Thank You For Pushing Us To Redefine Agile

Sep 8, 2022

Since our inception, “Making Clients Heroes” has been our NorthStar, and “Agile” has been our mantra. To our chagrin, GutCheck experienced a three–year hiatus from the GRIT Most Innovative Suppliers list. The message was loud, clear, and appropriate. To many, agile had become about being quick, inexpensive, standard research, and GutCheck was neither as distinguishable nor as relevant to our clients as was needed. This necessitated a return to our roots as a pioneering and empathetic company, striving to become more innovative and ensuring our service was not just quick and basic.

The transformation started by re-defining agile through the clients’ lens. We re-learned that it is about meeting our clients where they are and want to be. Agile is about being tailored to get to the heart of what matters, when and how it matters most to our clients, to support their insights needs and their brand and innovation decision–making processes. It is not about force–fitting clients to a template or a single way of finding an insight.

We also recognized that for brands to appeal to people in this hyper–competitive world, they needed to understand them and connect with them in a more significant way, because humans don’t fit neatly into a template, either. Combining these client needs together, GutCheck relaunched as the Agile Human Experience Intelligence™ Company (aka Agile HXI). While tech platforms have improved access to insights at your fingertips, in some cases, they also have made research a bit too plain vanilla. Agile HXI incorporates valuable perspective on people’s personalities, needs, emotions, and the context in which they make buying and usage decisions. Searching beneath the surface helped us to find these dimensions that drive people to have a strong affinity to brands.

We believe that the new tech platforms represent a meaningful advance and opportunity to improve access to insights for a variety of quick and iterative decisions. While that is important, it is insufficient. The insights experience must be multi-dimensional to support a wide array of business questions and decisions. GutCheck is delighted to be back in a space that offers our clients a differentiated set of research-grade solutions, supported by passionate and objective “get stuff done” service, while being timely and a good fit for a wide range of budgets.

So…I offer a heartfelt ’thank you’ to our clients for pushing us to redefine “agile” and partnering with us consistently and thoughtfully as we created a variety of solutions to expose the human experience. Being a more innovative company is better for all stakeholders in the GutCheck community.

However, a community is about more than just offering our solutions and service. We have been working to give back with an expanded set of thought leadership shared in multiple mediums. This includes a fantastic array of interviews with great brand builders in our “Gutsiest Brands” program and podcast. In addition, “GutCheckonomics™” has helped us go beyond the data and pundits to bring a human lens to economic and social uncertainty. And that’s just the beginning.

On behalf of the entire GutCheck team, THANK YOU for encouraging us and challenging us to serve you better, so that we can stay true to our north star, and play a small role in helping insights leaders, marketers, and innovators drive brand growth with confidence, and a smile.

Rob Wengel

CEO, GutCheck

This month, GutCheck was proudly recognized as: