, product can’t build differently for them and sales can’t sell differently to them, then for your purposes they’re one group. Statistics will happily support seven groups, but organisations rarely can. In our experience, the segmentations that survive contact with a real company tend to have three to five groups, with one of them clearly named as the priority. We’d rather hand you four segments your teams use every week than eight that describe the market beautifully and change nothing.

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. In this category that means you get the evidence and what to do with it: which group to serve first and what that changes about the roadmap, what people are actually hiring your product to do, where the message has to start because the belief underneath it is not there yet, and which beliefs inside your own company the evidence does not support. The point 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 moderator for a home visit in Mexico is not the right one for Germany, and the specialist who runs the segmentation model is not the one who sits in somebody’s kitchen for two hours, 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.