Company Description

Our perspective

We help our clients create more distinctive brands, remarkable products, compelling communications, attractive packaging, engaged customers employees or constituents, responsible business practices, and a more human face.

We work directly with marketers of the world’s leading brands, products and services – and prospective newcomers; the creative, marketing, branding, design and digital agencies that serve these marketers, and fellow researchers from around the world.

We align with your interests to help you achieve your goals, beginning with an understanding of the marketing and business objectives underlying the research. We see research in its strategic role, even when we’re exploring tactics.

We recognize that every consumer, shopper, employee or voter are human beings shaped by their identity (or identities), the myriad other roles they play in life, and the culture and multiple sub-cultures in which they grew up and live now. We appreciate that people are driven by a range of hopes, wants, needs and fears, and people can be complicated and inconsistent, often unaware of the deeper reasons they want what they want or do what they do, especially in times of uncertainty.

We treat everyone—our partners, our clients, our vendors, our participants—with dignity and respect. We strive to maintain the highest degree of integrity for everyone involved and to be conscientious about the social and environmental impact of the work we do.

Our Experience
Founded by Marc Engel over 14 years ago, Engel Research Partners has conducted over 2,000 focus groups, interviews, ethnographies, shop-alongs, coffee-klatches, quantitative and ideation/innovation work – in-person and online – speaking with thousands of people of all ages and walks of life.

Prior to starting Engel Research Partners, Marc worked for Harris Interactive and Alexa Internet as an e-commerce analyst and was a partner with B/R/S Group, a boutique research agency. He began his research career on the quant side from 1988-1991, before diverging to law and comedy in the 90s, then migrating to qualitative in 2001.

Marc Engel may be the only marketing researcher whose path to research includes both law and comedy, two seemingly divergent worlds that shape and complement his work. His legal training (Member of the California Bar, graduate of the UCLA School of Law) provides the discipline for constructing persuasive arguments, drawing evidence-based conclusions, and using precise language. Writing and performing comedy (standup, sketch and improv in L.A.) helps him connect with others, uncover unique perspectives and insights, and be simpatico with his clients and their creative work.

Marc developed Out of Focus Groups®, a proprietary approach to insight-generation, co-creation and ideation, based on applied improvisation that empowers you and your team to address your marketing challenges in novel ways.

With empathy at the heart of everything he does, Marc is adept at making people of all ages, backgrounds and situations comfortable sharing their feelings and opinions—whether talking with professionals, C-suite executives, and high net worth individuals or getting people to open up on such personal topics as personal health, beauty, politics, religion and social issues.  

Our Expertise
We work a wide range of verticals, including food and beverage, health and wellness, consumer packaged goods, beauty, technology, sports and entertainment, retail, hospitality, automotive, professional services, consumer electronics, financial services, politics and nonprofit on:
• Brand image/positioning/expansion
• New product development/enhancement
• Concept testing
• Packaging design/redesign
• Advertising, PR, marketing campaigns
• Category/white-space exploration
• Corporate reputation/social responsibility/crisis management
• Naming/taglines/logos
• Use of retail space

Our expertise is enabling all kinds of participants to share their opinions; conducting conversations whether they be straightforward, sensitive or complex; and making such of the barrage of information presented. We extract insights, develop our own perspectives, distill our findings, and share them with our clients to help them make better, more informed decisions for their products and brands.