We’re pleased to enhance our existing expertise in research and strategy through the acquisition of Fountainhead Brand Consulting.

What does this mean for you?

While we’re still employing the same strategic approaches to dig beyond the expected to get at motivations, with the acquisition we now have more resources and knowledge to put against asking why, uncovering insights and fueling strategy, enabling us to offer clients greater depth and capacity.

Here’s a look at three ways our Insights Team – made up of strategists and researchers from both Hiebing and Fountainhead – can support your brand.

1. For starters, we excel at helping each brand carve out a unique and ownable positioning in the marketplace. Our positioning model, combined with our collaborative approach to positioning work sessions, results in a richer understanding of why consumers care about your brand and the role it serves in their lives. To refine and validate positioning, we employ both qualitative and quantitative techniques to ensure the most powerful positioning possible. Together we’ll shape your brand’s strategy to set it apart in the marketplace and find it an ownable and differentiated home for life.
2. Your brand’s success, regardless of its lifestage, requires a deep understanding of its target consumer. That means we need to dig into both rational and emotional motivations. The rational side is easier to uncover and more broadly known. The emotional side takes work, but your target’s emotions are critically important. We get at them by focusing on “why.” Using tools like ethnography, which allows us to learn by immersing ourselves into consumers’ lives and observing their behaviors, we’ll develop a profile of your target consumer that shapes marketing and innovation for the brand.
3. This brings us to new product development, the lifeblood of brands. We’ll work with you to uncover the foundations of opportunity for your brand and hammer out an approach that will result in concepts your consumers, and you, will love. It all starts with defining success criteria and the brand’s role in the portfolio. From there, we often glean insights from a private online community and do shop-along interviews. All of this leads to a cross-functional team ideation session with exercises structured to get the most out of each participant. Then we winnow and cultivate the most compelling ideas to bring to market, optimizing them through focus groups and confirming their appeal quantitatively.

These are just three of the reasons we’re excited about continuing to expand our capabilities in research and strategy with Fountainhead Brand Consulting, our new division.

To learn more, please reach out to Ann Dencker, Director of Insights.