Channel 4

UK Tribes

Where to start with UK Tribes? Eight years in the making, it's the definitive resource for understanding youth culture

The recipient of multiple awards – most recently Marketing Week’s Data Storytelling prize – UK Tribes (www.uktribes.com) seeks to understand youth through the lens of tribal identity. It acknowledges that youth have always gathered around passion points, but whereas the tribes were once monolithic and relatively limited in number (think mods, punks, casuals etc) now they are numerous, with identity fluid and transition between them commonplace.

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It’s hard to keep count of the number of different research methods we’ve used over the various phases of this project (we estimate that, qualitatively and quantitatively, we’ve spoken to in excess of 200,000 young people). They’ve included online research communities, video blogging, an influencer network, expert interviews, co-creation and several major quantitative studies.

At the last count, there’s 25 tribes and five cultural planning segments (within which the tribes sit). Having fused the findings with TGI, created film, print and digital material to bring the insight to life, in the last two years the work has centred on our Tribes Live community – 400 young people, representing the various tribes, and reporting back via a mobile optimised platform that also feeds in their social media activity.

UK Tribes is used by Channel 4 for product development (including Skins and The Inbetweeners) and in planning and strategy by a huge host of partner brands and agencies.

Having now spawned a Global Youth Tribes Framework, it really is a significant body of work, of high relevance both culturally and commercially. To find out more please shout.

  • 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.