Discover What They Love (Or HAte)

Dark horses don’t trust anecdotes, convenience polls, or loud complaints. Dark Horses know that the majority of their customers won’t volunteer their reasons for considering an alternative, and they are savvy enough to insist on more than polite excuses. And here’s ways we might help: 

  • Deep-Dive Qualitative Discovery
    Designed for digging into brand and offer perceptions; includes in-depth interviews, digital focus groups, and live in-person or remote user testing to help you truly understand your target audience—an ideal place to begin if your brand value or product value proposition is not crystal clear.

  • Quantitative Brand Engagement Monitoring
    Tracking the ongoing effects of your organization’s decisions on customer and stakeholder engagement, based on regular representative surveys of your current customer segments.

  • DEEP Lightspeed Insight™
    Leveraging our proprietary, high-quality market research community platform, we can deliver emotionally powerful, narrative-based insights on nearly any topic imaginable, filtered to your target audience(s), typically within 2 weeks from project approval — FAR more affordably than a full-scale primary research study.** If you just have one or two questions (typically fewer than 5), don’t pay for a gigantic standalone research study!

    • Ideal for testing a single item: creative collateral, name options, product/concept resonance, felt needs, choice factors, rejection factors, etc.

    • **If your target audience is highly niche, an additional week may be required.

know your territory

Depending on the size and specificity of the group or audience you need to understand and reach, we can design the most cost-effective plan for getting you actionable, empathetic insight into what matters to those you seek to serve. How we might help:

  • Customer Satisfaction Tracking
    Based on valid samples of your customers, this vital business feedback empowers leadership to monitor and understand how the customer experience is being perceived—and to predict future customer churn and loyalty; at its best, a customer satisfaction (CSAT) data program can be used by leadership to quickly diagnose possible opportunities or threats to long-term value in the marketplace.

  • Target Audience Segmentation
    Typically building on qualitative findings or collective hypotheses, this quantitative process yields data-backed segmentation models that bring clarity into who specifically to target and with what tailored messages or benefits; depending on the purpose, predictive segmentation modeling and optional typing tool development is available. Note: database segmentation and target market segmentation serve different organizational objectives. Click here to learn more about the types segmentation.

  • Focused Qualitative Exploration
    An intense, extended and exploratory interaction (group or individual, ethnographic or facilitated) with carefully screened and selected target customers who will help us unpack their true desires, perceptions, aspirations, barriers to consideration, and potential points of resonance. May be virtual or in-person fieldwork.

  • Market Sizing & Feasibility Testing
    Based on representative survey samples of qualified audiences, this research process is designed to help you identify the size of your total potential market, the number of likely considerants in that market, and their quantifiable level of enthusiasm and likelihood to purchase your offering or service.

  • Market Research Online Community (MROC)
    A dedicated, purposefully-sampled qualitative research community comprised of current customers, target customers, or a strategic mix of both. It can provide (near) real-time insight and feedback on your proposed products, offers, features, messaging and more; especially useful for organizations developing significant new products or content over an extended period of time.

Measure Your Impact

Dark Horse organizations aren’t waiting for their customers to demand ROI. Instead, they pursue a growth mindset. They hold themselves accountable for outcomes, explicitly defining their goals and implementing sound methods for the measurement and reporting that set them apart. How we might help:

  • Impact Measurement
    Based on periodic representative survey samples, this service determines the presence, nature, and level of positive or negative impact, as well as the satisfaction and outcomes.

  • Predictive Instrument Development
    Based on the complete theoretical set of intended outcomes and potential outcome drivers, we can enable your organization to claim the long-term expected outcome of the actions you are taking today. (You won’t have to wait three years to take credit for the good work you’re doing now.) This type of research equips you with proprietary, data-backed models that substantiate impact claims, as well as perceptions of thought leadership.