You need to know who among your key stakeholders care about sustainability, how they think about it, how they talk about it and how it influences your bottom line. ERM Shelton researchers are sustainability experts and seasoned market researchers who will guide you through the issues of sustainability and help you gain a sustainable advantage.
Know Your Audience
We can help you check your biases. Our ethnographic research, interviewing and segmentation studies help clients understand the nuances of who their key audiences are, whether that’s customers, consumers or internal stakeholders.
Develop New Offerings
The best new products and services are grounded in what someone wants and needs, not just what your company can make. From needs assessment through concept testing, the right research can optimize your next offer.
Find Your Sustainable Future
Sustainability is how we make it to the future. Research can help you plot the course by identifying emerging issues, finding the right words to speak sustainability to your key audiences, and formulating a sustainability strategy that creates a market advantage,
Let’s Dig Deeper: Introduction
Any market research firm worth their salt can ask people questions about sustainability. The problem is that sustainability now carries a lot of social pressure. It’s very easy to get false positives. How do you avoid that? By working with a firm who’s been at it for years and knows how to get the real answers.
At ERM Shelton, we’re exclusively focused on creating a marketing advantage for organizations working to create a sustainable future. After 29 years in business, and over 15 years of conducting our own proprietary Pulse studies, we’re subject matter experts in sustainability, including the exploration of U.S. market beliefs/expectations surrounding sustainability, CSR topics, and ESG (environmental social governance) topics. Our team members are featured speakers at 15 – 20 industry events annually.
People ask how our research department works. So we’ll dive in and tell you. Here’s what we’ll cover:
Our Research Approach
Knowing some stuff is help. Doing something effective with what you know is powerful. At ERM Shelton, we know that successful business strategies, compelling marketing communications, and beautiful and impactful creative are all rooted in a deep understanding of people and the worlds they live. And because our area of focus is green market research, this means exploring their ideas about topics like sustainability, the environment, social issues, and the melding of "people, planet, profit".
At ERM Shelton, we can help you understand your B2B customers, your end consumers, your market, and your unique business challenges and opportunities — as they relate to sustainability and the circular economy. Our research department regularly helps clients crack the code on the toughest sustainability problems using market research.
Whether we’re gathering primary data by talking directly to your customers, digging into secondary data with a fresh eye toward your business, or using our using our deep catalog of proprietary sustainability trend data to support and expand insights, we’re all about getting your customer’s point of view and bringing it to life for you.
Many tools in our toolbox
We use multiple tools, designed each time with your specific sustainability/CSR-related goals in mind, to deliver insights that serve a strategic need.
We’re deliberate about how we gather data for each client and for each project. Every time we embark on a new job, we prescribe the best (and most efficient) ways to find out what you need to know. Whether its organic, rich qualitative data that gives a revealing look at day-to-day attitudes, beliefs and behaviors or robust quantitative data that accurately sizes, measures and predicts, we are seeking a better picture of the world. The moral of the story is: we don’t apply cookie-cutter methodologies. When we do research for you, it will be customized to your needs each and every time. And we have tons of great tools in our methodological toolbox!
Choosing the right tool for the job
Let’s explore some methodologies in the area of sustainability-focused market research and how each might be used to get the answers you need.
Qualitative Methodologies
Sometimes what you really need are some good, hard number to quantify sustainability, ESG, and CSR topics. Our robust quantitative toolbox includes methodologies like:
Ethnography, which is rooted in anthropology, is an incredibly powerful tool for market researchers. Chiefly, it allows us to observe consumers in their everyday lives, complete with all the rich context that’s unspoken and yet critical. This allows you to observe the intersection of your brand and your consumers in the world where they live, not in some artificial environment. When we develop a guide for ethnographies, we of course have questions and topics we want to talk about, but we’ll also have an unspoken list of things to look for and observe. These observations often lead to the insights that impact our clients’ businesses most. Ethnographic work in the sustainability field can take on different forms, depending on the goals and needs of each project.
In-Person Ethnography
In-person ethnographies allow us to observe one person or family at a time and get to know them for a day. When we get to join someone in the home and see how they really live, we get a very detailed picture of the topic we’re researching. Evidence of people’s behaviors, beliefs, and needs are manifested in their surroundings in ways they may not able to articulate in a traditional interview. With in-person ethnography, we spend a lot of time observing the participant and his or her surroundings, gathering clues we might never have discovered otherwise.
An in-person ethnography allows for organic observation, in-the-moment follow ups, and a great chance for making a personal connection with each participant. Additionally, we can adjust as the day progresses, making each ethnography highly personalized.