WE ARE HEADLINERS.
A small, elite collective of some of the world’s best brand researchers and strategists
If you need sharp strategic insight - delivered fast, priced sensibly, and led by the very best senior people in the industry - you've come to the right place.
ABOUT HEADLINERS
HEADLINERS was founded by Daniel Rose, former Head of Comms and MD of Firefish, with over 20 years’ experience leading strategic insight work for some of the world’s biggest brands and businesses.
Daniel’s mission with Headliners is simple: to do outstanding work for a core group of smart, interesting clients. The aim is not to grow it into a multi-million pound business. Nor to scale and sell to private equity. This is a business all about putting together brilliant teams of people, doing brilliant work for a select group of brilliant clients.
With HEADLINERS, each project team is designed to best deliver against the needs of the client. Whether it’s agile AI-powered work or full-service global qualitative, Daniel curates the perfect team of expert partners to ensure the work is delivered to the highest standard within the time scales you require. We can scale up to get the work done, but will never compromise on quality.
WHAT DO WE DO?
We specialise in strategic brand research, delivered exactly the way you need it done. Tell us what you need, by when, and how much you have to spend - and we’ll work out a plan that fits.
As a start point, we offer three core levels of service:
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Whether within the UK or working with partners overseas, we can run full service qualitative or multidisciplinary research from start to finish, just like a traditional agency.
We pull together teams of the world’s best researchers, project managers, tech platforms and local research agencies to deliver best-in-class work from planning and logistics through to analysis and outputs.
Our core expertise lies in qualitative research, but we have an expert network of leading senior practitioners from across the insight world available to support us when needed: quant, cultural insight, semiotics, data analytics, film, creative strategy and more.
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The new world of AI self-serve tools is in full effect and many clients are already turning to them for certain types of projects, with brand and comms work often an obvious choice for self-serve.
They’re great – but without expert supervision, the results can be at best inconclusive, and at worst misleading.
We have extensive experience working across a number of different tools and are able to provide a low-cost, fast-paced consultative layer on top of the tool of your choice (either one you subscribe to internally, or one of our preferred platforms) to ensure you get the best out of it. Whether that’s helping you up front to design the discussion guide, or at the back-end to analyse the responses and provide a layer of strategic thinking, we can help you get an awful lot more out of AI research than you would normally, for minimal additional investment.
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Sometimes you just need an extra brain in the mix to get you where you need to be.
That could be anything – from spending a few days helping extract the strategic story from a few different debriefs / data sources, through to spending a couple of hours helping you write a brief for an upcoming comms development project.
Larger agencies struggle with smaller engagements because the finances don’t add up. But with us you can buy our time for a week or just for an hour. We’re here to help, no matter the size of the engagement.
HOW ARE WE DIFFERENT?
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The contemporary world of insight looks very different to the way it used to. Speed is of the essence, more work is done in-house, and AI tools have become part of day-to-day life.
Sometimes what you need is not a full, bespoke project, but far more agile support. Someone to pull together a quick summary of existing data, or work with an AI tool to quickly test some ideas.
Sometimes a 5 slide sharp strategic summary of the project - delivered the day after the research - has 10x the impact of a 30 slide deck delivered 2 weeks later.
We’re not just here for the big projects. We flex to the demands of modern insight functions – providing support for anything from a few hours to a few weeks, always delivered by senior people who can work quickly and effectively.
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Research that informs brand strategy or creative ideas requires deep understanding of how a brand is built and how branded communication is consumed.
A lot of researchers treat brand and comms work as ‘the easy stuff’. It’s not. Ask people to react to an early idea, a new positioning, or draft packaging, and it's easy to get a misleading answer. Bad insight is worse than none: it sends you confidently in the wrong direction.
We specialise in this kind of work. We know the difference between a strategy, a positioning, a creative idea and an execution – and how research best feeds into each piece of the puzzle. You’ll feel the difference straight away.
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We’re a small, senior team of specialists who will be completely focused on your project.
Big agencies have to split the time of senior people in order to balance the books, so you often only see them at certain points in the project. But with us, everyone you encounter – from project managers through to your project lead – has over 15 years’ experience and will be dedicated entirely to your project.
You get the big guns from start to finish, without the big price tag.
WANT TO KNOW MORE?
Get in touch via the form or email:
[email protected]
FAQs
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Brand and creative insight is basically any kind of market research that’s geared towards improving the way your brand shows up to its consumers. It can be exploratory - speaking to your target audience, understanding what they are interested in / how they behave / how they feel about your brand…and then using that to create interesting angles for brand positioning or communication. Or it can involve testing ideas you’ve already had - for ways to position your brand, new product extensions, or communication ideas. In each case it requires both a deep understanding of people and how they work - and a deep understanding of brands and advertising and how all of that works. That’s where we come in.
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Great question, thanks for asking. Sometimes in life you come across things you’re really really good at. It doesn’t happen often, and it doesn’t always happen in the areas you’d like it to happen, but it’s still a blessing when it does. I wanted to be really, really good at football, but sadly the highest level I reached was the school 1st XI, and even then I was mainly used as a sub.
Instead, about 4 years into my career, I found out that I was really, really good at brand research. Something about the blend of creative problem solving and having a really good, intuitive understanding of people and how they operate meant I was able to make the connections between the things people would say and do in research situations, and the recommendations I would need to make to clients to shape brand and communications strategy. Because I was naturally good at it, I did it a lot more, and 15 years of experience later I’ve fine tuned all the different parts of the process to become (probably) the best in the world ;-)
I now run HEADLINERS and that means collaborating with other outstanding researchers I’ve met during my career who really ‘get it’.
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We are keen to work with any businesses or organisations who want to improve the way they communicate to their customers and / or position themselves in their specific marketplace.
In his previous role, Dan ran brand and comms research projects for some of the world’s biggest brands and businesses - from Google to Unilever to Diageo.
But HEADLINERS is a small business with small overheads - that opens things up, and we are keen to work with anyone and everyone…from start-ups, to NGOs to big corporates. Anywhere our expertise can be of use, and where we can do work that is fun, fulfilling and makes an impact.
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The cost of a research project generally includes three main elements - the cost of recruiting and paying participants (the people we speak to about your brand / business), the cost of the platform we use to speak to them (this might be an AI research tool, or it might be a simple low cost platform like Zoom), and the cost of the time spent by the team working on the project.
HEADLINERS is likely to be more cost-effective than most larger agencies because of our low overheads. We don’t need to charge the earth, because the HEADLINERS monthly target is simply to pay Dan’s mortgage.
We are keen to offer clients a flexible service that gives them what they need at the price point they want to pay, and we want every interaction with us to feel like excellent value for money. So whether your budget is £500 or £500,000, please give us a call for a chat. If we can find a way to hit your budget that ensures you get value for money, we will do.
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Dan Rose’s core specialism is qualitative research, but he has a network of outstanding freelance partners who are able to bring their own skill sets into projects - including quant researchers, cultural strategists, semioticians, advertising creatives and planners, workshop facilitators and more. Dan has run many multidisciplinary projects in his time and is adept at bringing the different skill sets together to deliver crystal clear, cohesive results.
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We can cover most markets across the globe, either via our network of trusted partner agencies in each market, or via one of the digital / AI platforms we are able to partner with.
WE TAKE DATA PROTECTION
AND INFORMATION SECURITY SERIOUSLY
We understand that confidentiality and data protection are essential for modern business. That’s why we have consulted extensively with legal, IT security and data protection advisers to ensure our processes and systems are compliant with all major data protection and IT security standards.
We are registered as a data processor with the ICO and have policies in place to ensure we comply with all necessary data protection regulations
All laptops associated with the business or its freelance associates are encrypted and have the latest antivirus software installed
We have detailed contracts in place with all suppliers to ensure they adhere to the same standards of data protection and IT security as we do
You can view our privacy and IT security policies below
