consumer-research
(15)
The Advertising Agency That Refused to Sell Time
Firehouse built its reputation on an awkward proposition: the best advertisement may begin with changing the business itself. One car dealer, four months of research and a pandemic made the case.
The Ad Agency That Still Rides the Milk Truck
For 50 years, Lawrence & Schiller has sold a simple, expensive habit: go close enough to the customer that the useful truth becomes impossible to miss.
The Ad Agency That Found 92% of America Hiding in Plain Sight
Bailey Lauerman spent decades being told that Omaha was far from the action. Then it made distance from America’s biggest cities the product - and built an agency around the people marketers fly over.
The Agency Between the Ingredient and the Aisle
MarketPlace built a business in the narrow, consequential gap between what a nutrition product does and why anyone should care. Its advantage is not louder advertising. It is knowing the molecule, the buyer, and the shelf at the same time.
The Agency That Waits for the Audience to Move
BCH sells advertising, but its more interesting product is a change of mind: the moment a client stops talking to the audience it remembers and starts watching the audience that actually exists.
The Agency That Asked Why Mothers Bought the Wrong Formula
Christie & Co has spent three decades selling purpose without pretending purpose sells itself. Its best tool is not a slogan, but a deceptively simple question: what actually made you choose?
Procter & Gamble
The company behind Tide, Pampers and Gillette has spent nearly 190 years turning tiny household frustrations into repeat purchases. Its real product is a system for making ordinary things feel worth choosing again.
Manish Shrivastava
At PulteGroup, Manish Shrivastava turned a career built on brands and shopper behavior toward a purchase where price, place, design and identity arrive in the same decision. His work shows what marketing becomes when the product must be bought, built and then inhabited.
Ranjan Kumar
Ranjan Kumar is a Bengaluru-based technology entrepreneur and the founder and CEO of Entropik, a Human Insights AI company he started in 2016 to reinvent the century-old market research industry. An IIT Kharagpur graduate who once headed business at Citrus Payment Solutions before its acquisition by PayU, he built Entropik around Emotion AI - facial coding, eye tracking and voice analysis - to read the subconscious signals behind consumer decisions. He is now building his next venture, DecisionX AI, and describes himself as a three-time founder.
Outrove
Outrove is a San Francisco AI company from Y Combinator's Summer 2025 batch, founded by Egyptian entrepreneurs Saif Elhager and Ahmed ElShireef. It launched as an AI recruiter that sourced candidates and ran lifelike video and voice interviews, then pivoted to Sapien (asksapien.ai) - a platform that builds simulated populations of real people so companies, investors, and governments can test a pricing, product, campaign, or policy decision against how audiences will actually behave before committing to it.
Anne Hay
Anne Hay is EVP and Chief Marketing Officer at PayNearMe, a fintech company focused on frictionless bill payment and money movement. A journalist by training, she has spent more than two decades in B2B SaaS marketing, including 16 years in payments technology, building brand recognition and consumer research programs across bill pay, lending, iGaming and online sports betting. She was named to the 2023 FINITE Influential 30.
Populix
Populix is an Indonesian technology-driven consumer research company that connects businesses, academics and government bodies with a verified panel of more than 700,000 respondents across Indonesia. Founded in 2018 by Cambridge graduates Timothy Astandu and Eileen Kamtawijoyo, it blends a mobile respondent app, a self-serve survey platform (PopSurvey) and AI tooling (the NeXa research assistant and synthetic respondents) to deliver market, policy and society insights faster and more affordably than traditional survey agencies. The Jakarta-based firm has raised about $14.2M to date, most recently a $4.3M Series B in 2025.
Entropik
Entropik is a deep-tech company that builds a unified human insights platform powered by Emotion AI, Behavior AI, and Generative AI. Founded in 2016 in Bangalore, it uses facial coding, eye tracking, and voice AI - backed by 17 global patents - to decode why consumers make decisions, not just what they do. Its flagship products, Decode and Qatalyst, let brands run quantitative, qualitative, media, and shopper research at scale, replacing slow traditional market research with real-time, AI-driven insights used by companies like P&G, Nestle, and JP Morgan.
Native AI
Native AI is a New York-based market intelligence platform that uses generative AI to build 'Digital Twins' - AI-powered proxies of real consumers assembled from reviews, interviews, surveys and other first- and third-party data. Brands, agencies and market research firms use the platform to chat with clones of their target audience, track products and competitors across the web, and forecast consumer reactions in real time, compressing research timelines that once took weeks into minutes. Founded in 2019 by Frank Pica and Sarah Sanders, the company raised a $3.5M seed round in 2023 and says clients have generated over 275 million Digital Twins to date.
Anita Batho
Anita Batho is the Co-Founder and Principal at Torch (torch.com.au), a boutique brand strategy and innovation consultancy based in Sydney, Australia that has illuminated brand futures for blue-chip clients since 1999. Drawing on a career spanning consumer goods giants Unilever (Best Foods) and ICI Paints, and senior roles at Kantar, Anita built Torch into a respected agency known for immersive consumer research, bespoke brand workshops, and commercially grounded innovation work for clients including Arnott's, Telstra, PepsiCo, A2 Milk, Mercedes-Benz, and Moët Hennessy.