We do it, on your data. Then you make it yours.
Research ends at the answer. Applied Fandom starts there.
This is not research. Research is very good at one thing: it tells you everything that has already happened, in the words people are willing to give you about themselves. That is a finish line, and it is where the industry stops. We treat it as the starting line.
Segmentation hands you Foodies, Gym Junkies and Brand Buyers, and not one of those is a person you could meet. We work in propensity - what people are already close to doing, read from what they actually do.
This tells you who to build for, what to build for them, and how to best build it for fandom.
This is Applied Fandom.
Research → Applied Fandom
- What people say about themselves → What people are already close to doing
- Self-reported question and answer → Propensity, read from what they actually do
- A study, delivered to you → A position, reshaped with you
- Describes what has happened → Reads for how to engage a person at their own depth
- Ends at findings → Ends at concepts and a strategy you can run
One is a purchase. The other compounds.
Not documents. A position.
The intelligence reads everything you give it and takes a real position: a named lens on your world, tested before you see it, with the working shown and the sentence that would kill it printed on the same page as the conclusion.
Then you get five chances to push against it. That is the product. The documents are how a position holds still long enough to be pushed.
Five steps. That is the whole thing.
Drag and drop
Your brief and your data into a secure chat window, data protected. Whatever you have. Research, transcripts, sales, social, streaming, a strategy doc, a deck from two years ago.
It runs
The method reads your world the way we would read it. Empathetic intelligence at speed. Four links, in order.
- The Cone. A lens on your audience as propensity. Not self-reported question and answer. One spectrum, four behaviours, Fanatics through to Indifferents.
- The Fan Map. Behaviour first, then the life it is lived in. A young superfan and an ageing Fanatic share a propensity and share almost nothing else.
- Applied. The insight, the learnings and your shaping, run through creative methodologies to innovate new solutions and put them to the test. Out come developed concepts, ready for human test and learn shaping.
- Strategise. From the concept, the best fit engagement strategy for what the brief is actually going after, and the year that carries it.
The deck comes back
Full, rendered, packaged. Not a chat transcript. A document you could present.
You riff
This is where it becomes yours. See below, because this is the part nobody else has.
Take it into the room
Or just start delivering.
Cone, Applied and Strategise all read for human understanding - for how to meet, delight and reward a person at the depth they are already at, rather than for what a person reports about themselves. That is the twenty five years, and it is the part no platform has.
Five riffs are included. A riff is not a revision round.
You bring the thing the machine cannot have: your years, your instinct, the thing you know about your world that was never in the data. The intelligence holds the method, thinks back, and holds its ground when the evidence says it should. And every riff closes on something made.
Sometimes that is the maps recut. Sometimes it is something the thinking demanded that was never on the order form: a brand repositioned, a script for the room where your fans actually are, a pricing architecture, a piece of creative. In our most recent full engagement, five riffs renamed a fan group, rewrote a brand's DNA, produced a chair-side introduction script, settled a pricing architecture, and ended on a billboard. None of it was commissioned. All of it came from the client's smarts, steering.
This is next-gen working, and it is the whole point. Human smarts guiding machine intelligence. Machine speed compounding human judgement. Not the machine replacing your room. The machine making your room the sharpest it has ever been.
Five artefacts, rendered and ready.
Your Fan Cone
The FECI behaviours, named in your world's own language, described so you could pick each one out of a crowd.
Your Fan Map
The Cone cut a second time. By generation, community, role or cluster. People you could name, meet and talk to.
The read
What is actually true about the people who care, and what holds it up. Including the parts nobody has noticed yet.
The developed concepts
Aimed behaviour by behaviour. Built for someone specific, not sprayed at everyone, and ready for human test and learn shaping.
The best-fit fandom strategy
Which fan building route suits you, and what the year looks like if you take it.
The Fan Cone and the Fan Map
Always. Every project starts here.
Applied and Strategise
Optional. Not every project needs them.
Five riffs
Each one closes on something made.
The Playbook, physical
So you can read what comes back.
Rendered PDFs
One per part, ready to put in front of a room.
A cut down summary
The easy-to-share summary that sits on top of the full report.
Run your fan meet and greets. Bring the transcripts back.
Upload them. Your Cone arrives provisional. The transcripts qualify it.
That is the part no research deck on earth can do, and it is exactly what those uploads are for.
If you need more.
An extra pack of five riffs, purchased on the same work. The reading is already done, so the pack is pure riffing, and riffing is the deepest part. By your sixth riff you are fluent in your own fandom, and fluent riffs are where the work rockets. We price the thinking, not the reprint.
Beyond that it is no longer a riff. It is a new Cone, and we will tell you so, and quote it as one.
The engine has limits, and we print them.
And we print what would kill it.
The chain has four links and any one of them can be wrong. We name which, out loud, before anybody spends money acting on it.
If the propensity read is wrong
The behaviours will not separate on anything that matters, and every group below is a label rather than a finding. This one is testable first and cheapest to kill.
If the Fan Map is wrong
The behaviour is right and the life is wrong, so the work is aimed at nobody. It reads as true in the room and lands on air.
If the ideation is wrong
The concepts test well with us and badly with people. That is exactly what human test and learn is for, and it is why concepts leave here developed rather than finished.
If the strategy is wrong
The idea is good and the route will not carry it. The most expensive failure of the four, and the last one to show itself.
And here is what the data itself cannot carry.
- It will not size a Cone it cannot source. If you do not have population data we can run without it, or ask us to find some.
- It will not invent a percentage. If you do not have sizing in your data, we will not make it up.
- It will not hand back a segment you cannot picture. No more dead profiles of made up people.
- If the data is not there, it says so.
It is either in the data, or we infer and say so, or we leave it out, park it for later, and say so.
Meaning you can trust what we produce, because nothing will ever be hidden from you.
No research firm prints this. It is the difference between a report and something you can trust.
Brands, labels and agencies with a live brief and real data.
One or two people on your side. We built this so no data team is required.
How we respect your data →
Bring a document to the call and we will read it live.