Newly Built Insights Community Serves as Driver of Business Operations

Gap Inc, Gap®, Banana Republic®, Old Navy®, Athleta® – have a continuous flow of learning needs. They needed their community to have a large enough membership to accommodate both qualitative and quantitative research and a diverse enough sample to include customers/prospects of each brand, offer depth in key opportunity segments, and include harder-to-reach target audiences.

Most critically – based on learnings from relationships with previous suppliers that came up short on consultative support – Gap sought a flexible workstyle that included true thought partnership on insights approaches, a blend of full-service and DIY capabilities, and a team that would earn their trust to become an extension of Gap’s internal team.

Finch Brands has delivered. We built a 20,000+ member insights community that ‘looks like’ Gap Inc.’s target audience – mirroring the opportunity across brands and segments. We nurture this community and serve its members to ensure continued health and vibrancy.

We work in depth with the Gap insights team daily – conducting full-service research, supporting their DIY efforts, and ensuring a vibrant/responsive/adaptive community experience for researcher and member alike.

In a typical month, Finch Brands/Gap will complete 10+ pieces of research – bringing the consumer into decisioning around style, marketing, brand, and other topics. Some of these projects are longer-term strategic studies, while others are unplanned rapid reads on key emerging topics.

In this effort, we leverage the full platform tool suite and have created new technologies for Gap’s use (such as a swipe right/left for ‘system 1’ consumer reactions). We’ve also conducted progressive in-person research for learning needs with more tactile elements.

As Gap Inc. seeks to put the consumer at the center of its revitalization, this insights community continues to be a fundamental data storehouse and on-demand learning capability. We are most proud of the strength and collaborative nature of the relationship.