Research that Builds Advantage
Deeply understanding your audience, category, and competitors lays the foundation for smarter strategy, more impactful marketing, and creative that resonates.
Start by getting to know the space you’re entering
Most marketing problems aren't creative problems. They're research problems. When you begin with brand, audience, and category insights, every strategy, media plan, and creative decision is grounded in real data. This means the work doesn’t just sound great, it’s tested.
Case Studies
Every campaign built on assumptions carries hidden risk — wasted spend, misaligned messaging, missed audiences. We find out what you're missing before it shows up in your results.
Research doesn’t just support the strategy. It becomes it.
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Brand Awareness & Perception Tracking
Know where your brand stands. Our research studies and perception data, including Brand Health Trackers, Competitor Audits, Brand Equity Studies and Social Listening Analyses, help you build a stronger brand from a position of clarity. Monitoring your place in the market means you know how you’re perceived, what’s shifting, and what needs to move.
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Audience Research
What drives your audience? Our research goes beyond demographics to understand motivation. Through Attitude and Usage (A&U) Studies, Audience Segmentation, Stakeholder Interviews, and Audience Persona development, we go deep on behavior, attitude, purchase intent, and decision journey, so your marketing speaks to real people, not averages.
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Market Research
Your markets’ needs are unique ― understanding your competitors, your requirements, and the right path forward is essential. Our market research uses qualitative studies, stakeholder interviews and data to quantify market opportunities, understand competitive landscapes and trends, and identify gaps and segmentation.
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Audience Development
We turn audience and market data into actionable personas that connect directly to your messaging strategy, creative, and media. Starting from the perspective of your target audiences and how they view your category and competition means you’re not just reaching people, you’re reaching the right ones at the right moment.
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Journey Mapping
Understand the moments that matter. Our research helps identify where your brand can best reach and influence your target audience. Examples include Customer Journey Mapping, Search Demand Analysis, Digital Day-in-the-Life Profiles. This directly fuels comms planning and content strategy.
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Custom Research
You need to understand your audience, the category and competitive landscape clearly – sometimes that requires a custom research approach. We’ll collaborate with you to design the recommendation and lead the program from start to finish.
Frequently Asked Questions
The questions we hear most ― answered directly, and without the runaround.
Market research focuses on the category — size, competitive landscape, white space, and opportunity. Audience research focuses on the people — their behaviors, attitudes, motivations, and decision journeys. Both are necessary. Market research tells you where to play. Audience research tells you how to win.
Brand research measures how your brand is currently perceived in the market — awareness, preference, positioning, and competitive standing. It matters before advertising because it reveals the gap between how you see your brand and how the market does. Campaigns built without that insight risk reinforcing the wrong message or reaching the wrong people. Research at Brunner isn’t a deliverable — it’s a foundation. Every finding from brand tracking, market sizing, or audience segmentation feeds directly into the brand strategy, positioning, messaging, and communications planning that follow. The research and the strategy are built in the same system, so nothing gets lost in translation.
We start with a kick-off discussion to better understand what your business goals and challenges are, and then develop a tailored research approach that fits your needs. Throughout the process we work together to gather insights and interpret what they mean for your business. Research collaboration could include stakeholder interviews, working sessions, reviews of current or previous research and discussions on what we discover. The goal is not to just gather information, but to align on what the insights reveal and how they should inform strategy, creative, and communications planning.
Yes, Brunner has primary and secondary research capabilities. For primary research we work with partners and in-house data scientists to deploy and interpret surveys, segmentation research, and brand health and AAU studies. For secondary research we have an arsenal of tools and in-house experts to provide market analysis, competitive reviews, social listening and evaluation of existing studies and data. These combined approaches allow us to gather direct sentiment and audience understanding while validating assumptions, identifying market opportunities and uncovering competitive whitespace.
Synthetic audiences are AI-powered models that replicate the characteristics, motivations, and behaviors of real audience segments based on research and data inputs. They are not a replacement for customer research, but they can help accelerate learning and test hypotheses more efficiently.
We use a combination of quantitative, qualitative, AI-powered and data science tools depending on the business challenge: • Quantitative surveys and online research panels • Brand health tracking and AAU studies • Customer satisfaction and experience research • Mixed Media Modeling • Market sizing and segmentation analysis • Concept and message testing • Competitive and social listening analysis • Proprietary tools that analyze large volumes of unstructured comments, reviews, and conversational data • AI powered modeling and synthetic audience training. The specific tools we use are always selected based on the business question we’re trying to answer, ensuring the research approach is tailored to each client’s goals.
Our Partners
We work with partners that make the whole system stronger. The right platforms surface better signals, move faster, and keep the work aligned from insight to proof.
