Market Research Projects & Case Studies

The challenge: Steering a restage in real time

A leading financial services brand launched a bold restage: a new name, a new visual system, and an integrated campaign debuting at a major national event. The stakes were high. The restage had to protect existing brand equity while building cultural relevance fast.

Traditional tracking couldn’t keep up. It was too slow and too siloed to pick up early signals, read sentiment in context, or explain which audiences and messages were landing. The brand needed evidence it could steer with while the campaign was live, not months after.

The challenge: Brand trackers that measure every category the same way

Most brand trackers apply one model to every category. Awareness, consideration, NPS, the same funnel whether you’re selling a car or a bag of chips. But categories don’t behave the same way. 51% of snack purchases are spontaneous. For cars, it’s 5%.

When a tracker can’t see that difference, it can’t tell you what’s actually driving choice. Teams end up with dashboards full of metrics and no clear direction on what to do next. We set out to prove the difference with data.

Toluna's Data Visualization team faced a heavy operational burden producing recurring multi-market, multi-category tracker reports. Although report structures were consistent, the process required manual copying of input files into PowerPoint, updating charts and proofing each output. Across nine projects this consumed ~235 hours (about 31 working days), creating risk of manual error and leaving little time for analysis and client-facing insight.

A leading global syrup brand wanted to know which coffee and syrup combinations consumers and professionals prefer, and whether those preferences hold across two very different coffee cultures. What works in a flat white in Shoreditch may fall flat in Soho, New York: sweetness expectations, the flavours baristas reach for and the way syrups interact with local coffee styles all shift across the Atlantic. The client needed evidence to shape its flavour portfolio, product development roadmap and go-to-market positioning in the UK and the US, not a simple preference ranking.

Amazon Prime Video could see viewing hours, completion rates and platform switching across its global user base, but not the context: why a thirteen-year-old in Tokyo opens YouTube instead of Prime Video after school, what happens on the sofa when a family in Minneapolis sits down for a film, how a German teenager discovers new content and what part friends, algorithms and cultural moments play. The brief was to understand the full entertainment journey of teenagers, from discovery to sharing, and how parents experience the same landscape, across three culturally distinct markets.

A global consulting firm working with Ajinomoto, Japan's leading seasoning manufacturer, needed to know whether a flagship MSG seasoning could find a place in Egyptian kitchens, a market with limited official data, a culinary culture built on generations of family recipes and strong loyalty to local brands. Desk research and surveys could not show how Egyptian households and professional chefs use seasonings, what drives their preferences, or whether there was real appetite for an international product. The decision at stake was the market entry itself: positioning, channels, pricing and timing.

A celebrated London restaurant group ran two concepts under one brand: a flagship dining room with real cultural cachet and a smaller, more intimate bar. Both were thriving in London and the group was planning to open in several new UK cities. The data could not answer the questions that mattered: do guests see the two concepts as one brand or as two destinations, what drives the choice of the bar over the restaurant on a Friday night, and would the equity built in London travel to cities where neither concept existed? The group needed to hear it from guests in the moment, while the experience was still fresh.

A brand strategy consultancy asked MindMarket to test a major rebrand for one of the world’s largest asset managers with the actual decision-makers who hire asset managers: CIOs, Heads of Fixed Income at pension funds and insurers, top-tier consultants, fund selectors and private-bank gatekeepers across seven markets (USA, UK, Germany, Switzerland, Hong Kong, Japan, Taiwan). These audiences are highly protected (assistants, compliance, booked calendars) and the required profile filters produced an incidence below 2%. The stake: the client needed a definitive answer that the rebrand would not block mandates and needed market-by-market, audience-specific guidance to decide whether and how to launch.

Kadence International needed reliable, high-quality multilingual support for market research — including survey localisation, transcription of interviews/open-ends, and verbatim/open‑end coding — while meeting tight timelines across multiple languages. The stakes were delivering accurate, culturally-appropriate research outputs on time (to preserve data integrity and client timelines) and scaling localisation workflows without adding overhead for Kadence project teams.

Ipsos needed accurate, timely transcripts and coded outputs from medical research sessions so moderators and analysts could derive reliable insights. The work had to be delivered quickly (turnarounds of 24–72 hours), handled by certified native specialists, and coordinated across multiple time zones while providing dependable support for Ipsos moderators and their end clients.

Hilton needed to deliver multilingual safety and security documents for its global properties on a tight schedule. The project required large-volume translation/localization while maintaining consistent terminology, culturally appropriate local variants, and print-ready formatting — all to protect guest safety, meet local regulatory/compliance requirements, and preserve brand trust.

Inbox Insight needed to publish weekly thought‑leadership content across EMEA in multiple languages. They required a fast, repeatable multilingual workflow that could handle regular weekly batches, control costs across many language pairs, and scale for larger, more complex EMEA projects. If not solved, the client risked missed publication deadlines, inconsistent messaging across markets, higher translation overheads and loss of regional audience engagement.