Advertising best practice, evidence and insights

Dispelling the myths of pollution to help people protect themselves

Case Study • MRS Awards, Finalist, MRS Award for Applications of Research, 2019

Reckitt Benckiser, a consumer goods company, investigated the reasons for disappointing face mask sales and how it could empower consumers to take responsibility for their health in India.

Audience segmentation & beyond

Case Study • MRS Awards, Finalist, MRS Award for Innovation in Data Analytics, 2019

Looks at how an artistic and cultural venue moved beyond its current customer base and tapped into new audiences to understand and engage potential audiences in the UK.

Open Banking: Power to the people

Case Study • MRS Awards, Finalist, MRS Award for Financial Services Research, 2019

Open Banking, a government agency initiative, developed, launched and scaled Open Banking in the UK using a curated suite of research methodologies to inform customer experience guidelines.

PwC: The Future of Government

Case Study • MRS Awards, Finalist, MRS Award for Public Policy/Social Research, 2019

PwC, a multinational professional services network, launched the Future of Government project, an ambitious effort to ask serious questions about what kind of a society we want Britain to be.

Business banking switch - business unusual for RBS

Case Study • MRS Awards, Winner, MRS Award for Financial Services Research, 2019

RBS (Royal Bank of Scotland), a banking brand, launched real-time customer communication research in the UK to understand how it could get consumers to switch banks.

World Animal Protection: When disasters strike, animals suffer

Case Study • MRS Awards, Highly Commended, MRS Award for International Research, 2019

World Animal Protection, a non-profit animal welfare organisation, created a quant/qual study that provided it with hard evidence to encourage the protection of animals from government officials globally.

Department for Education: Fire It Up – Effecting a seismic reframe of apprenticeships

Case Study • MRS Awards, Finalist, Jeremy Bullmore Award for Creative Development Research, 2019

The Department for Education, a UK government department, promoted apprenticeships across the UK by launching a mixed methodology research study that facilitated its campaign.

Talking to India’s farmers

Article • Brian Carruthers, Event Reports, Marketing Week Insight Show, March 2019

Outlines a project to set up the first continuous panel to help a pesticides company better understand India’s farmers.

Long-term tragedy versus short-term response: The marketer's dilemma

Research Paper • Sam Munderere and Will Goodhand, ESOMAR, Congress, 2019

SURF, a charity supporting survivors of the Rwandan genocide, used a new application of research and insight to identify the optimal creative executions for fundraising.

Standing out from the crowd: A global study to define the perfect music festival

Research Paper • Christian Kurz, Anna Noel Taylor, Kerri Fortune, Ian Wright, Jo McIlvenna and Ben Allen, ESOMAR, Congress, 2019

Viacom, an American multinational mass media conglomerate, set out to learn the 'secret sauce' of the best festivals and to evaluate how that might be improved.

Creating brand and business transformation: Awakening a sleeping giant

Research Paper • Sally Smallman and Emiliana Vidali, ESOMAR, Congress, 2019

Explains how, in ten years, Gordon’s Distilled Gin, an alcoholic drinks brand, reversed its decline by discovering new insights and changing leadership behaviours in the UK.

Rapid impact: Creating a market leader in a year through machine-learning, ethnography and psychology

Research Paper • Genevieve Hall, Vivek Banerji, Alessandro D’Angelo, Dan Atkins and Daniel Rayner, ESOMAR, Congress, 2019

Papilocare, a brand of HPV prevention cream, became the market leader in Italy in just one year thanks to a strategy which was underpinned by hidden and differentiating insights.

Lux: Shrugging off gender inequality – Decoding ambivalence towards gender inequality in Japan

Research Paper • Deanna Elstrom and Emi Nishiyama, ESOMAR, Asia Pacific, 2019

Lux, a Unilever-owned haircare brand, conducted a quantitative study to ascertain where personal "pain points" are from the perspective of today’s Japanese women.

Brand relatability x financial services: How to win with GenZ and millennials

Article • Ryan Arshad, WARC Webinars, May 2019

Discusses the core drivers of building 'brand relatability' vs brand relevancy and why and how the mindset of millennials and Gen Z differs when it comes to financial brand consideration.

VIVO Cannabis: How do you research a market that doesn’t exist?

Article • Sam Peña-Taylor, Event Reports, MRS Impact, March 2019

VIVO Cannabis, formerly ABcann, needed to transition its marketing out of a medical-prescription market and into a legal over-the-counter, wellness, and recreational offer – it needed to understand the Canadian cannabis market and launch brands to compete in it before it became legal.

Exploring sharing behaviors across social media platforms

Research Paper • Chang-Dae Ham, Joonghwa Lee, Jameson L. Hayes and Young Han Bae, International Journal of Market Research, Vol. 61, No. 2, 2019, pp. 157-177

Increasingly, consumers are simulcasting branded content across multiple, interconnected social media platforms creating a complex social media ecosystem.

Why companies risk losing customers by not reciprocating on shared data: Rebuilding the data-sharing economy in a consumer-driven world

Research Paper • Natasha Hritzuk, Journal of Advertising Research, Vol. 58, No. 4, 2018, pp. 394-398

This article looks at how companies can rebuild trust with consumers over the use of their data with the advent of increasing regulation, such as GDPR.

Christmas LIVE – Aldi shoppers’ journey to Christmas

Research Paper • MRS Awards, Winner, MRS Award for Applications of Research, 2018

Aldi, the value supermarket chain, changed how UK consumers viewed the store and Christmas shopping behaviours to contribute to a record-breaking Christmas 2017.

Auto Trader Group: The Car Buyers Report – not new, not used but next

Research Paper • MRS Awards, Finalist, MRS Award for Applications of Research, 2018

Auto Trader, a digital automotive marketplace, was able to shed its reputation among UK consumer as a place for ‘cheap second hand cars’ and delivered a twelvefold ROI.

PizzaExpress: Menu engineering - a predictive, insight-led solution to effective menu design

Research Paper • MRS Awards, Finalist, MRS Award for Applications of Research, 2018

PizzaExpress, a restaurant group, brought to light new insight into how customers navigate menus in restaurants and how this affects their purchasing decisions.

Multiple Sclerosis Society: Measuring the socio-economic impact of changes to PIP eligibly criteria for people living with MS: a participatory approach

Research Paper • MRS Awards, Winner, MRS Award for Public Policy/Social Research, 2018

The MS Society commissioned research to inform a media campaign aimed at convincing the UK government to change various aspects of Personal Independence Payment (PIP).

CPNI: “All aboard – “See it. Say it. Sorted”, a public vigilance campaign to support the transport network”

Research Paper • MRS Awards, Finalist, MRS Award for Public Policy/Social Research, 2018

The Centre for the Protection for the National Infrastructure (CPNI), the lead government authority for protective security advice, embarked on a four-year research programme to support the government’s counter-terrorism (CT) strategy in protecting the transport network from terrorism in the UK.

IKEA Life at Home Report 2017 International research by C Space

Research Paper • MRS Awards, Winner, MRS Award for International Research, 2018

IKEA, a furniture retailer, broke three norms when conducting global research to create its Life at Home Report.

Integrating Digital Conversations: Laying it on thick with social intelligence

Research Paper • Ellie Osborne and Oliver Roberts, ESOMAR, Fusion, 2018

GlaxoSmithKline, a pharmaceutical company, used social listening to collect data findings that were grounded on naturally occurring consumer conversations about athlete's foot in the US and South Korea.

Fast Fashion Delivered: An innovative approach fusing AI and segmentation for brand building and consumer targeting

Research Paper • Archana Pai andPriyanka Bhargav, ESOMAR, Fusion, 2018

Myntra, a fashion e-commerce company, developed Artificial Intelligence (AI) to predict growing fashion trends in India to improve its business metrics.

Qualitative research