Charlotte Maes

Senior Cultural Strategist (Numbers, London)

Charlotte accidentally stumbled into research during her placement year at Nomad Foods Europe, where she started her career client-side in their insights team. After completing her final year at the University Of Exeter, where she was determined to take up as many consumer behaviour and market research modules as possible, she realised she was more motivated to work agency-side where she could get closer to people. Starting at InSites Consulting as a qualitative researcher setting up and moderating online communities around the world, her focus on FMCG over the years required her to switch gears and became more of a hybrid consultant, tying together qual and quant. Moving to the Numbers team at Crowd DNA plays to her quantitative strengths as, having moved around Europe every three to five years as a child, math was the one constant she could easily pick back up and excel in. Outside of work you’ll either find Charlotte walking around with her analogue cameras, playing basketball, or doing some demo & reno work.

Narrated Galleries

We love films, but narrated galleries – fusing showreels of still images and audio of participant commentary – creates outputs that allow for high levels of reflection and audience empathy. Ideal for user experience work, in other words
Crowd Communities

We’ve a wealth of experience at setting up and managing communities for clients, with learnings on how best to engage audiences and a full box of tricks for maximising what we get out of the work – including geo tagging, streaming in social media data and a mobile optimised platform
Pinterest

We’ve used Pinterest to really good effect on a number of projects recently, helping us to explore differences and commonalities among different typologies in areas such as fashion and style, home, holidays and entertainment. Engagement levels with participants always rank high, and clients love the vividness and clarity of the findings.
Citizen Journalism

Citizen journalism works on the principle of making reporters of our participants, briefing them to capture what’s happening in the lives of their friends and family via video dispatches and blogging. It gets us places where we can’t otherwise get. It bypasses the bias of having a researcher in attendance. People are often more accurate reporters on those around them than on themselves, so that’s another bias circumnavigated.
Network Audits

If you want to really understand how people interact with those around them, it’s logical to research interconnected groups of friends, family and work colleagues. First developed as part of our award winning word of mouth research for Guardian News & Media, and since then refined and reconfigured across a range of global projects, our network audit approach helps us understand who’s influencing who as authentically as possible.