Real Conversations Uncover Real Insight for Impact and Growth

 

Whomever we’re engaging – internal teams, consumers, your business customers or partners – and whatever the subject, we bring our experience, empathy, and your vision and goals to every conversation. These conversations translate into action and impact.

The Customer Journey

The best way to understand your customer’s journey is experience it for yourself, develop hypotheses for how to improve it, and then bring customers into the conversation to hear their experiences, and together optimize the journey. See your pleasure and pain points through your customers eyes. Our customer journey work includes e-commerce, omni-channel, and bricks and mortar, including apparel, appliances and home goods, health care, pet care, and QSR beverages – and results in reimagining your customer’s experience from start to finish.

Segmentation

Do you know who your brand connects with? Understand your best and most lucrative consumers, how your brand fulfills their needs, what motivates their purchase and loyalty, and how to keep them as high-value, long-term customers. You’ll learn the best places to reach them and the messages that resonate with them. And how to attract more of them. Our segmentation work results in new product development and brand optimization, because people have more needs, and companies have more opportunities for growth than they imagine. Our segmentation work includes automotive, coffee, kitchen appliances, dairy, vitamins, health care, and technology.

Innovation and Transformation

Innovation and transformation, like insight, are collaborative arts. If you are a change agent, open to doing things differently and challenging the status quo, let’s talk.

Concept, Product, and Package Design and Optimization

Does your packaging communicate as if it were your 5-second ad? That’s about how long your package has to attract and communicate. We’ll help you get to quick go/no go decisions and optimize your investment by getting you the answers you need. Does your product meet a consumer need or aspiration? Does it have a reason for being? Does it stand out in your competitive line up?  Optimize before you measure the size of the prize and invest. 

Positioning and Communication

Know how your brand fits into people’s lives. Know the essence of your brand and what’s at the heart of the relationship (and not). Own your positioning and brand story. Give the market the story you want them to know and retell.  Identify the compelling elements of your brand story (and eliminate distractions) that connects consumers to your brand – and they’ll help you bring it to life in all your communication and touch points. 

E-commerce and UX   

Put a human touch into your high-tech tools. We bring our in-store shopper marketing expertise to e-commerce pure plays and omni channel marketers. Every website can benefit from design and communication enhancements. Every e-commerce experience has room for growth, from DTC to e-commerce package optimization. Get to know the person behind the screen.

Brand Revitalization  

Your brand may have been ground-breaking when first introduced, but is it still relevant? Find out how consumers have changed, what has replaced your brand in their lives, and how to get back into the consumers consideration set. Don’t wait until your brands are out of date and need a complete makeover to revitalize them. Staying current and keeping pace with the rate of change is more important now than ever. 

Mutually Beneficial Business Relationships

Your business partners are as important as consumers are to your business and the economy. Do you want to take your customer relationships to the next level? How much do you know about your business partners? People open up to us, disclosing information they won’t share with you.

Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion

Understanding employees’ experiences and paths to success are critical. Discover how your employees feel about their experiences, from interviewing, hiring, and onboarding to training, developing, and promoting. Our confidential interviews and group conversations with your employees uncover new insight and identify strategies that improve your company culture and business success.

Optimize Your AI and ML

Every aspect of your business benefits from engaging customers and end users. This includes your technology solutions. Consumers want them to enhance and enable them – not manipulate or stalk them. Chances are your AI and ML need optimizing too. Bring your customers into the conversation for optimization.

We Customize Our Research Approach to Your Objectives

We bring the right people to the table for open and honest conversations. You experience what they see, feel and experience. You connect with the people whose lives you’ve impacted and improved. That’s when compassion, creativity, and solutions happen.

Focus Groups

There is power of creativity and consensus building in groups, even when remote. Whether it’s your internal team, consumer segments, or subject matter experts online, on the phone, or in person around a big table, we create an atmosphere of safety and trust. That’s when participants give break-through answers to your most burning questions. Fresh insight and marketing solutions materialize right before your eyes.  

In-Depth Interviews

Hear people tell their truth. Whether in person, on the phone, or through video, even in the most delicate categories, people share their emotions, stories, and experiences because they know we care. Awaken your compassion and creativity.

Immersions and Ethnographies

Learn how people behave in their natural habitat – and why. Discover how your brand and category fit into people’s lives. They take us up-close and personal, understanding what it’s like to walk in their shoes. Solutions emerge out of left – and right – field.

Brain-share with A-list experts 

We bring experts into the conversation to deepen and heighten insight and impact. We’ve invited art teachers into the conversation about children’s creativity and 5-star chefs into the conversation for French and Italian specialty foods. When collaborating with a creative agency to reimagine the beverage experience, we brought in a cultural anthropologist and psychologists to deepen and heighten the insight and understanding.

We connect with key decision makers, best-in-class professionals, business, and partner prospects that you want to hear from: the CEO of a major bank. A world-class designer. Thought leaders. Retail buyers. Randy Pausch, before his last lecture. 

It’s not just what we do – it’s who you’ll get to know working with us. 

“Shelley develops rapport easily with all kind of people – shoppers, consumers, strangers on the phone. They open up to her quickly and tell their truth.”

– Cory Cunningham, Client Director, Kantar Retail

 

“Shelley is a brilliant marketer and researcher who understands how to structure, conduct, and analyze consumer research to yield exceptional insights into consumers.”

   – Marc Rovner, VP and General Manager, Boehringer Ingelheim Pharmaceuticals, Inc.

“Since I met her back in 2015, Shelley Forrester has been my go-to partner for qualitative research.  When the project is critical for our business performance or building relationships with external customers, the name Shelley Forrester always appeared in my project brief “

– Rich Oloffson, Mars, Inc.

“Shelley Forrester excels at high-level interviews. She has an amazing ability to access impossible-to-reach experts, yielding insights no one else has been able to uncover.”

  – Peter Klein, Founder/Managing Partner, PK Associates LLC