Human Understanding Lab

Industry-leading human insights

Our Human Understanding Lab helps brands to build strategies around human beings that deliver better business outcomes. And we do it better than any other agency we’re aware of.

Our experts in neuro, behavioural and data science combine with cutting-edge technology and tools to deliver human-centric insight and analytics, with greater emotional depth and faster speed of delivery.

We work with marketing, communications and digital teams to solve challenges, define strategy and drive performance across increasingly complex customer journeys – in short, we help brands to succeed in a fragmented, low-attention digital landscape by optimising the human experience.

The Human Understanding Lab team is integrated across our connected capabilities, inputting value, insights, and science into client briefs to drive effectiveness and conversion right across the marketing mix.

Human understanding logo

luca

AI-POWERED
HUMAN
INSIGHTS

Meet LUCA, the ‘bringer of light’, our AI-powered platform which mines digital data (so that we don’t have to), putting a spotlight on current human insights for our clients – and enabling all of our agency teams to help brands deliver more accurate analysis, conversion and ROI.

To ensure content and comms strategies are effective, LUCA helps to identify the right people, the most influential individuals and organisations relevant to the brand for audience targeting, as well as delivering current insights on the emotional hooks, topics, themes and content the audience is actively discussing to find what genuinely moves and resonates with them.

As part of Human Understanding Lab, our LUCA platform helps brands to tap into emotional context, quickly delivering insights to support speedy decision-making and responsiveness to market opportunity. The AI-powered platform reduces the need for teams to manually research, gather, combine and analyse digital inputs, delivering insights efficiently back to brands to give them a competitive edge.

With a number of exciting developments in the works, the LUCA ecosystem is delivering the following capabilities for clients.

<h3 style=”text-align: center;”>FAST DIGITAL INSIGHTS</h3>

Content Intelligence

LUCA analyses target audiences to uncover what specific communities are engaging with, talking about, and sharing, as well as who influences them. You can use the outputs to inform content planning, channel optimisation and contextual targeting for earned and paid media.

Personality Profiler

LUCA goes beyond job roles and interests to enrich audience profiles and buyer personas using AI-powered psychographic analysis – helping brands to gain a deeper human understanding of their audience’s core personality traits, what motivates and drives them to engage.

PeopleGraph

By creating network maps of target audiences or decision-makers LUCA reveals shared interests, content and connections across social media. AI-powered analysis rapidly identifies and analyses audience activity, most engaged content and online behaviours to inform client strategy.

EMMA

EXPLAINING HUMAN
DECISION-MAKING

Introducing EMMA, the other half of our Human Understanding Lab power couple. EMMA is our proprietary framework, enabling us to understand the true drivers of human behaviour for a brand or product. We use it to dive below the surface of what people say, exploring decision making below the level of conscious thought, navigating the complex webs of memories, emotions and motivations that shape our behaviours.

Emotion, Motivation, Meaning and Action is how we capture the important factors to influence in human decision-making. We use it as a framework to explain current behaviours – why audiences are doing what they do – and how we can help brands to bridge the gap towards achieving their objectives, for instance through sales, loyalty, interaction or perception.

Our work with Kinder Bueno shows how we used EMMA to translate human understanding into actionable strategy for our client – with tangible business impact through a 13% hike in sales – applied across creative, go-to-market, channels, experience and comms.

Packaged potential

Applying our Human Understanding Lab takes B2C and B2B brands to a new level of performance. We offer the suite of packages below to support specific projects or campaigns, help prove the business return on investing in human understanding or pilot the introduction of new insights techniques across neuroscience, behavioural science or data science into your business.

Decision Drivers
Pulse of the Nation
Creative Connection
Human understanding masterclass

MEET THE EXPERTS

Christina

Dr. Cristina de Balanzo

Brand Consultant & Neuroscientist

Cristina, PhD, strategic planner, scientist, researcher, consultant, speaker, lecturer and passionate about brands and brains. Always curious about human beings, but still trying to understand English humour and cricket, Cristina brings her expertise in neuroscience research techniques and academic knowledge to help our clients to better understand human behaviour and get to the heart of how people make decisions.

Andy Myers

Dr. Andy Myers

Neuroscientist

With a background in cognitive neuroscience brain imaging (fMRI) and market research, Andy bring the worlds of neuroscience and market research together to better understand brands, brains and everything in between. With no-nonsense science, without the techno jargon, Andy seeks to better understand human behaviour to deliver ground breaking insights and enable effective change for brands.

Simon Collister

Dr. Simon Collister

Director, Human Understanding Lab

Simon is an accomplished research and strategy consultant solving complex challenges through insight and creativity for some of the world's biggest brands, including multi-national corporations, international NGOs and governments. As Director of the Human Understanding Lab, Simon leads a 120-strong community of neuro, behavioural and data scientists, technologists and strategic planners, helping our clients to apply human understanding to drive conversion across the customer journey.

Latest from the lab

Stay up to date with the Human Understanding Lab including reports and thoughts from our experts, client successes and the hottest views and news – subscribe here for our quarterly digest straight to your inbox.

UNLIMITED requests the contact information you provide to us to contact you about our products and services. You may unsubscribe from these communications at any time. For information on how to unsubscribe, as well as our privacy practices and commitment to protecting your privacy, please review our Privacy Policy.