They needed to understand the behaviours and attitudes of their target audience before going out to market
A finance accounting tool was preparing to enter a new market and facing the problem every market-entry plan runs into: a product roadmap and a launch budget built on assumptions about a target audience nobody had actually tested.
The team knew who they thought they were selling to. What they didn't know, with any confidence, was:
• What actually frustrates this audience about the tools they already use
• What it would genuinely take to make them switch providers, versus what the product team assumed would matter
• Whether the messaging and campaign ideas in development would land, or just sound plausible in a planning meeting
We ran a mixed-method programme consisting of quant and qual with the actual target audience, designed to answer two different kinds of question that neither method could answer alone.
Qualitative: Conversations built to surface real pain points in their own words not the pain points the product team assumed were there, but the ones the audience actually lived with day to day using their current provider.
Quantitative: Once the real pain points were on the table, the quant stage tested which of them were widely felt versus which were loud but niche, and critically what would actually be enough to make this audience switch providers if the choice were in front of them. Not what sounds like a good reason to switch. What actually moves the decision.
The campaign test. Rather than hand over a findings deck and leave the creative team to interpret it, we tested the campaign material itself against the same audience before launch so the messaging going into market wasn't a best guess dressed up as strategy. It was already validated against the people it needed to persuade.
• Real switching triggers, not assumed ones. The team went into launch knowing precisely what would move this audience off their current provider and what wouldn't, no matter how good it sounded in a brief.
• Campaign material tested before spend, not after. Because the messaging was validated against the actual audience ahead of launch, the campaign didn't need a mid-flight rework once it went live.
• Sales in month one. The clarity from the research fed straight into go-to-market and the tested campaign helped drive sales from the first month of opening, rather than the usual slow ramp while a new-market campaign finds its footing.
• A defensible market-entry decision. Not a launch built on internal conviction, but one the team could point to and say: this is what the audience actually told us, and this is why the plan reflects it.
We came away from working with The Reality Department with a campaign we knew would work, they were great to work with, super approachable and made the whole experience actually fun!
No methodology, brief or perfectly formed problem required. Tell us what you're trying to understand or the decision you're facing.
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