How can you distill all the media, academic, and cultural noise into insights you can use?

Alter Agents takes a flexible, creative and strategic approach to Discovery called “Muraling” to ensure the current and evolving climate is reflected in all of our work. Muraling is an iterative process, during which we fully immerse ourselves in a category and seek diverse content from culture, media, academia, etc. From there we distill, synthesize, and ladder up critical elements into rich and credible insights. This robust and comprehensive “lay of the land” effectively inspires ideas, aids in hypothesis generation, and informs subsequent efforts.

 Muraling typically includes a combination of the following components, depending on existing knowledge and objectives:

• Secondary and Tertiary Research Review to gather additional input and align on existing insights.
• Semiotic Landscape Analysis to inform our understanding of the intangible facets of the market as it relates to the brand, category, and objectives.
• Online Conversation Analysis to provide cultural context that explores, deep-dives, and analyzes the frame in which this all lives.
• Trend Mapping to uncover ongoing and emerging cultural, political, economic, and other relevant trends, identifying overarching macro trends that illustrate the moment we are currently in.

These analyses are often coupled with In-depth Interviews among experts proficient in the categories of and the questions that reside at the heart of the research objectives. These recruits typically feature a purposeful mix of luminaries that are passionate in their fields while holding practical attitudes regarding the realities of each.