Market Research Projects & Case Studies

Urgent pain: The retailer faced immediate risk of missed revenue because product mix, pricing/value messaging and the in‑store experience were not proven to resonate with U.S. international travelers.

As a duty‑free retailer operating at a major European airport, the client needed to understand U.S. travelers’ motivations, needs and purchase triggers for in‑airport food, cultural items and duty‑free goods. The research brief included MRS to focus on what specifically drives purchases so assortment, pricing and service could be tailored.

The stakes were clear: capture growing luxury and duty‑free spending, avoid lost sales from poorly targeted assortments and messaging, and create memorable retail experiences that drive purchases and repeat business.

Core question: How should the retailer change product assortment, pricing/value messaging and the in‑store experience to make duty‑free, food and cultural offerings more relevant and compelling to U.S. international travelers—and thereby increase relevance and sales among this high‑value segment?

Immediate pain point: Beiersdorf needed to validate an unmet 'underarm beauty' opportunity and determine how to create a deodorant—product, name, packaging and communications—that would truly resonate with 18–35 beauty‑oriented women across multiple countries, without being biased by existing brand or packaging cues.

We understood the pressure: the team faced an urgent go/no‑go decision. Investing in R&D and a global launch without clear cross‑country consumer insights risked missing the target audience or diluting NIVEA’s equity.

Framing question: Can cross‑country consumer insights identify a scalable 'underarm beauty' proposition and unbranded cues for product, naming, packaging and communications that will drive global growth and capture switching from other deodorant brands?

Immediate pain: A live Copilot product needed to be fast AND trusted — right away. Customers demanded speed plus control and reliable outcomes, but the team had no real-time evidence of what users would actually trust, use and pay for.

We empathise: launching quickly to secure market advantage left product, commercial and brand teams under intense pressure to act without guessing. The client (Sage; industry confidential) triggered urgent research after the Copilot launch to resolve this exact gap.

The core question to answer was clear: how can the team gather real-time customer evidence — including MRS and other signals — to prioritise fixes, protect adoption and safeguard revenue, UX and brand reputation?

1

Sage had launched Sage Copilot quickly to secure market advantage, but the live AI product faced a core challenge: customers needed to trust, control and rely on the assistant in real workflows. The team could not afford to iterate in hindsight — they needed real‑time insight to decide what users would actually trust, use, and pay for. The stakes were commercial adoption, product credibility (turning an early release into a trusted offering), and getting roadmap, pricing and go‑to‑market decisions right under live customer pressure.

Immediate pain point: The airport retailer risked missing a fast‑growing duty‑free opportunity among American international passengers because it lacked traveler‑specific insight into what drives purchase — an urgent gap that threatened luxury spend and market share.

As a confidential client in the travel retail/duty‑free sector, they urgently needed market research (MRS) to empathize with both business and leisure US travelers: to understand motivations, needs, spending levels, product preferences (food, cultural items, duty‑free, luxury vs mass) and perceptions of service so merchandising, service and messaging could be tailored.

Stakes & trigger: With rising duty‑free demand—particularly from US travelers and potential luxury spend—the retailer faced losing customers to better‑informed competitors and failing to create memorable experiences that drive purchase and post‑trip brand recall.

Core question: How can the retailer translate traveler motivations and purchase triggers into an optimized product mix, service model and messaging that captures growing duty‑free and luxury spend?

Immediate pain point: Without reliable observational and shopper-level insight, the client risked poor in-store execution and wasted merchandising investment just weeks before a global launch.

We empathized with the team — a confidential global client in the PC/tablet category under pressure to validate a newly developed merchandising system and build an improved merchandising platform prior to market entry and expansion. They needed a robust, global evidence base, including MRS and observational shopper-level research, to predict real-world performance across diverse markets.

Stakes were high: ineffective POS/messaging, diminished launch performance, and lost merchandising ROI. The central question: how could they ensure consistent, high-impact in-store execution and messaging across key and emerging markets without comprehensive, shopper-level evidence?

A client working with a global pharmaceutical corporation needed reliable, comparable patient-reported data about opioid‑induced constipation across six countries in North America and Western/Northern Europe. The challenge was to recruit and survey a sensitive patient population (chronic pain patients on opioid therapy) across multiple languages and markets, localize medication lists and wording for each country, coordinate simultaneous fieldwork across time zones, and deliver analyzed results on a tight timeline so the client could act on the findings.

Immediate pain: Soupergirl’s pre-made soup packaging wasn’t strong enough to achieve shelf standout in mainstream retail — threatening the success of a planned retail expansion.

As a growing CPG brand in the vegan/kosher soup category, Soupergirl faced the urgent need to understand and convert a largely millennial-female audience but lacked clarity on the consumer path-to-purchase and online shopping journeys. The trigger for research was explicit: before pursuing distribution in larger retailers, the team needed evidence that packaging and digital experiences would drive visibility, loyalty, and sales.

Stakes were high — weaker packaging and unclear ecommerce flows risked higher site bounce rates, reduced shelf visibility, and missed distribution opportunities. The core problem we set out to solve: how can Soupergirl optimize packaging and the digital path-to-purchase, informed by focused market research (MRS), to increase shelf standout, lower bounce, and secure placement in mainstream retail?

Immediate pain: the only input from the client was a single, cryptic token — "умцум" — leaving the research team with no clear objectives and blocking all progress.

We empathize: it’s stressful to face tight timelines and decision pressure when the brief is effectively blank. The client is confidential/unspecified and their industry is not provided, so there’s no context on users, markets, or KPIs.

Stakes are high: without clarification, product decisions, budgets, and launch schedules risk being delayed or misinformed. How can we design a rigorous study or included MRS when the trigger for research is only an ambiguous string? The rest of this case study shows how we resolved that exact problem.

Immediate pain: Fraudulent or inauthentic respondents were threatening the integrity of live quantitative projects.

After bringing data collection and fieldwork in-house, Quadrant Strategies — a market research firm delivering strategic, decision-making insights for large clients (including many Fortune 50 companies) — needed to ensure that respondents entering their quantitative projects were authentic and that incoming data arrived clean, without time-consuming manual back-end cleaning. This created urgent pressure on scarce analyst time and risked eroding client trust and the firm’s reputation.

With priorities around respondent authentication, fraud detection, sample quality, and overall data quality in their MRS workflow, the core question was clear: how could Quadrant guarantee authentic, clean sample for their quantitative research without relying on manual cleanup that slows delivery and jeopardizes client confidence?

123123