Fundamental research

Fundamental research means observing customers and listening to their stories. What moves them? What do they dream of? What do they feel? 

The insights you get from fundamental research are a great basis to design new concepts and the future of your business. This has a simple reason: deeper-lying customer needs are very constant. So when you build on them, your product will not just be relevant now, but for years to come. 

What does fundamental research look like?

Fundamental research comes in many forms. But it follows the same structure.

Typically, we start off with a diary study to warm participants up. We have them do a few assignments before they come to our (online) lab for the interview. It gives us a first impression and puts the topic at the top of the participant’s mind — this gives more depth to stories they share later on.

After the diary study, we usually do group interviews, individual in-depth interviews, or in-context interviews. We use input from the diary study, do creative exercises, and trigger people with images and words to discover deeper-lying stories and experiences.

We can’t observe or interview hundreds of people face to face. So, if we’re still in doubt after the interviews, we send out online surveys to add priority and nuance to insights.

Once we’ve collected all the insights, we make them accessible through, for instance, customer journeys or stereotypes. Both give a deep, short, and sweet understanding of your audience and help you connect your product to their world.

When your fundamental research is done, you have a solid basis to come up with new ideas and explore them in more detail.

We know how to get to the bottom of things

We’ve been doing fundamental research for over a decade. We helped established companies like Eneco and PostNL rebuild strategies based on insight. But we also helped start-ups like Soulpicks create their proposition from the jump.