Why and when we recommend research
Most clients come to us with a decision point, not a question. They know something is at stake—a name, a positioning, a creative launch—and they’re not sure their instincts are enough to bet on it. What they haven’t done yet, and what we do together first, is turn that worry into a question research can actually answer.
A lot of the research we do is woven into the strategy and naming work already underway for a client. But plenty of it stands on its own, helping managers assess brand health, understand what their audiences need and prefer, or test ideas before they ship. Our research work spans three areas:
Exploratory research is how you find the shape of an opportunity. It rarely drives a single decision. Instead, it helps you understand an environment or a context. It might be used to understand a category or a customer segment well enough to develop new concepts and opportunities for your brand. This is where motivations and attachment research and customer journey mapping earn their keep, and it’s often the early, generative work behind a naming project or a campaign. Exploratory research helps us understand the landscape.
Descriptive research closes gaps in knowledge. It helps you answer questions like how big each segment is and what differentiates them, where a brand stands this quarter, or how customers actually use what you sell. It manifests in segmentation studies, brand equity tracking, and attitude-and-usage research. It’s structured, repeatable, and built to give managers a reliable read on the territory they’re operating in.
Experimental research de-risks the decisions that matter most. It’s called experimental because it’s built on controlled comparison—linking a cause to an effect. Concept tests live here, along with name and identity validation. It answers questions like which creative direction moves intent to purchase, whether a new name actually outperforms the incumbent, how a change in positioning shifts preference. When a decision is expensive to get wrong, this is how you buy down the risk before committing the budget.
Method follows the question
We’re a mixed-methods team, which means we don’t start with a preference for qualitative or quantitative work. We start with the question and choose the method that answers it.
Qualitative research is the right call when the question is hard to categorize, or when the point is to let people use their own language to tell you what they need, feel, and experience. It’s how you surface hidden bias and the emotional connections people can’t easily put on a survey scale. It takes the form of depth interviews, dyads, focus groups, and observational methods like ethnography and user-experience testing.
Quantitative research is how you size, confirm, and compare. Survey research is the workhorse, but some of our most productive studies link survey responses to a client’s own first-party data—what customers say, set against what they actually do. Most of our quantitative work is tied to outcomes that matter: consideration, intent, loyalty, recommendation. The aim is to do more than describe customers.
And it’s frequently both. Exploratory designs lead with qual to open the aperture, then quantitative to draw inferences. Explanatory designs run the other way: the numbers flag something strange, and a round of conversations tells you why.
This is also why we’re cautious about out-of-the-box brand trackers. Many survey platforms ship with them, and they over-index on awareness and familiarity because those are the easiest things to ask. They’ll tell you a brand is known without telling you whether being known does any work. What they miss is structure—the relationships between brand associations and the behaviors that pay the bills. Modeling those links is the difference between a dashboard and a decision.
How a real project comes together
When Heirloom takes on a market research engagement, the work usually moves through seven stages:
Discovery: A structured process we facilitate, meeting with your team and stakeholders inside the organization to thoroughly understand the context, the salient issues, and the questions research can actually answer.
The research brief: We turn that understanding into a plan—what we’re measuring, who we’re talking to, and what a useful answer looks like. The brief is the contract between the question and the method.
Questionnaire or discussion guide: Customized to the modality. For a survey project, that means developing a comprehensive suite of questionnaires with implementation instructions; for qualitative work, it means setting pre-screening criteria to qualify respondents and building the discussion guides that direct moderators and field teams.
Recruiting and prep: Getting the right people in the sample or the room—the customers, prospects, and stakeholders whose answers bear on the decision. For quantitative work, it’s also about coding, testing, and confirming the instrument performs exactly as specified before anyone sees it.
Fieldwork: Running the interviews, fielding the survey, gathering the data.
Analysis and reporting: This is where experience pays off. Our senior research professionals have decades behind them—for qualitative studies, that means people who know how to code transcripts and conduct rigorous thematic analysis; for quantitative work, experienced data scientists who can ladder up from individual responses to statistically significant inferences about the population you’re studying.
Working sessions and executive briefings: Working sessions refine the story so it’s genuinely useful inside your organization. Executive briefings distill it down to the insights senior decision-makers need when they have limited time and want clear direction on what to do next.
One principle runs through all seven stages: we believe in reproducible research. Our process is rigorous, but it’s also transparent and thoroughly documented. This means a study can be understood, scrutinized, and replicated by anyone, not just us. Findings you can’t trace are findings you have to take on faith, and a brand decision is too important for that.
Not too long ago, we worked with a technology company in the life sciences—a firm whose diagnostic and screening tools help physicians detect and treat cancer and other genetic diseases. They had built real credibility in the market, but their parent brand wasn’t carrying the weight it should. The work began in qualitative. We conducted in-depth interviews across the full constellation of people who shape how the brand is understood—patients, primary care physicians, oncologists, payers, and government collaborators—each with a different stake and a different vocabulary for what the company does. Those conversations gave the client the raw material to develop several positioning alternatives, which were first vetted internally with employees. From there the study moved into two quantitative stages. An experimental design let us measure the impact of each positioning concept against the KPIs that mattered—consideration, intent to prescribe, and the like—isolating which positions actually moved behavior. MaxDiff, a discrete-choice methodology, then linked the most important brand messages to those positions, so the client knew not just where to stand but what to say. The result was a sharpened brand message hierarchy and an optimal positioning for the parent brand—all earned through evidence.
The modalities and methods are how you describe research. But a sharp question, the right instrument, and an honest read of what the data means for your decision are how you actually do it. Get those right, and research stops being a cost center and becomes the engine that helps you grow your brand with confidence.
Have a brand decision you’re trying to de-risk? Get in touch.