Heart's Desire

I’ve always been rather proud of being arty. I did English at University- I'm bookish – love music, plays, and art. Maths has always been a rather alien thing to me- a language I don’t speak.

In the world of marketing, I’ve been suspicious of it too – the numbers game carries a whiff of exploitation about it. We’re the creative side of branding – we look to culture, to high and popular art for inspiration to create beautiful and useful things for brands to share with people. Let the number crunchers crunch away; it hasn’t got anything to do with me.

Over the last ten years, I’ve been slowly changing my mind. If my ambition is to understand and harness desire to make good choices desirable, then I need to find the most accurate and insightful ways of understanding people. The binary of left and right brains of arty or mathsy is an unhelpful nonsense – we need both. The result of this change of heart was the founding of Here Intelligence – an offer that uses big data to deliver audience intelligence, which in turn enables us to connect brilliant and bold design thinking to commercial growth.

Growth of all sorts, including influence, is a hard ask in our increasingly complex world. How can you drive it when there's increasing pressure to do more with less and when what worked today might not work tomorrow? The need for breakthrough ideas and thinking has never been greater, but few leaders are in the mood to use creativity for breakthrough growth, instead focusing on marginal gains and exercising extreme caution.

Moving beyond 'the way we've always done it' is tough. New and untested feels risky, and you need the business to commit and support you. This makes it easy to either get trapped in a cycle of inertia or feel like you're taking a blind leap of faith. The future IS uncertain (always has been, always will be). But we can navigate it by becoming more fluent in people. Who to focus on, what matters to them, and how to better engage them.

The opportunity has to be to put deep, actionable audience insight at the heart of business decision-making. Understanding who your priority audience segments are, what motivates them, and how to best connect with them provides a clear roadmap to inform all aspects of the business. Offering a way to navigate complexity, mitigate risk, and stimulate radical creativity.

At Here, we fundamentally believe the role of data and intelligence is to fuel and stimulate creativity rather than inhibit it. By providing clear direction and a simple set of parameters, brilliant creativity is able to flourish. Highlighting opportunities which stimulate creative thinking and removing levels of perceived risk that inhibit innovation and create barriers to change throughout an organisation.

Our approach is integrated: by combining cultural, qualitative and quantitative data we can deliver intelligence which is not only insightful but also useful throughout the business. Connecting creative inspiration to commercial outcomes.

Start with culture, not consumers

In our experience many businesses think they understand their audience but they actually don’t. The orthodox methodologies that most companies settle for are just too clunky and generalist to actually generate really useful insight: demographics are unreliable; behaviours don’t characterise why people do things and context is king.

Our integrated approach begins with semiotics - looking at the culture your audience is living in: The forces shaping their desires, beliefs, norms, behaviours. This helps create long-term relevance for brands through deep understanding of cultural context.

Find the people who actually matter

The cultural analysis is then used as the foundation of a quantitative audience segmentation. This is created via a questionnaire which covers the following areas: Demographics, Category needs & behaviours, Hobbies/interests, Media consumption, Current perceptions and relationship with the brand & market. We identify, quantify and profile groups of like-minded people based on the underlying needs which drive their category behaviours. Resulting in inspiring and actionable audience profile and portfolio mapping where we identify Brand fit, overlaps and white space opportunities.

Understand when and where people are reachable

We then run a 'moments' analysis to explore how context changes the behaviours of our target audience. Exploring how, when and where different audience profiles meet their needs and what influences their choices.

By capturing two ‘currencies’ of data 1. Underlying needs AND 2. how they will likely respond in different circumstances, we’re able to paint a richer picture of the market.

Map the growth opportunity

Lastly we apply this data to identify growth opportunities - where in the marketing funnel the growth opportunity lies for each segment. This shows us which segments to prioritise and how to target them based on the business challenges faced and enables us to develop a set of actionable and inspiring recommendations and opportunities across the portfolio.

Great design solves problems for people. But first, you have to properly diagnose what those problems are. That’s what Here Intelligence does: it connects creative ambition to commercial outcomes by starting with the clearest possible picture of the people you’re designing for. Not a demographic profile. Not a survey. A real, textured understanding of what people want and why.

Because if we’re serious about making good choices desirable, we have to know, with some precision, what the heart actually desires.

Want to know what your audience actually desires? So do we. Talk to us about Here Intelligence.