Strong research doesn’t happen in isolation, but through conversation with the people who are affected by an issue, invested in its outcome, or closest to the realities that data alone can’t capture. Leading our projects with a Stakeholder Engagement meeting is what grounds the research by providing context, making it more relevant, and ultimately more useful to the organizations we serve. When the right people are brought into the process early, research becomes more meaningful and likely to generate the kind of buy-in that makes findings stick.
Translating Objectives in Actionable Insights
The types of RFPs we receive are a spectrum. Some are polished documents with clear objectives and well defined guidelines, while others require more interpretation to understand what will actually move the needle with shoppers. What’s true in both cases is that RFPs have gone through multiple rounds of editing, with different teams and departments each leaving their mark on the document before it reaches our inbox.
But just like any script that’s been through too many rewrites, things can get lost. Official documents are often built for approval, to reassure leadership and align stakeholders around a shared narrative. As language gets adjusted to build consensus, what can disappear is the harder, more important stuff: the real questions that haven’t been answered, the internal disagreements that haven’t been resolved, and the tensions that no one has quite found the words for yet.
That gap between what the RFP says and what the organization actually needs to know is exactly where stakeholder engagement does its most important work.
Our Approach
We gather the full cast connected to the project at hand: visual merchandising, store operations, real estate, marketing, and even store-level leadership, and bring them into the same room. The goal is to establish the key objectives and determine what data can support strategic decision making.
What are we really trying to understand?
What are the assumptions driving these objectives?
What are the disagreements simmering beneath the surface?
A question like ‘how effective is our new store layout’ can mean ten different things depending on who you ask.
In these sessions, we review the stated goals, but we also document the hypotheses, friction points, and context that shaped the objectives.
We’ve found that simply getting these voices into one conversation can be transformative. In more organizations of any size, it’s sometimes the first time colleagues have had the opportunity to work together. Research is an opportunity for a collaboration reset.. Teams begin to see the customer experience more holistically, and that shift can change the trajectory of decision-making.
These meetings bring to the surface the quiet disputes that are holding up progress. We act as a neutral third party, documenting the perspectives and translating them into researchable questions.
We design our studies to generate data that can prove the underlying hypotheses about how shoppers move, view, decide, and buy. When fieldwork is complete, the themes from that original stakeholder session become the backbone of our reporting. We’re not just presenting insights, we’re answering the questions that mattered most.
Insight Accountability
Our process is supplemented by additional workshops to support strategic planning informed from the research. Most of our projects are bookended by a Strategic Planning Workshop, bringing key decision-makers back to review the findings as a group. This is more working session than presentation, as we translate insights into next steps, prioritizing, mid, short and long-term priorities, and assign ownership for making change happen.
The real measure of research is not how elegantly it’s written or how a particular visualization jumps off the page. It is whether the insights drive action and sharpen decisions. Ultimately, it comes down to one question: how does it impact the shopper journey.
That is the arc we aim for with all our partners. In the end, the quality of our research depends on whether we are asking the right questions in the first place.
