Tanya Thomson, strategist: market and consumer research, brand strategy, business audits

Quantitative research answers “how many.” Qualitative research answers “why” and “how”: why a person chooses, hesitates and walks away, and how they actually make a decision. People rarely explain their choices the way they make them. In a survey, a person answers questions someone else already wrote for them, and answers sensibly. They buy for other reasons: trust, fatigue, fear of getting it wrong, wanting to feel a certain way. An in-depth interview gets to those reasons when a person opens up, and people open up to someone they trust. That’s why interviewing is partly an actor’s job: reading the other person, finding common ground, earning the right to candor. And listening closely enough to hear everything that’s said, including whatever breaks a beautiful hypothesis. Sometimes by the third interview it’s clear we’re talking to a different audience than the one the business thought it had. We split audiences into microsegments by behavior and motive. Two people of the same age and income often buy for opposite reasons. A conservative buyer looks for reassurance. Someone in the middle of changing their habits looks for a reason to switch. And the children of the blue planet, for whom caring about resources is simply how life works, spot fake eco-friendliness in a second. With kids we use game-based methods, and in other markets a native speaker runs the interviews using our guide. AI can’t replace this part of the work yet. Generative models improve an individual idea but make different people’s ideas more alike (Doshi & Hauser, Science Advances, 2024), while real empathy and reading between the lines of a conversation still take a human.

The business gets a grasp of what its audience truly needs: insights, barriers and motives, meaning a clear sense of who to tell what and what to offer.

The most expensive business decisions get made on autopilot. The project is already underway, the money is already in, and stopping feels more expensive than going on. An audit brings the decision back to the numbers, and here the numbers are on our side. We dig into the data to find patterns. A pattern is what tells a symptom from a cause. Falling sales, discounts, turnover and unhappy guests usually turn out to be symptoms. The cause more often lies in people, in processes, or in how something is set up at the foundation of the business. Almost always the question is how the business does things, and far less often what it does. Symptoms can sometimes be eased, and that’s a fair deal too. The cause is better found. Sometimes the most effective step sounds unexpected: it’s time for the owner to step out of day-to-day operations. A business that runs on the owner’s daily involvement grows exactly as far as the owner’s energy goes, and the team next to them forgets how to make decisions. Sometimes the answer is a professional no. It’s the cheapest outcome a project can have and often the most valuable, because it stops the losses before they show up in the financial statements. This kind of audit suits a business that has already built up data.

The business gets a decision grounded in numbers and scenarios with clear limits.

New products usually get discussed on slides. Slides put up with anything: they never have empty screens, failed payments or buttons that go missing. Those questions surface later, once the development invoice is already out. A prototype clears that fog: you can walk through the scenario, click around and stumble. Arguing over a prototype like this is far more useful. It looks like the finished product, down to a 1:1 visual identity, and with a signature method the decisions are visible to everyone at once: options side by side, voting and comments right inside the prototype. We test the prototype on people: five users are enough to find most usability problems (Nielsen Norman Group). Then the team gets live components, tokens, rules and skills for its AI agents, and assembles the product like building blocks. That way the business tests a new product before committing a development budget, gives contractors a tender brief that’s hard to misread, and sees its visual identity in a live interface.

The business gets a tested hypothesis and decisions everyone involved is confident in.

A place stays alive as long as people have a reason to go there. Tenants follow foot traffic, and foot traffic follows a reason to come. If there’s no reason, it gets bought with ads and discounts. First for the opening, then for the season, then for every weekend, and so on for years. Bit by bit the place turns into a discounter, even though nobody planned it. Getting out of that game costs more than it seems. In 2012 J.C. Penney dropped coupons and sales in favor of fair everyday prices, and within a year revenue fell by a quarter and the CEO was replaced (Knowledge at Wharton). So we build a place’s concept around a reason to come that doesn’t need to be bought. Program and tenant mix, clusters, anchors, a free point of entry, a backstory, sensory experience, scenarios for different generations. Offline is strong here: trust in advertising is falling, while live experience and touch are coming back into marketing. We compare several concepts, because the first one is rarely the best.

The business gets a tenant mix logic that the architect, the broker and the sales team can all rely on.

Old buildings and industrial sites are usually judged by the square meter and by what’s trendy to open right now. That’s how you get lofts and clusters that all look alike and then spend years hunting for tenants. Yet an old place has what a new one doesn’t: history, scale, character, and the people around it who remember it. None of that shows up in the numbers, even though it’s exactly what gives people a reason to come. Jane Jacobs wrote about this back in 1961: new ideas need old buildings (The Death and Life of Great American Cities). So we start with what the place already is and what it could become for the neighborhood, the city and the business. We study archives, the market, similar places around the world, the context all the way up to regional strategy, and the people who will come here. We look at how the neighborhood lives and which desire paths people have already worn into it. We compare several concepts across a wide range, from a creative cluster to a car wash: it all depends on the owner’s goals and financial targets. Often the best answer turns out to be a mix. For a 1912 stock exchange building, the concept came together during the pandemic, when nobody knew what would happen next: experts and analysts said opposite things, and the market sent mixed signals for all kinds of reasons, some of them entirely subjective. There was no marketing budget. The concept was built on a close study of European experience: zoning for different scenarios, a point of attraction people come to on their own, and the legend of the building itself, where the wine cellar once served as a jail cell. Sometimes the honest conclusion is different: the place needs another format, and the project needs another site. That’s a result too, and it saves money.

The business gets a concept in which the place’s age works in its favor, and clarity on what to base the numbers on.

Branding often ends with a brand book full of mockups nobody opens. A billboard, a mug, a business card on marble: all beautiful, and almost none of it works. Good branding sets the flow of communication: what the business talks about, to whom, and in what voice. And it makes that conversation last for years. Slides show up in this work when they help get an idea across to the people at the table, and the people at meetings vary. We go in this order: name, then identity and touchpoints, then brand strategy, which branding grows into over the long run. Positioning has to pass two tests. The first comes from the competitor across the street: if the neighbor can repeat the promise, the buyer chooses on price. The second comes from the business itself: can the team keep that promise, prove it and back it up every day. You can make up anything. People sense fakeness, especially now, and stop listening without even noticing. On top of that, brands are more and more often met in a summary. According to Bain, 80% of search users rely on AI answers for at least 40% of their searches without clicking through to a website (Bain & Company, 2025). An abstract brand is the first to vanish in that summary, and a concrete one stays. We treat constraints as raw material. The project isn’t in a prime location, there’s no budget, the product can’t be changed: out of that comes a position no one can copy. We build risk-adjusted scenarios, so that boldness has limits. Constraints have a good track record in history. For Star Wars, no effects studio in Hollywood could pull off what was planned, so Lucas built his own in an old warehouse (D23). That’s how Industrial Light & Magic was born, and the Millennium Falcon grew out of a stack of dirty dishes in an artist’s sink (TV Insider). The most valuable thing at the end of this work is called vision. It’s an understanding of what we’re doing and why, so shared across the team that nobody needs to retell it.

The business gets a name, a system and a strategy the team can use on its own.

Briefs usually get written at the last minute: pieced together from old documents or pulled from a template online. The contractor honestly answers what’s written, and the business gets an answer to a question it never asked. Hence the age-old “garbage in, garbage out” and that cartoon of the tree swing, where all the customer needed was a tire on a rope. When a brief misses the main point, tender bids get compared on price, and the cheapest or most beautifully pitched one wins. According to PMI, almost half of the projects that miss their goals stumble over inaccurate requirements (PMI, 2014). A good brief says who needs convincing, who needs entertaining, and how everyone will know it worked. We translate the owner’s goals into the language of the architect, the branding agency, the events or digital contractor, put together a shortlist and pick the proposals apart: where the numbers hold up, and where a strong pitch has no answer to the task behind it. Experience on both sides, as client and as contractor, tells us which questions contractors are too shy to ask. Both sides choose, and half of the success stays with the client: keeping deadlines and not letting approvals go in circles.

The business gets a brief contractors answer to the point, and a choice it can explain with logic and numbers.

A model that works at home moves to a new market along with its assumptions and stereotypes. Some of what’s been tried and tested will work there too. Some of it will break at the very first meeting. So we take a meta-position and look at the business and the new market at once, from above. First we figure out what the market is: its conditions, its media landscape, how it tends to receive foreign businesses, who really makes the buying decision, and what local clients are already spoiled by. Then we hold the business’s experience up against all that: which hypotheses and habitual moves carry over, which need rebuilding, and which are better left at home. Strong brands lose in new markets most often on small things. They underestimated the role of coffee in the local culture. They didn’t expect competitors to be better packaged in service and aesthetics than it looked from home. Entering a new market is three different stories for a developer, an equipment supplier and a clothing brand, so we build the path for each specific business.

The business sees where the fog and the risks are before the team’s budget goes into the new market.

A good project keeps living after the strategist leaves. That takes a methodology: it explains to people how to keep working with the result without outside help. Engineers need criteria to make decisions on floor plans. The sales team needs a playbook: what to say, to whom, and why. A mall’s management company needs a methodology for building community and choosing tenants. HR needs criteria for who to hire under the new strategy. After in-depth interviews, a methodology shows how to turn knowledge about the audience into everyday decisions. We write these documents and train the team to work with them. Separately, the team gets guides and prompts so its AI tools carry on the work with the same logic and in the same voice. AI is great at scaling what’s already been found and bad at finding hidden motives, so it belongs at the end of the road.

The business gets a system that holds up without us, and a team that understands why the decision is what it is.

A strategy session is a complex tool, and there’s no one-size-fits-all script for it. The lineup is different every time: the owner with the top team, the team without the owner, partners, several departments whose interests have drifted apart. The reasons vary too. The team is demotivated. You need to see how people actually interact, and sometimes see it more than once. One person is slowing down the shared effort, sometimes almost on purpose, sometimes without realizing it. Then we look for a way to make that person happy in their role, if that’s possible. If it isn’t, the owner gets grounds for a decision. Every session rests on the principle of partnership. Everyone involved has a stake in success to different degrees, and the session looks for the point where their interests meet. A good session shows in its results: decisions are on record, the criteria for choosing are clear, and people leave feeling heard.

The business gets a team that’s on the same page for real.

When a team isn’t delivering, the first instinct is to check the people. More often the problem lives in the process those people work inside. W. Edwards Deming, the man who taught Japanese industry quality, put it this way: 94% of problems belong to the system and only 6% to special causes (W. Edwards Deming, Out of the Crisis, 1982). So we see people as parts of a process that can fly or get stuck at each one of them. Figuring out what each employee’s hour costs is pointless in this work. Sometimes the answer is measured in meters and steps. The line at the bar grows, guests are unhappy, and the reason is that the bar station was designed awkwardly, so the barista takes extra steps from the espresso machine to the tools. Hundreds of times a shift. Teams know how to sabotage, and most often they do it unconsciously. Ownership shows up where people understand the rules and feel safe. Separate work is needed when a team is tired or has lost faith in the project: without it, new procedures won’t stick. This work has a side effect that makes it worth doing. People rediscover meaning in their work. They come to the first meeting reluctantly, to the third prepared, and sometimes excited. And suddenly the business finds the motivation to work on the task again.

The business gets processes that work for people, and a team that delivers again.