About Us

We help our clients create successful strategies and make great decisions by interpreting the reality of people’s lives not just analysing data

Our Principles

CONTEXT MATTERS

Everything is clearer when understood in context. We work hard at making sure we find the right context for research and decision making.

DISTINCTIVENESS WINS

Our work is focused on identifying growth opportunities and we know most brands grow by gaining more buyers. We believe that the recipe for continued brand strength is two-parts Force (or distinctiveness) and one-part Fame.

PERSPECTIVE HELPS

We value Human Intelligence above Artificial Intelligence. We aim to bring clarity to the complexities, contradictions and inconsistency of people, their attitudes and behaviour by applying our minds as well as deploying our models.

PEOPLE NOT DATA

Understanding people is the key to success: we go beyond data and think about customers, shoppers, guests and consumers as people in different modes and circumstances.

Our Services

RESEARCH

Face to face and online qualitative and quantitative methodologies as well as traditional focus groups, interviews, surveys and communities we use a range of proprietary techniques to understand people’s behaviour and attitudes in their day to day lives and help our clients make great decisions.

CONSULTING

We support our clients with our commercial pragmatism and senior management experience by providing consulting services around: brand and business strategy facilitation: communications planning, trends and behaviour interpretation: market opportunity scoping and acquisition due diligence.

Our Blog

Our History

  1. 1999
  2. 2000
  3. 2003
  4. 2003
  5. 2005
  6. 2005
  7. 2009
  8. 2012
  9. 2013
  10. 2016
  11. 2017
  12. 2020
  13. 2021
  14. 2023

  1. The Idea

    We thought that lots of market research was underwhelming because it failed to focus on delivering practical, usable and clear recommendations backed up by real evidence gathered in the right context.

  2. The Launch

    Tangible was launched by Martin, Sean and Gail – we found a great property in a seventeenth century former tea importers shop in Windsor and set it up with everything we needed for doing real consumer research: real store fixtures, a real and functioning kitchen, a real living room which doubled as a big meeting space and an informal  study for important one to ones.

    Reckitt Benckiser was our first client and we have been working with a huge range of fantastic brands ever since.

  3. The Sheffield Launch

    We had built up a big client base in the north and found ourselves running fieldwork all over the country. This called for an expanded team and a new facility, so we set up in Sheffield. Initially in a magnificent mansion house in leafy Nether Edge, we moved into a converted dairy yard just off Ecclesall Road and replicated the home from home set up: a shop, kitchen and living room.

  4. The Methodology Breakthrough

    We invented our specialised quali-quant clinic methodology for testing and optimising packs and products in a simulated buying situation. It’s been used by Kelloggs, Arla, Heinz, Warbutons, Pladis, Pfizer and Unilever amongst many others.

  5. The 100th Client

    2005 arrived and we hit a big milestone: our 100th client.

  6. The Growth Plan

    It was time for more new ideas and Dominic, a former client at Nestle, PZ Cussons and Premier Foods joined and eventually became MD

  7. The Retirement

    By now Dominic was running the company and Martin moved to Bath to take a well-earned early retirement.

  8. The 200th Client

    2012 saw our next big milestone: our 200th client The National Trust.

  9. The International Expansion

    Three quarters of our projects were UK based over the next few years we continued to expand our minds with travel – working in the United States, Canada, China, Russia the Middle East, and across most of Europe.

  10. The Manchester Move

    We moved from Sheffield to the booming city of Manchester and into our spectacular new Deansgate offices and workshop space. It turns out that the magnificent baroque building we found was on the site of an old tea importers too!

  11. The New Generation

    We started our Training business and expanded our consulting offer by teaming up with long time colleagues Elaine and Carol. Sean retired his calculator around this time too. Steph joined and started to build our brand new strategic quant offer.

  12. The 20th Anniversary

    Celebrations of 20 years since Tangible started were put on hold as the global pandemic arrived.  ​Lockdowns led to the development of innovative new methodologies for QuickQual research, online and app based qual and the refinement of our approaches to innovation and co creation.

  13. The 21st Birthday

    The team comes of age and goes from strength to strength with Gail stepping down and new skills and behavioural science expertise coming into the business. As we came out of Lockdown we moved our base in the South from Windsor to London.

  14. The New Generation

    The long term succession plan kicks in with Steph taking over as Managing Director of Tangible and Dominic focusing more on the consulting side of the business as Strategy Director. Both are working together with the team to keep developing our specialist qual and quant offer and extend our brand health diagnosis tracking, concept testing, pack and design evaluation, consumer profiling, category strategy and store experience …. and much more besides