Our Methodologies
About Ava Lindberg |
Our Methodologies |
Credentials and Client Brands
CREATIVE FOCUS GROUPS are moderated with creativity and experience, with their scope and structure based on a client's objectives, depth of inquiry, segmentation needs, regional spread, and speed of results. Groups are often conducted with 6-8 respondents over two hours, but for special studies, mini-groups like triads and quads are valuable. Indepth interviews with single respondents and dyads with two respondents are helpful for inquiries requiring more individual reactions. Ava’s moderating process combines imaginative projective exercises, open-ended dialoguing, and custom designed techniques like photo gallery walks, drawing exercises, archetypal exercises, provocative word sorts, collage creation, and spontaneous storytelling with direct and indirect probing. Groups are lively and spontaneous feeling. Respondents reveal their deep emotional reactions to key questions. Focus group process is flexible and responsive to the client team’s evolving needs.
ARCHETYPAL PROCESS is used for special branding, research, and new product development projects, when a deeper, more mythic, and newer approach is sought better understand underlying motivational forces. Used to jumpstart a project, enhance new brand imagery or reposition an existing brand's persona, these archetypal techniques and analysis provide greater vitality, personality, and life to a brand or finding; enhance a study’s potential for creative and character development; connect a brand to the unconscious longings and aspirations of consumers; intuitively satisfy consumer needs and wants; provide ways to overcome product issues and obstacles; and intensify the brand's potential for awareness, usage, and growth. The 22 Transformative Archetypes are explored, identified, and applied to study findings through a three-part process: a) upfront team training in archetypes, b) special exercises conducted with consumers during archetypal groups and ethnography, and c) creative debriefing of key insights and findings in light of archetypal motivations. See Articles for details and information on Ava’s newest innovation in group process. She also conducts workshops: Working in the Mythic: Transformative Archetypes and Their Place in Focus Groups and Ethnographies.
AUTHENTIC ETHNOGRAPHY is an indepth, in situ process of in-home ethnography based upon nine principles of classic academic anthropology carefully combined with the timing and objectives of contemporary qualitative research. Authentic Ethnography emphasizes observing respondents’ natural behavior in and around their key environments. Its cornerstone processes are called reality observationals and Ethnographic Household Observationals (EHOs). These are half-day-long encounters within the real-life universes of our selected respondent, family, even community, on cultural, behavioral, emotional, attitudinal, and spiritual levels…a process that allows the observing team to understand true respondent behaviors and attitudes. SunResearch ethnographies are a profound way to link consumers' natural, everyday behaviors, events, purchases, shopping experience, product usage, lifestyle, decision making, and household icons to personalized symbolic codes and rituals with dynamic relevance to wider cultures, regions, and consumer segments. SunResearch has perfected this provocative anthropological technique that emphasizes an authentic observational process of observing mostly natural behavior as we meet the objectives in a spontaneous, indirect way via collaboration between a highly experienced ethnographer with a core client team. We use special methods of pure observation for the first few hours of an ethnography, then follow up with questions at the end, use digital photography to capture impressions, encourage ongoing brainstorming of findings during fieldwork with team, and communicate key insights and hypotheses via Synectics sessions and PowerPoint presentations. For more information on Authentic Ethnography, see the powerpoint Presentation on Ethnography.
VISION SESSIONS generate a resonating vision for a company or brand by sharing and synthesizing the ideas, intention, and creativity of key management team using Synectics and brainstorming ideation techniques.
BRAINSTORMING AND IDEA GENERATION are creative ideation sessions using Synectics and CPSI processes to brainstorm new ideas and coalesce complex research insights and implications from focus group or ethnographies; create new concepts, names, product ideas, tactics, promotionals, or action plans; and resolve creative and marketing challenges. Idea generation, Synectics sessions, and innovation workgroups are conducted with management team only or management and consumers combined as "super sessions." Creative ideation/brainstorming sessions range from a few hours to a full day to several days in length.
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