News: Crowd Source is Crowd DNA’s weekly newsletter. Cultural insights to make the world go round… Click here to sign up

Culturally charged commercial advantage

London New York Amsterdam Singapore Sydney Stockholm Los Angeles

Crowd DNA is a cultural insights and strategy consultancy with offices in London, Amsterdam, New York, Singapore, Sydney, Stockholm and Los Angeles. Formed in 2008, operating across 70+ markets, we bring together trends specialists, researchers, strategists, data analysts, designers, writers and film-makers for the world’s most exciting brands…

See our work

Three workstreams

  • In this workstream, we look out onto the world, avoiding the limitations of simply exploring a category or a brand in isolation.

    To get to this credible wider cultural context, we blend research methods (such as ethnography) with trends analysis techniques and the investigative intelligence of journalism – arriving at stories that are rich in detail, that help our clients to relate to people, their lived realities and all that is changing.

  • Shaping purpose and optimising brand positions; readying for launches and new markets; through to the specifics of communication and campaign testing.

    We mix evidence with real world inspiration. The methodologies are diverse and fit for purpose (rather than off the shelf) and our Crowd Context toolkit gives us the frameworks and techniques to reach telling, culturally-informed conclusions.

  • We help clients to build empathy with people, their journeys and their experiences. We collaborate on the development of new products and services – everything from streamlined evaluations to multi-phase, clean slate innovation endeavours. We map the paths to purchase and the best places at which a brand can make a difference.

    In-the-moment methodologies come to the forefront here, also trends work to identify opportunities; and ways to socialise the findings, to truly build audience understanding. There’s an important role for personas and prototyping, too.

How we work with culture

>>> Reporting on culture

Culture isn’t fluffy – culture is powerful. And while not all brands can be culturally iconic, we believe all must be culturally relevant.

Reporting on culture sees us getting to the narratives, the human needs and the tensions. The purpose: to drive empathy and inform all areas from brand strategy and comms development, to product and experience innovation, to thought leadership.

We get there through a diverse method set: including trends analysis, ethnography, online qual, semiotics, culture-at-scale (with unstructured data), expert views from our KIN network and quantitative work.

We also call on our Socialise team of writers, videographers, designers and photographers, creating content to communicate trends, amplify the impact of findings and engage with audiences (internal and external).

>>> Acting on culture

Acting on culture sees us transform human empathy, trends and narratives into meeting rigorously defined commercial goals.

Strategy development, co-creation, prototyping, innovation programmes – this is award winning stuff, all underpinned by intelligent frameworks around cultural and behavioural factors, scenario planning, consumer journey models and value proposition techniques.

We approach each brief with creativity and determined energy, bringing together the optimum mix of strategists, trends specialists, researchers, designers, writers and film-makers. Our skill-sets are blended with client objectives, rather than a rigid team structure, in mind.

We now consider Crowd DNA as close partners. By taking time to listen and understand, they have fully immersed us in the lives of music fans. As a direct result of their work, the business has been inspired into developing ever more creative ways of connecting with our audiences.

Federico Bolza, VP Marketing Services, Sony Music

We love working with Crowd DNA. They deliver high quality, strategic insight that has helped us grow our business. They have a unique ability to tell stories creatively, which means that their outputs are different, attention-grabbing and memorable. It is for these reasons that we have trusted them with some of our most important projects of recent years.

Jake Steadman, International Research Director, Twitter