Market Discovery

Tackle undiscovered opportunity spaces by understanding how people think, choose and behave in your category.
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Benefits of this approach

See the category through your customers' eyes

Reveal how people make sense of the category in what belongs together, what stands apart, and where your brand or product truly fits.

Find opportunities before you commit to solutions

Identify high-value spaces, tensions, and unmet meanings before you choose a product, message or positioning. Innovate where it truly matters.

Avoid false differentiation

Not all "white space" is real. Understand which distinctions matter to people, helping you launch ideas that are really experienced as unique.

Align brand, innovation, and growth around one map

Use a single shared picture of the category to connect brand strategy, product pipelines and portfolio decisions. Reduce misalignments, accelerate better bets.

RESEARCH MODULE

Market sensemaking

0 participants (content collection from public sources)
We build deep, behavior-driven understanding of a category by analyzing spontaneous digital content generated by real people across public digital environments like social media, vertical communities, forums and blogs. 



This approach allows us to observe how the category is actually talked about and lived, surfacing emerging themes and trends, contexts of use, recurring episodes, cultural tensions or unmet needs and expectations that rarely emerge from traditional research.
OUTCOMES

A structured map of the category’s discursive landscape including key themes and conversation clusters with brand and competitor positioning in natural consumer language.

A rich understanding of how the category is experienced and narrated, including emerging trends, dominant and alternative narratives, emotions, tensions and unmet needs, recurring and new usage moments that all help us see opportunity spaces and innovation territories.

OUTCOMES

Structured models to describe usage situations, moments and behaviors, highlighting when, why and how consumers engage with the category

Attitudinal and motivational frameworks with a clear hierarchy of key drivers, barriers and decision logics

Data-driven maps of actionable opportunity areas where tensions, gaps and emerging needs appear across usages and attitudes

RESEARCH MODULE

OeQ-powered survey

1000 participants
Leveraging the power of open-ended questions we use topic modeling and semantic clustering to capture a scalable, comparable and insight-rich view of any category. 



This survey module can surface how consumers truly think, feel, and decide in everyday life, revealing usage patterns, drivers, barriers and expectations, and identifying actionable opportunities for innovation and positioning beyond predefined answers and surface-level metrics.
RESEARCH MODULE

In-depth interview add-on

20 participants
Interviews and group discussions turn early insights into confident decisions by clarifying the drivers, trade-offs and tensions behind real consumer behavior.

By combining focused interviews with in-context explorations and a “follow-along” methodology, we sharpen the opportunity area and discover unspoken behaviors.
OUTCOMES

Reinforced behavioral archetypes that capture people’s behaviors and decisions as grounded in real actions and attitudes.

Visualized journeys with key steps, triggers and moments of choice, including points of friction, hesitation or influence

A refined set of opportunity areas, now stress-tested and based in real-world observation

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CASE STUDY

From wellness to energy: identifying the right way in

CHALLENGE

A leading bottled-water and beverage brand in Italy, specializing in health and wellness, wanted to expand into the energy drink category yet unknown to them.

The core brand values were clear, but would energy drink consumers actually want such a product?

APPROACH

We mapped how Italian consumers actually perceive and navigate the energy drink category and its top players.

By combining methods of digital ethnography and a 1,000-person OeQ study of energy drink users and abandoners, we analyzed how people mentally group energy drinks, what "energy" means in different contexts, and where tensions and unmet expectations exist. This allowed us to move beyond brand claims and see the real category landscape.

OUTCOME

The research clarified what it would take to succeed in the energy drink category, and where the brand could (and could not) compete credibly.

This gave leadership the confidence to assess the opportunity realistically, understand what true differentiation would require and protect the strength of the core brand. The result was a strategic decision grounded not in assumption or hype, but in how consumers actually see and organize the category.

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