The method fits the question – never the other way around. From concept tests to conjoint, and from satisfaction to segmentation, we build the study that answers what you actually need to know.
We choose the method to fit the question – quantitative, qualitative, or mixed designs combining both – and build in Qualtrics and NVivo, the industry standards for surveys and qualitative analysis.
The output is never just data. Every project ends in findings you can act on, whether that's a pricing decision, a service change, or evidence of how well a programme is working.
Careful design gets you the right method at the right price. And when a project needs specific expertise beyond our team, an established practitioner network brings it in.
Most of a project's cost and quality is determined at the design stage – the method, the sample, the questions. We get those decisions right before fieldwork starts, so you're not paying for data you don't need or missing the data you do.
One senior team designs, manages and delivers your project from brief to final report. No handovers, no re-explaining your needs mid-project, and a single point of accountability throughout.
Free tools have made surveys easy to send – and easy to get wrong. A biased question, a leading scale or a poorly structured questionnaire produces confident-looking numbers that mislead. The craft of survey design hasn't changed: questions must be neutral, formats deliberate, completion easy, and analysis planned before invitations are sent.
We design and build in Qualtrics – the platform used by 99 of the top 100 business schools. When your project needs respondents at scale, we draw on 10 million survey panellists across more than 40 countries. When it needs local voices – your customers, your community, your region – we get them.
Numbers mislead when analysis stops at percentages. We test what the data can actually support – whether differences between groups are real or noise, which factors genuinely drive satisfaction, how much weight a subsample can bear – using the appropriate statistical methods, not just descriptive summaries.
Then we translate. Findings arrive in plain language a board, management team, or council committee can act on – with the statistics supporting them, not instead of them.
Interview transcripts, free-text survey responses, focus group discussions – qualitative data contains the why behind your numbers, and it's the data most often wasted. Our analysts code it properly, theme by theme and topic by topic, and tell you not just what people are saying but who is saying it and how strongly.
The result gets to the heart of what matters to people – reported as clearly as our quantitative findings.
A report is value for money if the right people read it, understand it, and act on it. We write for that outcome – findings first, plain language throughout, and the evidence visible behind every claim.
Quantitative and qualitative results are woven into a single narrative, not delivered in parallel, and the format fits the project and audience: full technical reports for the project team, summaries for executives and boards, infographics for the widest audience.
Click the headings below for more information.
Before customers can choose you, they have to think of you. Brand awareness studies measure exactly that: who recalls your brand unprompted, who recognises it when prompted, and what they associate with it – against the competitors fighting for the same recall.
Measured once, that's a benchmark. Measured over time, it shows whether your marketing is actually moving the needle – we've tracked brand awareness annually for Médecins Sans Frontières in New Zealand since 2016.
Ask people what they want or value and they'll say everything. Ask them to choose between realistic alternatives – this product at this price against that one at that price – and their trade-offs reveal what they'll actually pay for. That's conjoint analysis: complete product profiles, forced choices, and statistical modelling that puts a number on the value of every feature and price point.
We design and run conjoint and discrete choice studies for pricing, product development and service design – telling you not just what customers prefer, but how much preference each feature buys – whether you're launching something new or repricing an existing product.
A complaint that reaches you directly is a gift, because the same complaint on a review site is a cost. A customer experience programme gives customers a direct channel for feedback, positive and negative, so problems surface where you can fix them and successes surface where you can repeat them.
We design and run the whole programme: the feedback channels, the ongoing analysis, and reporting that shows you where customers are frustrated, where you're winning, and what to change. Run continuously, it becomes an early-warning system rather than an annual surprise.
We've run exactly this for the Patterson Hospitality Group for more than a decade – and their hotels' public scores tell the story on TripAdvisor: Queenstown Park Boutique Hotel consistently ranks number one in Queenstown, with the Commodore Airport Hotel and Hotel Montreal both within the top four in Christchurch.
Satisfaction surveys answer the question every business should be asking on repeat: how are we doing, and where are we falling short? Done well, they pinpoint which parts of the experience drive loyalty and which drive customers away – not just an overall score.
We've run continuous satisfaction tracking for electricity suppliers, public transport providers, hospitality and travel businesses since 2013, which is long enough to know the craft: questions that get to the heart of the issues, samples that represent your actual customers, and reporting that separates real change from noise.
Trying hard is not good enough – and that's the starting point for good evaluation. Programmes can be busy – outputs delivered, budgets spent – without anyone being better off, and only evaluation tells you the difference. A good evaluation asks Mark Friedman's three questions in the right order: how much did we do, how well did we do it, and is anyone better off?
We design evaluations to fit the initiative: baseline and follow-up measurement, stakeholder and participant research, and analysis that distinguishes the programme's effect from everything else that changed. Findings arrive in time to inform the next decision, not after it.
Organisations forget what they already know – past surveys, previous consultations, years of call centre conversations. We call it organisational amnesia, and it's expensive: evidence you've already paid for, sitting unused while new research is commissioned. Before a major project, or instead of one, we establish what's already known – from your own records and the published research – where it's strong, and where the genuine gaps are.
We deliver this at two depths: a rapid scan to orient a project team, or a full structured review to underpin a business case or policy position.
Sometimes humans just work better in groups. A well-run focus group produces more than the sum of its parts: participants build on each other's ideas, challenge them, and take them somewhere no questionnaire would have gone.
Our moderators keep the discussion on topic while leaving room for the unexpected, and make sure every voice contributes – not just the loudest. Focus groups are often the fastest route to rich feedback, and frequently the first step in a multi-stage research design.
NPS asks one deceptively simple question – how likely are you to recommend us? – and its value depends on asking it at the right moments. Transactional NPS measures a specific interaction, straight after it happens. Relational NPS measures the overall relationship, tracked at regular intervals.
We design NPS programmes that do both, placed at the contact points that matter in your customer journey – and we analyse the "why" behind the scores, because the number alone tells you where you stand, not what to fix.
Everything that makes focus groups work – ideas building on ideas – can happen in a virtual room, without the cost and logistics of getting everyone to one place. Online groups suit dispersed participants, busy professionals, and topics people discuss more freely from home.
They're not always the right call, and we'll tell you when they're not. Where they are, we moderate them with the same discipline as our in-person groups, and report just as quickly.
Phone surveys were once the standard method for random-sample data collection. In New Zealand and many comparable markets, however, they have become increasingly unreliable and cost-prohibitive relative to current alternatives.
The key limitations:
Sampling bias: mobile numbers are generally private and not publicly listed, making truly random sampling difficult. Landline use has declined significantly and is now concentrated among older households, meaning landline-based samples no longer represent the general population.
Low response rates: a large proportion of respondents do not answer calls from unknown numbers. Certain demographic groups, particularly younger adults and those in employment, are especially difficult to reach by phone, introducing further bias.
Cost: interviewer time and the need for multiple call attempts make phone surveys comparatively expensive per completed response.
Our recommendation: in most cases, we recommend modern approaches: online survey panels, address-based invitations, or mixed-method designs, which typically yield larger, more representative samples at lower cost. Research also indicates that many respondents prefer completing surveys online at a time of their choosing, which can improve data quality and consistency.
When phone surveys are the right approach: there are circumstances in which phone surveys remain the most suitable approach, for example, when replicating a prior study to ensure methodological consistency, or when the target population is best reached by phone (such as a defined business or interest community). In such cases, we are well placed to deliver a robust phone survey programme tailored to your specific objectives.
Before an expensive production run or service launch, test the idea on the people who'll buy it. Concept and product testing puts your product, prototype or proposition in front of future customers and measures their response – to the form, the function, the price, the name.
We match the method to the stage: focus groups and workshops for early concepts, structured testing and surveys closer to launch. You find the problems while they're still cheap to fix.
New Zealand provenance can command a premium – for food and primary-sector products especially, perceptions of quality, traceability and clean-green production are worth real money in export markets. But the premium varies by market and product, and guessing it wrong is expensive in both directions.
We test international demand and willingness to pay before you commit: what customers in the target market value about your product, what they'd pay, and how to position the New Zealand story.
Some things people only say one on one. Semi-structured interviews follow a designed question set that adapts to the conversation, which makes them the right tool for depth: expert views, sensitive topics, and the reasoning behind opinions that a survey can only record.
We design the questions, conduct the interviews, and analyse them thematically – delivering a comprehensive understanding of your topic in a report built for use, not just reading.
Workshops let a community or group work through an issue from multiple angles – and let every participant contribute in the way that suits them, whether that's discussion, writing or mapping. For complex topics, a designed series of exercises captures far more than a single conversation.
We handle all three stages: designing the exercises around your questions, facilitating on the day, and analysing everything captured into findings you can act on.
Tell us what you are facing – a decision, a survey, a pile of submissions. Within two business days, you'll have a candid view on the best way forward.
