Offerings

We offer a prix fixe menu of solutions as well as customized projects. If one of our prix-fixe offerings meets your needs, we're ready to start when you are! Otherwise, contact us to discuss customized objectives and outcomes.

cultural landscape

Focus on customer segments and channels: Understand cultural meanings embedded in practices and artifacts related to your business. Access the ideas, images, and messages that form people's expectations and perceptions. Understand values that drive behaviors and decisions in your markets. Discover intersections between subcultures and categories of products and services.

How it works: 

Researchers collect data from secondary sources. They interview subject matter experts, visit places central to the study, and gather artifacts from the perspective of both consumers and producers. We look at a variety of sources — print-based and online media (books, blogs, forums, etc.) and cultural artifacts (TV, film, advertising, music, products). We analyze and document cultural artifacts, practices, and discourses (commonly circulated messages) relevant to the subject matter.

Price: 
$24,000

dive into a slice of life

Connect to value propositions: Gain quick access to people's everyday experience — their feelings, goals, pain points, and workarounds. It could be about places (coffee shop, playground), interactions (family, hobby group), activities (cooking, commuting, playing), or objects (kitchen appliance, shoes, backpack, car). Resulting visuals and insights help inspire product and service design, or feature development.

How it works: 

Based on an area of focus defined by the client, participants take photos and describe their experience and feelings while involved in their daily activities. We prompt them to focus on specific aspects of their experience, times of day, objects, or tasks. This is a self-reporting study, an in-context visual diary kept online.

Price: 
$30,000

out-of-box experience (OOBE)

Improve customer relationships: The out-of-box experience can be delightful or stressful, and it often deeply affects a customer's perception of your business. Observe the first experience people have with your product, when opening the package and taking it into use. Improve first impressions and interactions, enhance user guides, reduce customer support costs. Optimal prior to a launch, but also very effective after.

How it works: 

In-home videotaped observation of the interactions and first impressions a user has with a product (or service) after purchase. Conversation and follow-up questions with the user while it's happening. Each user also keeps an online diary documenting their first ten days of experience.

Price: 
$54,000
References: 
Wikipedia: OOBE

guided home expeditions

Get inside the touch-points of your value propositions: Join ethnographic expeditions to deeply understand the reality of your customer's life. Observe people in their homes as they interact with products, services, spaces, and other people. Talk with them about their perceptions, how they do things, challenges they encounter in using particular products, and what matters to them most. Afterwards, zoom in on key insights during debrief sessions led by senior ethnographers.

How it works: 

Become immersed in the research process. Help develop a field guide. Join ethnographers in the field, as we observe, shadow, and interview people in their homes. Sessions are documented with video and still photos. You participate in session reviews directly after each event. Together we focus on use and perception of products/services relevant to your business. We also highlight key functional and organizational aspects of the homes we visit.

Price: 
$60,000

day in the life

Bring to life customer segments: Create rich video portraits of people who represent your key market segments. We put a face on your users, and show how your products or services are integrated into their lives. Ideal for executive presentations, marketing support, as well as illustration of customers for ad sales and design teams. Participants are carefully screened and selected to best exemplify your target attributes.

How it works: 

A senior researcher and professional videographer interview and shadow participants while involved in daily activities, using products and services in context. For each session we generate a selection of video clips, to illustrate actions, interactions, and emotions relevant to the project objectives. We edit and produce a high-quality video with rich, visual portraits of each participant.

Price: 
$86,000

post-launch study

Evaluate and improve your value propositions: Discover how people integrate your new product or service in their life, what they think, and their level of emotional engagement. Learn how it connects and compares in their ecosystem. Understand the activities that surround use, as well as the motivations and triggers for use. Uncover mismatches between product and brand promises, user goals, and actual uses. Enhance the experience people have by making improvements that more fully meet their expectations.

How it works: 

Videotaped observation of the interactions people have with your product or service. Conversation and follow-up questions while it's happening. Focus on reasons for the initial purchase, comparison to other elements in the household ecosystem, and influence on the way they do things. Participants also keep diaries for five days after their sessions.

Price: 
$162,000

All prices are in USD. They include professional fees and recruitment of participants. Payment terms: 50% due at inception, 50% invoiced at completion. Project expenses to be added, depending for instance on the number of markets and potential travel costs. As a rule of thumb, project expenses may amount up to 20% of total costs.