Another one of my favourite projects.

Sony Music had loads of data on UK Gen Z rap fans, but the team didn’t feel the business truly understood them.

They asked us to dig deeper and build a consumer-closeness programme that would actually get stakeholders up close with their audience.

Going in, we knew two things. First, this group wouldn’t engage with a traditional research approach. Second, most consumer-closeness events feel pretty sterile.

So we created Pave - a zine focused on UK rap. We built a brand, put a call-out on social for contributors, and through the process of making the zine we gathered insight into their attitudes, behaviours and unmet needs.

We then hosted an immersive launch event that brought the insight to life and gave stakeholders a space to meet fans in a way that felt natural, not staged.

Working with Nike is a dream brief for most people, but digging into something as complex as mental health was equal parts exciting and terrifying.

Nike has always been a performance-first brand. And like a lot of sports brands, they’ve often talked about mental strength and grit as traits of a successful athlete.

But those narratives don’t sit comfortably with how we now think and talk about mental health.

We worked with Nike to understand what mental health looks like in the context of physical activity - from the US to Scandinavia to Asia - using voice-note diaries and in-person ethnography.

It wasn’t just about how people talk about mental health. It was about finding a strategic way in for Nike that felt true to the brand.

The stories we uncovered fed into an immersive insight exhibition on the Nike campus in Portland, where 500+ employees could connect with the work and understand the opportunity.

Probably the project I’ve talked about the most – and the reason friends and family think I’m obsessed with truck drivers. I might genuinely be the person who has spoken to the most drivers on the planet (about 835 across 10 countries).

Shell’s challenge was simple: they didn’t really know one of their biggest consumer groups. Truck drivers buy huge amounts of heavy-duty engine oil to keep their trucks moving. It’s a billion-dollar product in a brutally competitive category.

To win, Shell needed to communicate better than anyone else. The issue was that it wasn’t realistic for stakeholders or agencies to travel the world and meet drivers. So instead of sending people out, we brought the world to them.

We spent weeks across the US, China, India, Pakistan, Vietnam, Thailand, Indonesia, Russia, Brazil and Egypt interviewing drivers, photographing and filming their lives, and using 360 video to capture everything from cabins to the small hotel rooms they treat themselves to. We also used drones to show bird’s-eye views of truck stops and the journeys in and out of them.

All of this became an interactive microsite called The Listening Post, giving Shell and their agencies on-demand access to insight and inspiration.

We then ran immersive workshops in London, Shanghai and Houston to put Shell teams in the shoes of one of their most important customers.

Working with ASICS came at a key moment. Once the go-to for serious runners, they’d slipped into the middle of the pack – losing share, relevance and a clear sense of who they were designing for. Our job was to understand the running landscape and give ASICS a way to grow with both committed runners and the huge wave of newer, more casual runners.

We built a global segmentation across 9,000 people in six countries, combining quant with deep qualitative work. I spent time out in market with runners – talking, observing and trying to keep up – to understand the behaviours and emotional triggers that don’t show up in a survey.

A crucial part of the work was creating projective exercises to move beyond rational motivations and basic purchase decisions. We needed to get under the surface: the identity, the meaning and the role running plays in people’s lives.

What emerged were six clear segments, from dedicated marathoners to park-run regulars to people who run simply to reset their mind. It gave ASICS a more nuanced, strategic way to understand their audience.

We then travelled to ASICS teams around the world to embed the segmentation so it became a practical tool across product, marketing and research.

The impact was big. Within a year, ASICS reported 143% brand growth, backed by a global typing tool that lets future work plug into the segmentation and cuts redundant research. A clearer view of the running world – and a brand now aligned to it.

I think this was genuinely one of the first Gen Z insight reports ever done. Lucozade wanted to position themselves early as an authority on this cohort - and this project wasn’t just about understanding Gen Z, it was about publicity. It was “research as content.”

We travelled across the UK doing street intercepts and meeting young Gen Z people who were already making an impact - starting businesses, campaigning, building communities or just making waves in their own corner of the world. We wanted to hear directly from the ones shaping culture, not talking about it from the sidelines.

We also spoke to a range of experts who helped contextualise what we were hearing - the social, economic and cultural forces shaping this generation, and the opportunities and challenges waiting on the horizon.

The work blended insight with storytelling. We created a public-facing report, built a YouTube series, and even produced a newspaper that was distributed across London. It was a brand showing up with something to say - and using insight as a way to spark conversation, not just sit in a deck.

There’s no shortage of Gen Z insight reports in the world. I’d been writing them for about 10 years by the time the Diageo North America team came to us with their challenge. Because of responsible marketing rules, they’d had to wait until enough of this cohort was over 21 to properly dig in.

But the real challenge was bigger. There were so many assumptions flying around about this audience - especially in a business where most people weren’t part of it. And a lot of the “insight” to date had come through an innovation lens, not from starting with the audience themselves.

That’s where we came in. We built FutureProof - a bespoke Gen Z insight platform for Diageo. We ran robust national quant, a digital ethnography, and then city meet-ups: immersive research events where Diageo stakeholders could meet Gen Z first-hand, get inspired and learn directly from them.

The work gave Diageo a clear, nuanced view of who Gen Z actually are - not the stereotypes. It helped them understand what this cohort expects from alcohol brands, what turns them off, how they socialise, what “treating” looks like, how they make choices, and where drinking fits (or doesn’t fit) into their lives. It also exposed new need states, new occasions, and gaps in the category that brands weren’t speaking to.

All of this came together to shape a focused, future-ready innovation strategy across the Diageo portfolio - and gave teams a shared language and confidence to create products, experiences and comms that genuinely resonated with Gen Z, rather than just guessing.

When I was younger, rum and coke at midnight in a club felt like the height of fun. But high-energy moments have changed - and so has what fun means for a new generation.

Captain Morgan had always been a light-hearted, playful brand, but the world had shifted around it. Globally the brand was still growing, but in the US it had been flat for years and was losing relevance with younger drinkers. The old version of “fun” felt narrow and tied to a drinking culture that didn’t match how Gen Z socialises today.

The challenge was clear: move the brand away from its frat-y, high-octane legacy and understand what fun really looks like now - the moods, the energy, the occasions - and what this generation expects from a brand like Captain Morgan.

We worked across North America, Europe and Africa to map how Gen Z’s social worlds, behaviours and needs had evolved. We built from those insights through brand workshops to shape a new strategic direction and explore how Captain Morgan could show up in design, innovation and creativity in a way that felt modern, warm and genuinely inclusive.

The result was a refreshed positioning, a new masterbrand design, a future-ready innovation strategy and creative work that helped the brand grow again. A clearer, more expansive view of what fun means for a new generation - and a brand that now meets them there.

It’s always a fun challenge working on a product you don’t actually enjoy (I don’t like coffee). But the strategic task was great.

Nespresso Subscription was struggling. The boutique experience felt like a small luxury; the subscription felt the opposite. Premium everywhere except in the one place built to keep people loyal.

We needed a proposition that balanced brand-building with hard acquisition and retention targets.

We started by understanding what was really happening. Quant showed attitudes and barriers at scale. Digital ethnography revealed how people bought, drank and talked about Nespresso. And hands-on coffee workshops let people play with the experience and show us where subscription added value or fell flat.

From there, we reimagined what subscription should be: more flexibility, curated selections, better delivery moments, clearer benefits and service cues that felt premium.

We delivered a new strategy for acquisition, experience and retention. And in the first year, the work delivered Nespresso’s biggest subscription growth in the UK.