Market Research Projects & Case Studies

On Feb 2, 2014 Coca‑Cola aired a Super Bowl ad featuring people of various ethnicities singing “America the Beautiful” in their own languages. Immediately after the airing an intense backlash erupted across Twitter and other social platforms and continued for days and weeks. The core problem was to understand what offended and angered people, why the ad triggered such strong reactions, and whether the negative reaction would damage Coca‑Cola’s brand equity. The stakes were high: unchecked negative PR could erode brand equity and translate into real business loss, so the brand needed timely, accurate insight to assess impact and inform response.

Neomind was building an always-available, human-like AI tutor for students ages 12–18 but needed an honest read on how the product actually landed with real students before scaling. Key issues: whether students would trust and return to the tutor, where the experience helped or frustrated learners, and how to gather rigorous, compliant feedback from minors. The stakes were high — without trust and repeat use the product could fail to gain adoption, undermine go-to-market plans, and waste further development resources.

Brands and retailers needed to turn shelf execution and fixture decisions into measurable category growth and improved shopper experience. Specific problems included poor availability, sub‑optimal shelf placement and signage, oversized assortments or SKUs that slowed trips, unclear price/pack trade‑offs - each risked lost spend and lower category sales.

A charitable foundation had strong local brand awareness but a fragmented understanding of donor motivations, and demographic data enrichment didn't help. Donors weren't engaging despite high awareness and support

Specific issues: highest-intent segments had the lowest familiarity, high-value givers gave minimally due to perceived misalignment with priorities, engagement preferences varied widely by segment, some programs were misunderstood or underused, and emotional motivations differed even among donors giving to the same cause

The brand relied on a single “hero” claim despite mixed evidence it drove initial purchase, faced uncertainty about which ingredient/naturality claims truly motivated subscribers, and risked raising costs through premium claims that might not increase trial or willingness to pay.

The client also needed to balance revenue growth versus margin expansion and respond to competitive pressure from other premium subscription brands.

What was at stake: the client needed clarity on messaging and pricing to accelerate subscription growth, avoid eroding brand equity or loyalty, minimize “would not buy at any price” rejections, and optimize revenue and long‑term profitability.

The premium pet food market is rapidly fragmenting (fresh frozen, refrigerated, air-dried, freeze-dried, baked, etc.), producing low consumer familiarity with formats and benefits, confusion over product role (treat vs. topper vs. full meal), skepticism about high price points, and packaging that often fails to communicate premium benefits.

The client (a private equity firm) needed definitive consumer insight to identify whitespace opportunities and to guide product development and investment strategy; without this insight they risked backing innovations that would not achieve adoption or justify premium pricing.

Seasonal shopping for a leading CPG brand was fragmented across online and in-store channels. Retailer platforms buried holiday content, offered inconsistent product availability across delivery modes, and failed to connect seasonal missions to product suggestions, limiting incremental sales and brand visibility in the digital aisle.

Harvest Insights ran a multi-phase AAU study: initial qualitative work to identify key selection variables, in-depth interviews and on-site PPE usage reviews, and a quantitative study spanning five countries and six industries. The research tracked usage by job function and measured attitudes toward product performance, safety, and environmental impact, with findings delivered in reports broken out by country and industry.

The volunteer-led QRCA board needed to understand how current, prospective, and former members (plus in-house corporate researchers and young professionals) perceived the organization in order to set strategy before the 2026 annual meeting. Because board members balance volunteer duties with full-time jobs, manually reviewing, transcribing, coding and synthesizing qualitative feedback from an asynchronous online bulletin board and follow-up IDIs would have taken weeks — too slow to inform a timely strategic rollout.

Problem: The client needed reliable, comparable insight into SSD usage and buying behaviour among active content creators across selected MENA and African markets.

Key field challenges included identifying and recruiting:

1. A hard-to-reach target audience (active content creators)
2. Language and cultural differences
3. Substantial socio-economic and technological disparities between countries.

Stakes: Understanding these drivers was critical for storage manufacturers and channel partners to refine product positioning, pricing and support; failure to address recruitment, localisation and sampling issues would produce weak or non-actionable insight and risk poor commercial decisions in these growth markets.

The client needed an unbiased, cross‑national measure of public attitudes and participation in activism in Nigeria and the USA, but fieldwork risked producing distorted results.

1. In Nigeria, respondents face political unrest, corruption and a real fear of persecution that can cause them to withhold or alter answers.
2. In the USA widespread distrust of media and acute political polarisation risked low participation, biased samples and socially desirable responses.

The stakes were high: inaccurate measurement would undermine the study’s academic value and leave policymakers without reliable evidence to inform democracy, human rights and social justice interventions in both countries.

Client needed reliable, representative feedback from general populations at four small-scale, remote sites (Eilat, Israel; Puglia near Lecce, Italy; Almendralejo, Spain; Omiš, Croatia) to evaluate social acceptance and perceptions of an integrated water‑management technology.

Conducting traditional face‑to‑face research in these dispersed locations would be

1. Time‑consuming and costly
2. Low digital literacy in some communities and concerns about confidentiality threatened response rates and data quality.
3. Without robust community insight, technology deployments risked poor local acceptance, wasted investment, and missed opportunities to shape policy and targeted interventions to address water scarcity.