Audience Insights
I help business owners and executives truly understand their audience through academic-quality research.
Gain clarity
Win competitive advantage
Optimize marketing spend
Learn what actually motivates the people you're trying to reach.
Optimize marketing spend
Win competitive advantage
Optimize marketing spend
Ensure every dollar you spend on marketing is as effective as possible.
Win competitive advantage
Win competitive advantage
Win competitive advantage
Access unique insights and intelligence for an edge over the competition.
What do you really know about your audience?
When I speak with business owners and executives, one thing I hear all the time is that they're unsure what's motivating their audience.
In many cases, they have highly successful businesses, but their understanding of the people driving that success is largely based on intuition.
It's not that they don't know who those people are. They have demographics, dashboards, and metrics that tell them the "who."
When it comes down to "why," it's intuition.
Why do they buy a product or service? Why do they donate money to a foundation? Why do they enroll at a university? Why do they take a destination holiday?
Intuition vs. genuine understanding
Business owners and executives have an intuitive awareness of their audience because of experience.
They've spent a career refining their offering and adjusting their sales pitch, and they've found something that "just works," as many of them say to me.
But in many cases, intuition and hoping that something just works isn't enough. It could be creating a new offering, launching a new campaign, moving into a new market, or getting ahead of the competition.
That's where a genuine understanding of what's motivating the people you're trying to reach becomes important.
The value of clarity
I uncover the motivations behind the decisions that matter most.
I don't just hand you a research report and wish you good luck.
I translate research into strategy and messaging that you can use to guide your positioning or growth.
It might make sense for us to work together if...
You're a B2C or public-facing organization
Your offering or product involves a significant decision
Your offering or product involves a significant decision
I mostly work with B2C companies or other public-facing organizations with an audience they're trying to reach.
Your offering or product involves a significant decision
Your offering or product involves a significant decision
Your offering or product involves a significant decision
Your offering involves a significant decision that has psychological depth, tension, or underlying motivation.
You're open to examining your assumptions
Your offering or product involves a significant decision
You're open to examining your assumptions
You recognize gaps between what you believe and what you need to know about your audience.
My Audience Insights Approach
PhD background
That's me wearing the silly hat and outfit. I received my PhD in literature from Memorial University, where I researched phenomenology and discourse analysis.
Phenomenology is a terrible name for an audience insights research method. But it is an incredible method for uncovering the deeper meanings, sentiments, and emotions that drive decisions.
Phenomenology studies lived experience. In my audience insights work, I discover how people experience brands, products, or offerings and the deeper meaning of their decisions.
Marketing and communications professional
After I finished my PhD, I worked in marketing and communications for a decade. I worked with large private and public organizations throughout Canada. My last post was as director of strategic communications at a large Canadian research university.
I'm a little embarrassed to say, in many of the organizations I worked with, we didn't truly understand our target audiences. We had audience data, like demographics or metrics. But the big gap was always in the deeper motivations driving people's decisions. That's what led me to my work on audience insights.
Audience Insights Engagement
There is no one-size-fits-all Audience Insights Engagement. Every client I work with has different needs, so each project requires a unique design. Below is a general template of my approach. Projects typically take 4-6 weeks, depending on the scope and research requirement .
Phase 1: Scoping study
This initial phase establishes what is already known about the audience, what the organization currently believes, and where important knowledge gaps remain. I review existing research and relevant market materials, conduct initial consultations, and identify the question that should drive the research. Together, we refine that question before moving forward.
Phase 2: Audience insights discovery
I conduct in-depth interviews with research participants and use phenomenological analysis to examine the experiences, meanings, and motivations underlying the decision being studied. I also incorporate relevant findings from Phase 1, cultural references, and influential advertising or campaigns. The result is a detailed report of the findings, accompanied by the primary research materials.
Phase 3: Positioning & messaging
I translate the research findings into practical marketing strategy, including core messaging, brand positioning, and audience personas. My background in marketing and communications allows me to connect the research directly to the decisions your organization needs to make.
Phase 4: Activation
When it's useful to you, I can work with your internal team or creative partner to translate the messaging and positioning into content, campaigns, and other marketing activities.
Entry Offer: Audience Assessment
Before making an important marketing, positioning, or growth decision based on assumptions, the Audience Assessment establishes what you know about your audience, where the gaps are, and what question is actually worth investigating.
The Audience Assessment takes one to two weeks and includes:
- Review of relevant organizational and market materials
- Review of existing audience research
- Targeted secondary research
- Assessment of current audience assumptions
- Identification of audience knowledge gaps
- Development of a focused research question
I deliver a concise report outlining the key findings, the most important question to investigate, and recommended next steps.
The Audience Assessment can stand alone or become the foundation for a larger Audience Insights Engagement.
Gain Clarity
Win Competitive advantage
Optimize Marketing
Know what actually motivates the audience you want to reach.
Optimize Marketing
Win Competitive advantage
Optimize Marketing
Make every marketing dollar more effective.
Win Competitive advantage
Win Competitive advantage
Win Competitive advantage
Discover insights that give you an edge over the competition.
Ready to take the next step?
Case Studies
The following cases are offered as illustrative examples based on previous projects or background research in particular sectors. They are not a limit on the kinds of projects I work on.
Context: A large hospital foundation is launching a new campaign, specifically to target the broader public in its annual appeal.
Question: How do regular people decide to give to healthcare organizations?
Work: Design and execute a research project to uncover the motivations and hesitancy of regular people to give money to healthcare organizations.
Potential outcome: Improved messaging and ad effectiveness, significantly increasing annual giving.
Context: A tourism board is seeking to cut through the marketing noise to reach its target audience.
Question: How do people decide on a tourism destination?
Work: Design and execute a research project to investigate the psychological drivers for people to choose a tourism destination.
Potential outcome: Improved messaging and brand alignment to accentuate the underlying motivations and sentiments behind tourism destination decisions.
Context: An aesthetic medspa is creating a new service offering and attempting to open up a new market.
Question: How do people in this new demographic approach aesthetic treatments?
Work: Design and execute a research project to understand the lived experience of deciding to get an initial aesthetic treatment for this demographic.
Potential outcome: Created messaging that spoke to the underlying tensions and improved prospect conversion.
Context: A jewelry retailer is expanding its offering of lab-grown diamonds.
Question: How do customers perceive lab-grown diamonds, both initially and over time?
Work: Design and execute a research project to understand the hidden dynamics of purchasing lab-grown diamonds.
Potential outcome: Improved messaging, ads, and sales approach that accounts for the social and emotional undercurrents.
Context: A large, research-intensive university attempting to connect with prospective international students in a saturated market.
Question: What are the sentiments and decision drivers that motivate prospective international students to choose one university over another?
Work: Design and execute a research project to uncover the lived experience of an international student's choice.
Potential outcome: Improved messaging and recruitment efforts that more effectively target the underlying motivations.
Context: An insurance broker wants to better connect with a new generation of prospective clients, who may not have the same motivations as an older generation of clients.
Question: What motivates this younger generation to see insurance as a worthwhile investment?
Work: Design and execute a research project to better understand the younger generation's perception of insurance.
Potential outcome: Improved messaging and alignment with the desires and tensions of this generation towards insurance.
Context: A large hotel brand is creating a new service and accommodation tier and wants to understand the luxury audience they are targeting.
Question: How do luxury customers expect to be treated in a hospitality setting?
Work: Design and execute a research project to understand luxury purchases in the hospitality sector.
Potential outcome: Improved messaging and satisfied guests, leading to higher revenues and repeat bookings.
Context: An NGO wants to reach a broader audience and get its message out in a way that will land.
Question: How does the public perceive this NGO and its messaging?
Work: Design and execute a research project to get at the deeper meaning of this NGO to public audiences.
Potential outcome: Improved messaging and public advocacy strategy, leading to greater buy-in from public audiences.
Frequently Asked Questions
Great! I love to work with internal marketing teams, and I can provide them with significant insights to use in ongoing marketing programs. Internal teams excel at product metrics and operational data, but they sometimes struggle to uncover deeper buyer motivations due to internal bias and lack of specialized research design.
That's actually quite common. I'm not looking to replace your agency. We help organizations understand what their customers actually value, so your agency can build campaigns on a stronger strategic foundation. If an audience insights discovery helps make your marketing investment with an agency more effective, it's one of the highest-return investments you can make.
Traditional marketing research often focuses on explicitly stated opinions, preferences, and rationales. It delivers what people say they do, which isn't the same as why they do it. Because of this, traditional marketing research can sometimes get caught in the "say-do gap." My phenomenological approach focuses on lived experience, embodied habits, and pre-reflective choices. It reveals the underlying structures of people's experience and the meaning and significance of decisions.
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