How can we help you?
As a full-service market research consultancy, our team is experienced in all types of quantitative and qualitative methodologies — which we use to help our clients in these ways:
Brand
Tracking
How is my category changing? How are consumers responding to our marketing efforts over time? Brand tracking provides ongoing answers by keeping tabs on consumers’ changing tastes and behaviors month-to-month or quarter-to-quarter. Especially for large brands, brand tracking provides a crucial feedback loop, showing how various efforts contribute to brand health over time.
Shopper
Journey
How do my shoppers go from undecided to decided? What sources of information are most influential, when, and why? Our team are pioneers in shopper journey research, having developed the Google Zero Moment of Truth research. We apply a mix of quantitative and qualitative methods to reveal the end to end shopper journey, providing client with actionable steps to help win shoppers at each point along the way.
Online
Communities
Online communities provide clients with a valuable, constant line of communication with the audience that the brand serves. We have extensive experience across industries developing and running bespoke platforms built to engage with both existing customers and prospects. When tactical questions can’t wait, communities provide a quick- turn solution for getting quant or qual insights that inform key decisions.
Customer
Segmentation
Who’s my target? What do they believe? How can I find and convert the most valuable audiences? Segmentation seeks to answer foundational client questions applying a multi-step process, that uses iterative statistical analysis to arrive at a set of segments that are clearly differentiated, and that provide actionable insights for future messaging and programs. All of our segmentation work includes development of an action plan to ensure the research can be socialized and leveraged throughout your organization.
Concept and
Message Testing
How are customers responding to my products and messaging? Too often, quantitative tests provide only the most basic insights about whether people like or dislike the stimulus. In our work, we go further, getting at the “why” questions that truly empower brands to take their products and messaging to the next level.
Tradeoff
Analysis
What are the costs and benefits of changing a product, or introducing a new product within a line? Which features do customers value most, and which are worth the cost? Every decision requires tradeoffs. Using advanced statistical techniques, we can give you the cost-benefit information you need to make an informed decision for your business.
Emotional Response
Testing
To understand consumer receptivity to creative concepts, we apply a scientifically rigorous methodology using biometric response testing to select creative concepts among in- lab, remote, or focus group respondents. One of the most powerful outputs of this methodology, is that it quantifies a respondent’s emotional response to the stimuli.
Drivers
Analysis
What sets apart a brand or product in my product category? What levers can I pull to draw in new customers? Understanding brand personality and product attributes only goes so far. Our approach to advanced drivers analysis provides actionable guidance on where to focus resources and messaging for maximum impact with consumers.
Advanced
Analytics
How can I dig beneath my customers stated preferences to understand their true desires? How can we model complex decisions to try and predict the outcomes? When you’re not sure about the best approach to answer a business question, Alter Agents will use our experience with advanced analytics to recommend an approach that pushes deeper than standard survey scales and subgroup analyses.
Diverse
Populations
Where do I go for feedback when the customers I want to talk to are hard to find? Whether it’s working across languages or reaching a hard- to-find ethno-linguistic subgroup, Alter Agents is up to the challenge. As an LA-based firm, diversity is in our DNA, and our partnerships with local clients mean that reaching out to smaller demographics is just part of our job.
Building a pipeline to leadership
You need to carry data through to your internal stakeholders so you can evangelize and maximize your hard work. We understand this, and realize that delivering an insightful report is not the final task in any research project. We start every project by building an understanding of who will be using the data, what decisions they will make from it, and how those individuals best absorb information. Discussing this at the beginning allows our team to support you in getting internal buy-in for the research and setting the context in which the data will be used to help make business decisions. From there, we work diligently to make sure all the deliverables are focused on the needs of the decision-makers.
Championing the challengers
How are consumers actually weighing their options? Often, brand research skews towards the category leaders, but a well-known name is far from your audience’s only consideration. It’s true that brand awareness, familiarity, consideration, and most brand personality and imagery statements all favor the leaders in the industry. Traditional, brand-narcissistic research allows for this bias to color and inform the insights, leading to the belief that years are needed in order to see real change in key metrics. We apply a nimbler, consumer-centric approach to research that provides brands with data that goes beyond who is biggest and looks at the context.
Launching brands
Foundational research can help your brand thrive. From exploring and defining a target audience to concept and messaging testing to brand awareness, our team has helped startup brands like Waymo, Humm Kombucha, Evelyn & Bobbie, RepairSmith, and Karma Automotive understand their consumers from the ground up. Custom research is perfectly suited for startups who are bringing something new to the marketplace and have yet to establish a strong brand identity. Alter Agents’ approach to consultative partnerships means that we act as an extension of the client company, giving them a fully functional market research team that is experienced, nimble and on-call.
