Our work

From zero to a defined ideal customer in under a month

Audience

Brand

Communications

The Challenge

A digital banking platform for small businesses needed to decide who it was really for.

It had customers, low fees and a modern product — but a fuzzy picture of which slice of a broad, fragmented market to build for. “Small business” covers a solo photographer and a multi-site manufacturer, and their banking lives share almost nothing. Without a defined target, every roadmap and messaging debate was being argued from opinion.

They also needed more than a standard segmentation: a read on where the market is genuinely under-served — needs that are important, widely felt and badly met — because that’s where a challenger can plant a flag. And they needed it fast enough to feed a brand strategy already in motion.

Our Approach

We designed a hybrid program where each phase earned its keep.

Phase one was a four-day immersive diary with 18 business owners — a deliberate mix of business stage, revenue, headcount and industry, including both traditional-bank and digital-bank customers. Polls, ranking exercises, projective tasks, video submissions, guided shop-alongs, group discussions. The goal wasn’t to answer the business question; it was to make sure the survey asked the right things in the right language.

Phase two launched the day after the diary closed: a 400-respondent national survey that sized and validated what we’d heard, then mapped importance against performance across 45 relationship drivers, features and pain points — for the client and the competitive set.

Phase three went back to qual: 12 depth interviews with people who fit the two priority groups the survey identified, to bring them to life internally.

That turnaround is only possible when the same senior people run all three phases. No re-briefing, no handoffs, no translation loss — whoever moderated the diaries wrote the survey and analyzed the crosstabs.

What We Uncovered

A five-group view of the market based on who owners are, what they need and how they think about banking — and within it, a defined ideal customer profile plus a second priority group, sized together.
A shortlist of focus areas built from three independent cuts of the data — high importance, relative under-performance and competitive disadvantage — so the team could see where to move first, and why.
The emotional barriers keeping otherwise-willing owners with their current provider, and what shifts them.
The specific “jobs” each priority group wants a banking partner to do, in their own language, ready to drop into product and messaging conversations.

The Impact

The team moved from a contested definition of its audience to a specific one it could design and market against — with a short list of areas to attack first and evidence for why each made the cut.

Because the qual and quant were built as one program, the outputs travel together: the survey gives an executive the sizing, the interviews give product, brand and creative teams a target that feels real.

This work directly fed into development of a reimagined website complete with a new help center, an editorial platform full of stories from real business owners and internal collateral bringing priority customer segments to life.

Key Takeaways

Qual before quant is what makes the survey worth running. The diaries determined which 45 factors were worth measuring.
Three cuts beat one. Filtering opportunity by importance, relative performance and competitive gap produces a shortlist people believe.
Speed comes from team structure, not corner-cutting. One senior team across all phases is why fieldwork could run back-to-back.