Market Research Projects & Case Studies

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.

The client needed to understand investor attitudes, preferences and intentions for property investment at a time when Saudi Arabia was preparing to relax property ownership laws for foreigners.

The immediate challenge was running a multi-country concept test (10 markets). The project should produce comparable, nationally‑representative data despite language, cultural and regulatory differences, and varying device/technology access.

The stakes: the client wanted reliable, actionable insight to identify the factors that drive cross‑border and domestic property investment, reveal barriers and the most appealing property features, knowledge needed to shape product, pricing and market entry strategy and to attract new investors once legal changes take effect.

Our client wanted to assess and increase its market penetration and brand recognition in Switzerland quickly and affordably. The challenge included:

1. Achieving a representative sample within Switzerland's relatively small but high‑purchasing‑power population
2. Eliciting candid consumer opinions in a culture that tends toward measured, neutral responses, and
3. Complying with Switzerland's strict privacy and data‑protection requirements.

The stakes were strategic: Client needed timely, reliable insights to guide marketing and positioning decisions in a fast‑moving fashion market spotlighted by new brands relocating to Zurich, without the delay or cost of a full bespoke study.

A postdoctoral researcher at Wits wanted to understand how COVID‑19 changed giving, volunteerism and environmental consciousness across culturally distinct markets (Kenya, USA, Egypt, South Africa). Key challenges were digital accessibility disparities across markets (threatening representativeness), capturing cross‑cultural nuances without imposing external perspectives, and ensuring the reliability of the online survey technology (avoiding downtime or platform glitches). The stakes were high: robust, representative cross‑country data were needed to produce valid academic findings and to inform policy/organisational responses to shifting philanthropic behaviours.