The Next Frontier of Consumer Intelligence

Services

LIFESTREAM: understand authentic in-home behaviors, on a global scale.

Unlock more detail & data than with traditional research.

By tapping into real life, our Lifestream methodology removes the bias from researchers & facilities and introduces a new-to-the-industry data source, uncovering hidden truths from consumers’ lives in near real time.

Understand real-life behaviors by observing real lives.

Real life is messy: human behavior is subconscious and based on habit. Lifestream provides a window into everyday life to understand real human experiences and behaviors in an undisturbed context.

Services

LIFESHARE: capturing real-life situations and experiences on the go, in context.

Easily tag along for in-context learning.

Our mobile capture methodologies & techniques take you on a consumer’s journey, to experience real moments in their everyday.

Engage to uncover more layers of their lives.

Put a face to your consumer and gather deeper understanding as they share their real experiences with you.

Services

VISUAL INSIGHT SYSTEM

Helping you interpret, analyze, and understand authentic human experiences & behaviors.

At the core of it all, we are a technology company. Through a combination of AI + human understanding, our technology aggregates audio or video content from any source, structuring it into actionable data and insights.

Providing a combination of empathy, analytics, and strategic storytelling, our Visual Insight System delivers to you an agile data source, where insights can be socialized and data re-mined over time.

How clients are using our technology

1 Fortune 500 cleaning brand

To support the development of a new cleaning product, we spent 8 days observing how people cleaned their homes by the use of wearable cameras.

The solution

People do not move their feet when they clean. Additionally, people are more likely to use cleaning products that are in plain sight. This meant that surfaces which are a long distance away from where they started cleaning are missed by the spray from the bottle.

The outcome

Our client developed a unique nozzle that sprayed the cleaning product further, covering more surface area. It was supported with ATL comms encouraging people to keep the product in plain sight. The product has grown the category by 6% overall, and won Product of the Year 2020 for the cleaning category.

2 Global cleaning products company

Our client wanted to understand how real life behaviors and odors impact the in-car environment. Claimed data had identified purchase drivers; however, the client needed to understand what really happens in-car, and how behaviors change seasonally.

The solution

Big Sofa recruited a network of 20 drives across the country to capture in-car behavior for 8 weeks (2 weeks per season).

Collected nearly 600 hours of video across 4,100 videos
Coded & analyzed 46,100 data points

The outcome

The client’s customized Visual Insight System supported internal workshops through which they built out their foundational understanding of authentic behaviors on the in-car environment, including the identification of seventeen unique orders that had never before been considered. The research was socialized to cross functional teams using Big Sofa’s Visual Insight System functionality.

3 Global beverage and snack company

This client wanted a strategic review of its key vertical, seeking platforms to be built that were rooted in real, in-home behaviors.

The solution

From over 80 households in 3 countries, Big Sofa collected 28,000 food and beverage videos, leading to 350,000 data points and 1,700 days of observation.

The outcome

Combined with multiple data sources to create:

14 growth platforms across 3 work-streams
Multiple workshops to engage stakeholders, activate platforms and create plans.

Content has been repeatedly re-analyzed saving significant investment in potential new research.

4 Global Apparel Company

This client wanted to breathe life into a global segmentation to really capture what lay behind specific attitudes, and how those attitudes manifested themselves in behaviors.

The Solution

Immersive mobile video where consumers shared multiple ‘days-in-their-life’ with us.

106 consumers
4,300 videos
3,600 minutes
1,600 images
400,000 words

The Outcome

Platform created allowing stakeholders from across the business to deep dive into segments, brought to life with video content. Unique triggers identified for each segment that became the basis for creative briefs.

Our Technology

Secure

We take security very seriously. We are ISO27001 accredited and we use global data centers, both cloud and private, to ensure data remains in its country of origin for GDPR compliance. Permissions within our application are completely customizable and transparent, giving you control over who sees your data. Additionally we offer obfuscation services in order to maintain anonymity.

Fast

Our architecture auto scales in response to web traffic and processing queues, so you’re never left waiting for your content. Our processing pipelines are designed with speed and scale in mind and can be custom built to your needs.

Intelligent

We use Machine Learning technology to automatically detect the contents of your videos and convert them into searchable, actionable data points. This makes video research at scale a far more viable, and economic choice. Not only does your video data become searchable, we automatically analyze your aggregated data to spot trends, clusters, anomalies and correlations.

Consumer Closeness and Feedback

Our intuitive interface allows you to get closer to your consumers with our suite of storytelling tools. Highlight reels, offline downloads, curated homepages and community tools such as interactive comments and sharing, get you closer to true human experiences.

Data-led Insights

Convert your video research into data with visualizations and reports. A Hybrid of Machine Learning technology and human analysis drives deeper insights at scale.

Questions? We
Have Answers

For Agencies
For Brands

I need professional quality video deliverables, but I don’t want to lose any of the content that we captured. How does this work?

Big Sofa's Studio team can deliver high-quality videos, complete with custom animations and incredible storytelling. All content from your study stays in the Visual Insights System, and is explorable and re-mineable for more learnings down the road. You or your teams can revisit consumers and even create your own video clips and playlists.

Is there a way to understand human behavior over time, but also capture day-in-the-life ethnographies?

We can mix & match any of our methodologies on a project. Making use of both Lifestream (in-home capture alongside), and Lifeshare's mobile work (via iOS and Android app), Big Sofa can design any type of study style, length, and capture methodology to answer your business questions.

We’re looking to do a long study – meaning weeks or months. Have you ever done this?

Yep! Most of our Lifestream observational projects last about a week; some stretch over many months. As it's all digital and automatically uploaded, video content streams to the Visual Insights System as it is recorded, so you can stay in-tune throughout the research.

You talk about ‘in home’ with Lifestream and ‘on the go’ with Lifeshare. What about in stores at shelves, or in cars, or beta product testing?

Yes, yep, and yeah. Our solutions work in cars on the go, or in understanding product location and perception on shelves, or at home and reviewing a product.

Can our teams work with your tools, or do you also have people to help?

Both! We can arrange a DIY solution, work together, or our team of consultants can handle the entire process, from capture to analyzing content and uncovering insights and producing deliverables. The Visual Insight System is a powerful tool that's ready to go and easy to use, by your teams or ours (or together!).

Do we need to use your video capture methodologies? What if we already have content to analyze from IDIs, focus groups, or immersions?

You can do either: our Visual Insight System is able to work with any content you may already have, turning video, audio, or images into incredible data sources that are available to your entire teams. Or, we can help plan out your project utilizing our capture methodologies.

Explore how the next frontier of consumer intelligence can help
your business.

London

Unit 106, Metal Box Factory
30 Great Guildford Street
London
SE1 0HS
+44 (0) 20 7357 0033
info@bigsofatech.com

Philadelphia

Stacks Co.
52-54 East Oakland Avenue
Doylestown, Pennsylvania 18901
usteam@bigsofatech.com

Say hello to the Big Sofa leadership team.

OUR STORY & NAME

Big Sofa Technologies was founded on the idea that market research and ethnographies can be done better. No matter how hard you try, traditional research methods like in-homes and shop-a-longs still introduce influence and bias. At first, we removed any sense of structure from an interview by inviting people to join us for a conversation on a sofa – hence our name.

What we discovered is that observing actual behaviors over time is what best brings information about, and clarity to, the true human experience. Seeing how people act and behave, unfiltered, in the spaces and places they live is the best way to bring empathy into research and human behavioral understanding.

Over the past few years, we set out on a journey of building a pioneering video technology system to help leading brands capture and understand authentic consumer behaviors and experiences.

Welcome to the next frontier of consumer intelligence.

Kirsty Fuller

CEO

Matt Lynch

Co-Founder & CSO

Joe MacCarthy

CFO

Martin Chapman

CTO

Sam Curtis

Managing Director, Client Services

Charlotte Coleman

Senior Director, Insights & Strategy

Brian Livell

Managing Director, North America

Keanan Barbour-March

Client Director, North America

Careers at Big Sofa

Who we are

Integrity Led

Integrity is the defining quality of our people and our work. Whether it’s our contribution to corporate social responsibility and research, or our relationships with our clients and our employees, we strive to act truthfully and authentically. We’re unafraid to meet life with a high standard of ethics.

Self-improvers

We believe in the importance of continuous improvement and pushing the boundaries of the norm. Curiosity is at the forefront of our business and we strive to improve our product, our people, and our technology.

Future Shapers

Innovation is hardwired into our products and our people. As pioneers in video technology and analytics, we are shaping the next frontier of consumer intelligence, putting human experience and behavior at the heart of businesses and brands.

Tech Enthusiasts

We are fascinated by what technology and human endeavor can achieve. We build and improve our technology to aggregate human diversity in a way that uncovers its shared patterns while doing justice to its heterogeneity. We combine the best of human and machine intelligence to deliver new data streams and better solutions to our client’s business needs.

What we believe

Now & Next

We are hellbent on providing the most valuable consumer intelligence platform today. And, we believe that’s impossible to do without thinking about what’s next. We are constantly improving and expanding our system’s capabilities.

Technology Enhances Reality

When our technology intersects with data from real consumer lives, we open a window into insights that more authentic and valuable than other research methods could ever offer.

Better Data In, Better Insights Out

Authentic video data reveals what people do, not just what they say they do. It means we can illuminate trends, behaviors, and insights that would otherwise go undetected.

The Next Frontier of Consumer Intelligence.

Services

LIFESTREAM: understand authentic in-home behaviors, on a global scale.

Services

LIFESHARE: capturing real-life situations and experiences on the go, in context.

Services

VISUAL INSIGHT SYSTEM

How clients are using our technology

1 Fortune 500 cleaning brand

To support the development of a new cleaning product, we spent 8 days observing how people cleaned their homes by the use of wearable cameras.

2 Global cleaning products company

Our client wanted to understand how real life behaviors and odors impact the in-car environment. Claimed data had identified purchase drivers; however, the client needed to understand what really happens in-car, and how behaviors change seasonally.

3 Global beverage and snack company

This client wanted a strategic review of its key vertical, seeking platforms to be built that were rooted in real, in-home behaviors.

4 Global Apparel Company

This client wanted to breathe life into a global segmentation to really capture what lay behind specific attitudes, and how those attitudes manifested themselves in behaviors.

Our Technology

Questions? We Have Answers

I need professional quality video deliverables, but I don’t want to lose any of the content that we captured. How does this work?

Is there a way to understand human behavior over time, but also capture day-in-the-life ethnographies?

We’re looking to do a long study – meaning weeks or months. Have you ever done this?

You talk about ‘in home’ with Lifestream and ‘on the go’ with Lifeshare. What about in stores at shelves, or in cars, or beta product testing?

Can our teams work with your tools, or do you also have people to help?

Do we need to use your video capture methodologies? What if we already have content to analyze from IDIs, focus groups, or immersions?

Explore how the next frontier of consumer intelligence can help your business.

Explore how the next frontier of consumer intelligence can help your business.

London

Philadelphia

Say hello to the Big Sofa leadership team.

Kirsty Fuller

Matt Lynch

Joe MacCarthy

Martin Chapman

Sam Curtis

Charlotte Coleman

Brian Livell

Keanan Barbour-March

Careers at Big Sofa

Integrity Led

Self-improvers

Future Shapers

Tech Enthusiasts

Now & Next

Technology Enhances Reality

Better Data In, Better Insights Out

The Next Frontier
of Consumer
Intelligence.

Questions? We
Have Answers

Explore how the next frontier of consumer intelligence can help
your business.

Explore how the next frontier of consumer intelligence can help
your business.