Focus Groups

Alchemical Insights can host, recruit, mediate and summarize focus groups, looking for feedback like attitudes, perceptions, and preferences on a specific product, service, idea or concept. We most often use Focus Groups to gain insights on branding and messaging, creative content, pain points and needs, or even product features, pricing and packaging.

Custom InsightAlchemy^TM Study

InsightAlchemy^TM is our proprietary quantitative research tool that allows us to understand shopper journeys, allowing us to segment shoppers, uncover and validate patterns, quantify preferences, and identify opportunities to disrupt and delight buyers during that purchase journey.

Market Insights

We conduct market research in order to provide a market insights report that includes the size of the market (how many possible shoppers exist), and seasonal or industry cycles, competitor overview and share of voice and so much more. We can tailor this report to your needs, but is excellent for brands considering a new product launch, or a rebranding or repositioning.

Shopper Insights

We partner with a remote research platform that recruits shoppers, and allows us to collect rich, in-context data from them as they interact with products and services in their natural environment. This partner platform gives us videos, text inputs, survey data in near real time as shoppers use their own phone to document their process.

Qual/Quant Studies

As part of our audience research, we may use qualitative practices like interviews, observation, ethnographies, online forums, diary studies, shop-alongs. or social media listening. We can use these as a preliminary to generate ideas, or to understand topics that we want to explore after a quantitative study. We can also offer surveys such as via Qualtrics or Survey Monkey, use our consumer insight platform tool (GWI Core), or any of your data from sales, web analytics, social media analytics, CRM data, or testing data.

Competitive Audit

With a competitive audit we’ll look at your top 3-6 competitors and provide feedback on their messaging, creative, channel use, spend, share of voice, sentiment (via social listening tools), social media presence, and their product positioning/availability and pricing. At the end we’ll discuss and brainstorm the opportunities and white space that they allow for us to work into our own messaging and positioning.

Audience Target Definition

We can take help create a targetable audience. This means the audience you aim to reach through your marketing channels and platforms (media). This can be channel specific, but usually a definition that can be used to find customers where ever they are, whenever they’re on those platforms.

This is based on their media consumption habits and behaviors and can include demographics as well.

Audience Design

A design target tells the creatives who they’re designing for – it includes things like preferences, motivations, and emotional responses. It can ALSO include consumption habits and behaviors, but is more about who the customer is, and what they need and how they feel. The outcome for creatives is that they can design content that will make an emotional connection.

Journey Mapping

The end-to-end customer or buyer journey is a tool to drive the shift from brand and product-first to audience-obsessed thinking.

Its format is not always linear, even if its laid out that way. A customer can enter and exit the relationship with a brand at any point in time and may not always move forward. By understanding what is happening at each need state, we need to make sure we deliver an outstanding experience at each touchpoint.

Jobs to be Done

Creating “Jobs to Be Done” (JTBD) fas part of a marketing campaign refers to understanding the specific needs, motivations, and tasks that customers are trying to accomplish at different stages of their buyer journey and tailoring the communication strategy to address those needs effectively.

The Jobs to Be Done framework is based on the idea that customers look to brands to get a specific job done—whether it’s solving a problem, achieving a goal, or fulfilling a desire. By understanding what the customer is trying to accomplish at each stage of their journey, we can craft messages that resonate with them, not just address what the brand or product team wants to say!

Barriers & Opportunities

We use a variety of data sources to understand key customer needs, emotions, and barriers against each need state in the customer journey. This is usually laid out as an insights map, a subset of the Buyer Journey Map

Personas

Personas provide a human-centered approach to marketing, enabling creative and channel teams to connect with the targeted audience on a deeper level and achieve better results. They are a crucial tool for data-driven decision-making and building a strong brand-customer relationship. They are usually a result of the target definition and audience design encapsulated on one page.

Campaign Ecosystem

Our campaign ecosystem maps show how all campaign and evergreen touch points work together and where they drive for further engagement, enabling a campaign that delivers the right message at the right time via the right channel to the right audience.

This artifact becomes a key input for creative teams, providing the guidance on how an idea may come to life along the journey. It shows what a buyer has been exposed to before (and what is planned after) each touch point.

Messaging Framework & Content Strategy

The messaging framework provides an audience-centric definition of the key strategic messages and communication objectives along the audience journey. The content strategy outlines all of the content needed to tell your stories – from ad sets, to blog posts, to presentations, to leadership comms, and more.

Our aim is to provide the biggest impact, addressing the needs, barriers and emotions of our audience. The Messaging Framework is a key input for creative teams when it comes to activating an idea along the journey. We can write the briefs for you, and even help develop the content.

Channel Planning

Using a variety of research partners and datasets, we are able to identify moments, channels, and behaviors that allow us to prioritize specific channels as being most advantageous for reaching the audience and executing against each need state in the buyer journey.

We can look at this by market, by audience subsegments, and by how they’ve interacted with the brand.

Go-to-Market Plan

A Go-To-Market (GTM) plan is a strategic blueprint we create with all the elements needed to launch a product, service, or brand into the market. The GTM is the whole package that encompasses everything from audience and market research to messaging, channels and assets needed, launch timing, and measurement and even testing. This ensures that every part of the organization is aligned and prepared for the launch.

Product Launch Strategy

A Product Launch Strategy and a Go-To-Market (GTM) Plan are closely related, but the product launch strategy is more tactical and focused on the execution of the product introduction. From a timing perspective, it focuses on the tease, the announcement or release, and the immediate amplification and PR/media outreach.

Measurement Strategy

The measurement strategy helps brands understand whether campaigns are achieving goals, how much return on investment (ROI), and where we might need to adjust the approach. We’ll look at benchmarks, expected KPI (Key Performance Indicators), testing plans, and ensure that creative is designed and implemented in a way that’s trackable against campaign goals.