Brand Marketers

We work with innovative marketers to challenge category conventions, create a distinctive purpose and develop breakthrough brand experiences.

How we help Brand Marketers

Brand Purpose
Brand Positioning
Category Disruption
Cultural Relevance
Experience Benchmarking

Who we help

See and think beyond the obvious.

Category leaders know that the only way to stay ahead of the competition is to see things differently, think differently, and innovate. This is easy to say, but difficult to do.

Brands are constantly under scrutiny; to talk the talk and walk the walk, live up to brand promises and deliver faultless product experiences. It is no longer enough to compare your brand experience to that of category peers. Expectations are raised because customers benchmark brand experiences across categories. We must see beyond the obvious and raise the bar.

Accelerate the edges of culture into the mainstream

In a diverse, omnichannel world, we turn to The Sense Network to set new benchmarks, so that we can exceed them. Cultural creators, outliers, and disrupters provide a radically fresh perspective on your category; one that conventional research cannot show you. We identify plausible new ideas from the edges of culture. We work with you to accelerate these ideas into the mainstream.

Talk the talk, walk the walk and disrupt your category: co-create distinctive brand propositions with The Sense Network, discover new creative communications territories and define a disruptive purpose to challenge category conventions. Together we will design game-changing brand experiences that will delight your customers and surprise category competitors.

What are your jobs to be done?

Can’t see your challenge? Contact us to see if we can help.

How We Work

At Sense Worldwide we use an agile approach when tackling innovation challenges. By breaking the process down into distinct loops, we build on our successes, deliver on expectations, while keeping costing transparent.

We work as a partner. We collaborate with your teams every step of the way. Together we learn from each loop. This reduces waste and ensures your teams can work simultaneously with what has been learned at each stage.

1. Mind Expansion	2. Opportunity Mapping	3. Co-create	4. Define	5. Pipeline
Go wide, gather radically diverse perspectives and reframe your category	Go deep and identify emerging and under-met consumer needs	Defining the most fertile opportunity spaces for future growth	Co-create and stress-test propositions with your future consumers	A pipeline of breakthrough propositions to champion your category

How The Sense Network gives you an unfair competitive advantage

Why is The Sense Network better at evaluating breakthrough innovations?

The Sense Network sees the potential in novel ideas. As creators, they are more open-minded and can increase your accuracy, and the odds of betting on the best original innovations, by 65%.

In his book Originals, Adam Grant, professor of organizational psychology at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, demonstrates that when you take a managerial role it’s hard to avoid letting an evaluative mindset creep in and cause false negatives.
Managers and focus groups are 55% more prone to major false negatives, undervaluing strong breakthrough ideas. The Sense Network mitigates this risk.

Why is Sense Worldwide better at identifying future innovation opportunities?

We already live in the future, with the people who are creating it, The Sense Network. We go to the edge of culture for inspiration, and drive fringe behaviors and needs into the mainstream.

Science fiction author William Gibson writes about the future. He famously stated that ‘the future is already here, it’s just unevenly distributed’. He observed that there are people in society who are already living in the future, today. These are the people who see things differently and think about things differently. You won’t find them living in the mainstream. They live at the edge of culture. This is why The Sense Network was created.

To gather foresight into business models, brands, customer needs, categories, and products we go to the edge of culture. We collaborate with people at the extremes of the bell curve: outliers, misfits, rebels, and the crazy ones. Meet them, spend time with them, understand their needs and motivations, learn from them, find common ground; and invite them to join our community. 

What they are thinking, feeling, and doing right now is an indicator of where mainstream consumer culture is heading.

How The Sense Network elevates analytical thinking into breakthrough ideas.

The Sense Network sees things differently and thinks differently. Harnessed correctly, the collective, lateral thinking of the network can help to reframe a situation analysis, competitive review, or research brief to reveal fresh perspectives not yet visible to the organization.

 This is how we do it: The post-it note on the right shows that the worldview of those standing in front of Peak A on the left of the diagram can only see the summit of Peak A, their best analytical thinking. 

Their view towards the breakthrough ideas at Peak B is hidden and obscured by Peak A. To expand our worldview, we talk to the people who are standing on the right of the diagram The Sense Network; those who are currently out of your view.

  People looking at Peak B can help us to see things that we cannot yet see. They help us to understand the game-changing opportunities and breakthrough ideas waiting for us at the summit of Peak B.  

Through an iterative ideation process of testing hypotheses and receiving feedback, we make creative leaps that deliver breakthrough innovation; it’s proven.

Why is feedback from The Sense Network more valuable than conventional research?

Focus groups and user research restricts feedback to a single demographic or target user. The Sense Network provides multiple, diverse perspectives. The more divergent perspectives your idea receives, the better shape it will take.

The cognitive diversity of The Sense Network can be directed in a focused and calculated way throughout the innovation process. This metric can be expressed as CQ (Cognitive Quotient) and can be applied to both teams, and the tools they use.

To calculate CQ, measure the number of people working on an activity, multiply this by the number of disciplines in the group e.g. strategy, design, marketing, brand, insight, and multiply this again by the hourly duration of the activity.

When an innovation team needs inspiration or feedback on ideas and boost their CQ they can undertake user research or focus groups. When you look at the numbers through the CQ lens focus groups are a disappointing research tool.

How will The Sense Network derisk and future-proof your innovation strategy?

A situation analysis will only ever be 75% complete if you take a conventional approach to strategic planning. With the help of The Sense Network, people who see things differently and think differently, 100% knowledge is our goal.  

The Rumsfeld Matrix is a useful tool to de-risk strategies. At first glance, we know that it can appear confusing. Hopefully this explanation is better than Donald’s.

The Known Knowns
Explicit, documented knowledge about your organization and the sector. Factual, evidence-based quantitative information: financials, trends, metrics, competitive review. A good situational analysis should cover this thoroughly.

The Unknown Knowns
The tacit knowledge known by individuals within your organization, but unknown by the wider organization. Stakeholder interviews are useful for surfacing information. However unless the right question is asked, stakeholders do not always know what they know, this is particularly true of innovation.

The Known Unknowns
The knowledge and opinions of external partners and organizations that we must seek out to make known. Access to sector experts is limited and the echo chamber effect is prevalent. This is where conventional strategic planning begins to slow down, 75% complete.

The Unknown Unknowns
The Sense Network are unconventional thinkers from worlds unlike your own. Their divergent outlook and specialist knowledge reveals unknown unknowns. This perspective helps mitigate the risk of being blindsided by disruption.

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