What are you looking for in a brand strategy agency?
A team that has a deep knowledge of your industry? One that has intimate knowledge of the lives and habits of your consumers? An agency that has the analytical skills to dig deep into your brand and answer your burning, niche research questions?
That’s what you’ll get at Hook Research – we’re a brand strategy agency that uses forward-thinking and powerful research methods to help companies around the world create resilient and engaging identities.
So how do we manage this?
Past, present, future – our 4D Methodology illuminates the way forward
Each brand strategy agency has their own special sauce – and ours is the 4D Methodology.
This rigorous process – developed over many years working directly with businesses of all shapes and sizes – allows us to build a picture of your brand now, and understand how it can most efficiently grow going forward.
There are 4 stages to this methodology:
Discovery – In this first stage, we use a range of tried-and-tested processes to shed light on a brand and it’s ecosystem now.
While each project is bespoke (responding to the tangible business needs of our clients), these processes might include: Internal Ideation sessions with stakeholders across the business that help us fully understand internal perceptions and hypotheses; deploying our AI-assisted Social Intelligence process to scope the social landscape; or creating quantitative surveys that let us speak to consumers at scale (to name just a few).
Dialogue – This second stage is about starting conversations with the people who matter most: your consumers.
We’re a brand strategy agency that knows people (we are all about Talking Human, after all) – and our insights are always built around the thoughts and behaviours of real consumers. We begin this process here, creating a two-way conversation about their lives: How do they interact with their favourite brands? What do they think of our client and its competitors? Where do they fit into their daily routines?
Online communities, daily diaries, and video ethnographies are all incredibly useful for digging deep into consumers’ thoughts at this stage.
Demonstration – In the third stage, we turn our gaze towards the future – exploring pitfalls and opportunities for brands as they continue to grow and evolve.
At Hook, we achieve this by taking the conversations we started in the Dialogue stage of the research into future-facing workshops. In these face-to-face sessions, we explore how consumers’ lives are changing, and how they would like brands to keep pace. Where possible, we also go in-home with consumers to see how they are interacting with brands in their day-to-day lives. Face-time with consumers is invaluable and helps keep the research grounded – making sure that our research produces actionable insights that can be rolled out into a real-world strategy for our clients.
This process has helped us shape powerful insights for businesses across the globe: Our recent work for the Channel 4 sales team, for instance, created a road-map for how consumer’s wanted brands to engage with big ethical and social issues in their purpose-driven ads going forward.
Deliverables – The final stage of the research is about communication.
Good design helps communicate findings internally and externally – that’s why each of our projects goes through our Engagement Team to ensure that it not only looks great but that it also conveys our findings with clarity and efficiency to stakeholders up and down a business.
These deliverables come in all shapes and sizes, and are designed to meet the unique needs of each client. You can take a look at one recent example of our video deliverables below:
Finding the right audiences for your brand
A brand strategy agency creates the best insights when they connect with the right people… and our experience across many different industries and business areas means that we always know exactly who to talk to.
At Hook Research, our extensive recruitment and moderation experience enables us to connect with the right audiences and speak to them in a constructive way – whether that’s obscure podcast listeners, hidden-away delivery drivers, or tricky kids audiences. But how is it possible to keep up in a world where trends come and go at the click of a button?
As the media landscape evolves, audiences are splintering – and that means that agencies must stay agile to survive. That’s why we always keep our finger on the pulse of popular trends – whether that’s by creating weekly blogs on topical issues, running our own proprietary research into interesting audiences and trends, or attending conferences up and down the country (and, sometimes, running our own panels with industry experts).
Staying plugged in to the latest developments means that we recognise the subtle yet notable changes in consumer attitudes, and are thus best positioned to know exactly who to speak with on each project (and deliver the best results for our clients).
So does this sound like what you’re looking for in a brand strategy agency? If it does, we’d love to have a chat – get in touch with us today!
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