CASE STUDY: RESEARCH

Researching Brand Trust in a Global Market

The Challenge

In an age of digital advertising and rapidly advancing AI capabilities, brand authenticity has become essential to building consumer trust and driving business success. This layered program involved multiple rounds of research and design iteration aimed at understanding how consumers discovered and interpreted visual signals meant to convey brand authenticity in digital ads.

A Mixed-Methods Approach

The research program included a competitor audit, four rounds of individual interviews conducted in the U.S., India, and Brazil, A/B testing, and a survey. Layering these different methods allowed our research & design team to cover multiple global markets, to collect insights from a broader audience, while digging deeper into the ‘why’ behind their preferences through 1:1 interviews. By the conclusion of the program, insights from customers pointed to the strengths of one of three potential visual signal systems, which stood out as the most appealing, discoverable, and easy to understand.

Impact

Based on these findings, our team made strategic recommendations to leadership, and the research continued to influence work in this space well beyond the life of the initial project.

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