Morphological depth psychology
We do not just ask people what they think. We show why they think and act as they do. Morphological market psychology reconstructs the unconscious motives, emotional tensions and symbolic meanings that actually govern behaviour.
Understand why people buy.
The motives behind your audience's behaviour are out in the open, in language your team can work with.
Know what works before it ships.
Claim, concept and packaging go on the test bench while changes still cost nothing.
Know what to do next.
At the end there is a recommendation your team can start on Monday.
The structures behind the phenomena.
Standard interviews take statements literally, or weight them by gut feeling, and stay on the surface. Morphological analysis treats the first answer as an entry point on principle, and works with the turns in which the real drivers come out.
What first looks like a commodity turns out, on second look, to be attachment; what is justified rationally has archaic roots.
Making those structures visible is the standard we hold ourselves to, not describing what is obvious anyway.
Sharpening the question
A joint briefing in which the marketing question becomes a research question.
Study design
The methods are chosen to fit the question, not the other way round.
Fieldwork
Depth interviews, groups or observation in everyday life, led psychologically.
Morphological analysis
Interpretation in the research team, not by individual coding.
Findings and translation
Findings become recommendations, in a workshop with your team if you want one.
Our qualitative toolbox: the methods are chosen to fit the question, not the other way round.
In conversation
In depth interviews, consumers describe their own experience and behaviour in unusual detail. Our psychological interviewers make sure the conversation does not stop at the surface, but brings out connections that otherwise go unnoticed.
Group discussions allow us to decode the group effects that shape how opinions about products and brands are formed. The art lies in psychological moderation that steers the dynamic of the conversation in the right direction.
Interviewing friends and acquaintances together in a paired session makes it possible to go into individual perspectives in detail while sparking a discussion in familiar surroundings.
Consumer experience is governed by inner images that are often unconscious and hard to put into words. Collage work, picture sorting and similar techniques make those images accessible. Our moderators analyse together with the participants what the image associations mean.
Children experience a classic interview like a school exam and rationalise. So we adapted a diagnostic method from child therapy for brand research: children act out scenes with figurines, and what expresses itself unconsciously in the play becomes analysable.
In everyday life
Interviews in the home make it possible to follow everyday product rituals in more detail than a test studio ever could.
In our own research apartment we recreate the in-home situation and let participants feel as if they were at home.
Particularly suited to store and promotion research: accompanied interviews while shopping capture exactly what guides and influences consumers during the purchase process.
In our experience, B2B interviews work better when participants are interviewed at their own workplace. There the interviewers see live what actually determines the workflows.
Tasks set before the interview and diaries kept alongside it capture usage routines where they happen, and over a period of time. The material becomes the basis for the later conversation and opens up habits nobody recalls spontaneously in an interview.
Morphology
Using the tool of motive-impact units, we decode which unconscious drivers sit behind consumption behaviour. The result is insights that guide how an audience is addressed and how products and brands are oriented.
Out of ethnographic motive research we develop case-specific segmentation models that distinguish between audience personas, forms of product use or modes of purchase decision. They are the basis for setting strategic direction.
What makes up the meaning of brands in everyday life, how they work as brand personalities, how far they move deep-rooted brand myths and what their further development demands: our decoding tools open all of that up.
We decode how advertising media, formats and channels produce and steer messages, and which message actually reaches consumers. From that come concrete recommendations for improving the creative.
A dedicated set of tools analyses the processes of purchase decision and product experience in fine detail. The findings on touchpoints and critical incidents serve to address the phases of the purchase process better and to strengthen loyalty.
Digital
Consumers are used to exchanging product experiences at length in forums and on social media. With online panels we put that culture of communication to work for research.
Where participants are hard to reach or widely spread out geographically, these formats have advantages over face to face. With adapted interviewing, we achieve a high degree of closeness despite the online distance.
Our web user research goes beyond classic usability and UX research, because in the sessions we capture the psychological dimension of interacting with websites and online stores. We also use eye tracking, where the gaze recording becomes the basis for depth exploration.
We analyse what consumers write about products and brands unprompted. That reveals the unconscious themes and sore points of a market without a question setting them up.
Smartphone apps make it possible to track location data while shopping. Interviews on shopping experience and store experience can then be aimed more precisely, using visit frequency, visit times and follow-up activities.
