We have four divisions:

Moving Brands Forward

Every marketing challenge is different, but the goal is always the same: find a way to get the most value out of your brand with the resources at hand. At Epitome, this is our number one objective. We believe you can unlock hidden value without breaking the bank, and move your strategy forward one step at a time.

The Tools You Need

We offer a wide range of services, all backed by an innovative delivery model, a passionate team, and methodologies proven through real-world application. When your business faces a pivotal decision and you need the right answer fast, we provide an elite team with the time-tested tools to get the job done — quantitative data, market and customer intelligence, narrative insights, cutting-edge brand strategy and more.

What to Expect

When you engage Epitome, we immerse ourselves in your industry, including its history, discourse, techniques, technology and competitive landscape. Consumer or B2B, niche or mass-market, we investigate your brand's past and present from every relevant angle, then work directly with you and your team to chart a course for the future.

What is NarrativeLogic™?

NarrativeLogic™ is a deep-dive qualitative research technique based on the discipline of narratology and decades of social science research.

Narrative: The Key to Human Identity

NarrativeLogic™ succeeds in understanding buying behavior because consumers and B2B buyers, like everyone else, make sense of their lives through the stories they tell; they are constantly composing stories about why they act the way they do and make the choices they do.

What to Expect

Through our unique methodology we identify the stories your customers are living through and locate points in the stories that afford opportunities to brands and businesses. The groundbreaking insights generated by NarrativeLogic™ are often transformative, mapping out completely new ways to position brands, communicate value propositions, and develop new products and services.

Proven Success

In multiple tests in North America and abroad, brand concepts developed with NarrativeLogic™ have consistently outperformed competitors, often with a two-to-one advantage.

What is StoryLogic™?

StoryLogic™ is a qualitative research methodology that makes your messaging platform more meaningful. It yields "thick descriptions" of the target consumer's ego structure, relationships, and personal narrative.

Finding Your Brand's Story

StoryLogic™ draws on a rich history of work in the humanities and social sciences on the factors that give stories power and meaning. A series of one-on-one interviews surfaces all the vital elements of the consumer story: the character of the target/protagonist, the call to action, the obstacles and traps that must be overcome, and the way to the desired goal.

What to Expect

Through an in-depth narrative analysis of all the consumer's motivators and inhibitors— rational and emotional, conscious and unconscious— StoryLogic™ reveals the deep psychological structures that make your customer tick. By leveraging these insights you can help your brand break through as a powerful, attuned force at critical junctures in the stories your customers tell about their lives.

What is CustomerLogic™?

CustomerLogic™ is an Epitome product focused on the continuous improvement of the customer experience. This technique integrates quantitative and qualitative data to help you build lasting relationships with valuable customers.

Discover Your Customers

First we help you to discover and understand your customers with quantitative segmentation based on cutting-edge intelligence about current, former and potential customers. With information about the attitudes, behaviors and demographics of your target in hand, you can tailor marketing and selling strategies to optimize your sales cycle and get the most bang for your marketing buck.

Strengthen Your Relationships

Once you identify and engage with your customers, the key to continuing success is keeping them happy. We will help you develop an effective engagement model to guide your interactions with customers. Our process combines internal performance metrics and customer touch point analysis, built upon all interactions between the company and its customers.

Market Insights That Matter

No one who runs a business should have to fly blind. Epitome offers a variety of services to help you gather and analyze the information that you need to succeed in the modern marketplace. Instinct and anecdote can only get you so far—take your business to the next level with hard numbers and deep insights about your category, competitors, customers and brands.

Full Range of Quantitative Services

In addition to our custom expert panels we offer a full set of quantitative research services ranging from broad-based A&U studies to more focused research on new product development.

We work with the following platforms:

B2B Expertise at Your Fingertips

Epitome builds and maintains panels of experts in the B2B space. Our industry research panels provide essential information for strategic planning, brand management and new product development. Many clients use our panels as an ongoing resource to keep their strategy in focus.

Full-service Panel Solutions

Whatever your industry, Epitome provides a complete research solution. We advise clients on strategy, help them design and deploy research and take care of all the back-office details, including incentive fulfillment and panel management. We specialize in recruiting hard-to-reach buyers and experts in a wide variety of industries. We can also customize a panel to fit your firm's needs.

We currently maintain the following panels:

Looking Ahead

Epitome's 2014 research program combines traditional desk research with the ongoing evaluation of best practices, based on the shared experiences of a consortium of companies facing a common challenge: how to manage premium brands in commoditizing categories.

The Challenge of Branding

Classical political economy was fascinated by the problem of commoditization— the process by which the free flow of information and mass production could rapidly transform a unique, profitable invention into a standardized, low-margin commodity. The rise of brands, with their ability to form powerful, sometimes inimitable emotional connections that resist commoditization, contravened this cycle. However, as categories mature, as distribution becomes saturated, as patents expire and as competitors emulate innovation, the protection offered by a strong brand begins to erode. This has led to a common problem faced by managers of premium brands, namely how to maintain a premium positioning in a rapidly commoditizing category.

Confronting a Common Problem

Epitome is assembling a research program for 2014-15 that will bring together leading companies from different industries to analyze this problem, asses best practices, share insights and pool knowledge.

Help Over the Long Run

Epitome specializes in large-scale strategy and research, but you don't need a major project to take advantage of our expertise. Epitome works with change agents, the dynamic people who drive progress, and our relationships with clients nearly always last beyond the initial project. But you don't need a major project to take advantage of our expertise.

Through the Epitome-by-Request loyalty program, we reward clients with ongoing access to critical resources, helping you to do your best work and supporting you in advancing your career.

Services at your Fingertips

Through Epitome by Request, you can use Epitome as your "go-to" source for questions on branding and strategy and to help make your work on strategic problems a force in your own professional development.

Highlights of the program include: