Communicating insights:
Marketing and visibility for brand-side research teams

You already did the hard part, the research is right. The harder part is getting a distracted, deadline-driven business to actually notice it, believe it, and change a decision because of it. That's not a research problem. It's a marketing problem, aimed inward, and it's the one we solve.

Your market isn't outside the building; it's down the corridor.

Every agency and supplier we work with is trying to be heard by an industry. Every brand-side insight team we work with is trying to be heard by their own organisation, and that can be harder. You're not competing with rival agencies for attention. You're competing with the sales deck due Thursday, the reorg nobody's talking about yet, and a stakeholder base that's read one too many 80-slide decks to open another one voluntarily.

The result, all too often: excellent work, quietly ignored. Not because it's wrong. Because it never had a fair fight for attention against everything else on someone's desk.

Why "just present it better" isn't the fix

Most insight teams' instinct, when work isn't landing, is to improve the deck. Sharper charts. Cleaner narrative. A better executive summary. All useful but none of it fixes the actual problem, which usually sits upstream of the presentation:

• Nobody outside the team really knows what you do. Stakeholders can't proactively come to you with a problem they don't know you can help solve.

• The findings arrive once and disappear. A single readout, however well delivered, competes against everything a stakeholder hears for the rest of the quarter. One moment of impact isn't a communications strategy.

• The team has no brand of its own. Insight teams, more often than not, are "that group who sends the surveys" a description that undersells everything they actually do.

Fixing this is a marketing job, not a bigger-slide-deck job. It's exactly the work we do for insight and research agencies, turned inward, at the people who most need to hear it: your own colleagues.

How we build it: F.A.M.E, aimed inward

Same model, same discipline, different audience. We start with a Foundational audit of how your insights currently travel through the business, what gets read, what gets ignored, and why. We segment the Audience properly: a CFO, a brand manager and a frontline sales lead need the same insight delivered three different ways, not one deck sent to all three. We build the Marketing; newsletters, videos, infographics, templates, a team identity that actually gets opened. And we Execute and track it, the same way any external campaign would be tracked, because "we sent it" is not the same as "it landed.

What that looks like in practice

• How to make your insights impossible for the business to ignore - building a communications cadence stakeholders actually look forward to

• Beyond storytelling: what actually lands with stakeholders — building on our "Beyond Storytelling" and "Fame Formula" thinking

• Benchmarking your insight team's communications — finding out, honestly, how your team compares before you fix anything

• Templates, style guides and training for insight analysts — giving your team the tools to communicate clearly without needing a designer on call

• Building a brand for your insight team — treating your team's internal reputation as a real asset, not an afterthought

• The 60/40 problem: why insight teams need marketing, not just great analysis — making the case internally for investing in how findings are communicated, not just how they're gathered

Proof, not promises

Coca-Cola EMEA
Spread across 18 markets, with low awareness and a knowledge-sharing platform nobody used, the Insight & Knowledge team asked us to help. We benchmarked their communications, tested six formats of internal comms, and rebuilt the strategy around what actually worked. Result: a 40%+ increase in traffic to the knowledge platform and direct conversations opened with stakeholders across the business. "They never, ever read the email!" — Head of Knowledge & Insights, EMEA

Adobe
The Brand Strategy and Customer Insights team wasn't getting the engagement their materials deserved. A benchmarking audit, interactive workshops and new templates helped them make reports, newsletters and presentations shorter, clearer, and more strategic. "This will encourage our team to go further and look at the real business implications." — Heather Coombs, Head of Strategy, Adobe

Merck
Data analysts had the skills but not the speed or confidence to turn analysis into clear, high-impact communications for marketing teams. A PowerPoint audit, a bespoke style guide, and one-to-one training for the full analytics team fixed both. "The style guide and training have been a big help, enabling the team to create consistent and clear presentations much faster." — Rebecca Forringer, Merck

Sanofi‍ ‍
Responding to the CEO's call for the organisation to be "more human, and more kind," we built a brand — Humankind — for the global CX Insights team's knowledge, with an ongoing content campaign reaching 2,000+ people across every discipline. "I'm very happy for us to show the organization that we are crazy elevating our creativity in how we tell our consumers' stories to inspire consumer-centricity!" — Seth Minsk, Sanofi

JPMC Insights
We facilitated the team's annual global strategy meeting, working through the implications for people, services and communications needed to deliver their new vision. "We are still referring to it a year later — we have been implementing the actions and have increased our impact." — Abbye Bonatsos, JP Morgan Chase