Marketing Research and Insight Excellence Awards winner Hotspex

Editor’s note: Hotspex is the winner of the 2022 Marketing Research Supplier of the Year (2021 revenue above $10 million) Award which is a category in the Marketing Research and Insight Excellence Awards. To find out more about the awards click here.

Hotspex is a “new rules” insights, innovation and technology leader focused on applying emotional science to driving buying behavior and relationships with brands. Hotspex is the brand-building partner that enables companies like P&G, The Coca-Cola Company, Tik Tok and Under Armour to use behavioral and implicit psychometrics to uncover learning undetectable to traditional research across 30+ countries and all major continents. Many companies talk about emotions, but Hotspex deepens brand-builders’ understanding of human motivation to unlock brand growth.

What is the overall goal when taking on a client?

As enablers of client success, we deliver research projects with excellence. More than this, we see ourselves as enablers of the next step of our client’s career. We work with clients that are insights professionals striving to impact their businesses, insights leaders growing their teams and insights innovators building capabilities. We support these various personas across industries at leadership, tier one brands globally.  

Yet we know that we are not for everyone. We are not at our best if we are kept at arm’s length as a “supplier” that does not add value or understand your business and how you get promoted. We pride ourselves on being the antidote to the “traditional” market research mentality.

We are grateful that clients have rewarded our agency with superior growth over the past 20 years. 

What, in your opinion, is the most important thing for a supplier to provide to an end-client? 

Let’s start with what we’re not in the business of providing: 150-slide data books. Disparate data points without considering the bigger picture. Answering just the “what” without the “so what” and “now what.”

The most important things are

  • Integration: Beyond research to strategic direction for profitable action. 
  • Flow: Understanding how to help our client impact their customer journey. 
  • Connection: Build the big picture across brand-building touchpoints. 
  • Gravity: User-friendly deliverables for stakeholders, transparent pricing models and joint business planning with clients at the business unit level.

Where do you see market research in five years?  

More process automation that accelerates time to value (from study initiation to data processing).

More modeling of real-world buying situations for accurate predictions of consumer behavior. 

Integration of true non-conscious psychometrics with neurometrics to unlock learning undetectable to traditional methods. 

Deeper understanding of human motivation, cognitive computational models and causal relationship models proactively inform future-focused business decision making.