Marketing, PR and internal communications for the market research industry
You spend your working life helping the world's biggest brands understand people, decide faster, and get noticed. So why is it always your own visibility that ends up at the bottom of the to-do list? That's the gap we exist to close.
The insights industry has a marketing problem, and it's not the one you think.
Market research and insights is a big business. Not a niche, not a back-office function — a genuinely enormous industry that quietly powers the decisions behind almost every brand you can name. And yet, ask most people outside it to name a market research company, and you'll get a long silence followed by "Nielsen, maybe?"
That's not a fluke. It's structural. The industry has three groups of people who all need to be seen for different reasons, and almost none of the standard marketing playbooks were built with any of them in mind:
Insight managers and directors
Buried inside brands, who have to fight for internal attention using the same three PowerPoint templates everyone else usesInsight and research agencies
Competing against household names like Kantar, Ipsos and Qualtrics, and increasingly against each other, for a shrinking pool of attentionData and tech suppliers
Trying to prove there's real expertise behind the platform, in a market where "AI-powered" has become background noise rather than a differentiator
Our own Insights Awareness Pulse research backs this up: recognition in this industry is dominated by a small handful of giants, with everyone else, however good the work, fighting over what's left. Being brilliant at your job and being known for it are two completely different problems. We solve the second one.
Why generic marketing advice doesn't work here.
Most marketing and PR agencies treat "insights" as a vertical, like fintech or hospitality. It isn't. It's a discipline built on nuance, caveats, and the discomfort of telling people things they didn't want to hear. That's exactly what generic marketing — and increasingly, generic AI-written marketing — flattens out of existence. Complexity becomes jargon. Expertise starts to sound like everyone else's expertise. And thought leadership, the one thing your industry is supposed to be selling, loses the originality that made it worth reading in the first place.
We've spent over 20 years doing the opposite: turning complex data and specialist knowledge into stories that stick, for people who already know their subject better than we ever will. Our job isn't to learn your business from scratch. It's to make sure the rest of the world hears about it.
Our approach, our F.A.M.E model.
Every piece of work we do — whether it's a single press release or a 12-month retainer - runs through the same four stages. It's how we make sure fame isn't an accident.
F: Foundational audits and researc
Before we write a word, we establish the real challenge: what's actually stopping you from being seen, heard, or believed. Sometimes it's a message problem. Sometimes it's a resourcing problem. Usually, it's not the problem you started with.
A: Audience
We analyse and segment exactly who needs to hear from you: internal stakeholders, trade press, procurement panels, prospective clients, because a message built for one rarely works for all of them.
M: Marketing
We develop the campaigns, content and communications that actually reach those audiences: PR, thought leadership, LinkedIn, events, training, video, design whatever the audit says will work, not whatever's fashionable.
E: Execution
We deliver against the plan, track what's landing, and keep sharpening. Fame isn't a launch moment. It's a habit.
Are you a
brand-side client?
Your challenge isn't winning new clients it's winning attention inside your own organisation. We help you get the business to actually act on what you already know.
Are you an insight or tech company?
You're competing for recognition in a market where the biggest names get remembered, and everyone else gets lumped in as "the rest." We help you build a distinct position, win press and industry recognition, and prove there's real expertise behind whatever you're building.
Proof, not promises
We don't ask you to take "expert, creative, entertaining" on faith. Some of what that's looked like in practice:
System1
As retained PR agency for the Ad Ratings launch, we mined the database for stories that landed in Campaign, The Drum, CNBC, The Wall Street Journal and The Guardian: 69 pieces of coverage and an online reach of 269 million in six months.
Coca-Cola EMEA
A benchmarking audit and new internal communications strategy across 18 markets drove a 40%+ increase in traffic to a knowledge-sharing platform nobody was using before.
Buzzback
An insights agency with genuine expertise and a low profile. We turned their own consumer-trend knowledge into thought leadership and press outreach; their CEO now sits on VitaFoods' Content Advisory Board.
Sanofi
We built "Humankind," a brand and content campaign for their global CX Insights team, reaching 2,000+ people across the business. "I'm very happy for us to show the organization that we are crazy elevating our creativity in how we tell our consumers' stories." — Seth Minsk, Sanofi
Adobe
A benchmarking audit and new templates helped the Brand Strategy and Customer Insights team get taken more seriously as strategic partners, not just report-writers. "This will encourage our team to go further and look at the real business implications." — Heather Coombs, Head of Strategy, Adobe
JPMC Insights
We facilitated their global annual strategy meeting. "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
FAQ
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Because the industry is crowded at the top (a handful of global names dominate recognition) and fragmented everywhere else, and because most insight professionals were trained to analyse audiences, not market themselves to one. Being good at the work and being known for it are separate skills.
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PR earns third-party credibility — press coverage, industry awards, conference visibility, analyst recognition. Marketing builds the ongoing presence that makes that credibility land: positioning, content, thought leadership, internal or external campaigns. Insights companies typically need both, in that order credibility first, then sustained visibility to make it count.
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It depends on ambition, not headcount. What we see consistently is that insights companies under-invest relative to how much they ask their own clients to invest in brand and marketing — a "do as I say, not as I do" problem worth fixing.
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It's KaM's framework for building visibility that lasts: Foundational audits and research, Audience segmentation, Marketing campaign development, and Execution. It's designed to stop marketing being a one-off launch and turn it into a repeatable process.
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Yes, just aimed inward. An in-house insight team's "market" is its own organisation: the stakeholders who need to act on findings, not just receive them. The tools are the same (positioning, storytelling, campaigns); the audience is different..
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Not on its own. AI is genuinely useful for planning and first drafts, but insights work is built on nuance and caveats, exactly what generic AI content tends to flatten. The companies winning attention right now use AI to move faster, with a human editorial layer keeping the expertise intact, not to replacing that layer.
Ready to stop being the industry's best-kept secret?
Whichever side of the table you're on- in-house, agency, or supplier the first step is the same conversation.