Ad-hoc Custom Studies

Bespoke research designed for high-stakes decisions — for the questions where standard data falls short and the cost of being wrong is real.

When off-the-shelf research will not do

Syndicated reports and existing panels answer questions someone else thought to ask. That is often enough. It stops being enough at exactly the moments that matter most: when you are pricing a product nobody in the market has launched, entering a category whose boundaries are not agreed, assessing an acquisition where the target’s real position is contested, or defending a business case that a board is going to interrogate line by line.

A custom study is built from the decision backwards. We start by establishing what you would do differently depending on the answer — and if there is no answer that would change the decision, we will say so rather than sell you the research. That conversation costs nothing and occasionally saves a great deal.

Typical questions we are brought in for

  • Pricing and willingness to pay — conjoint, Van Westendorp or discrete choice designs where the category has no useful precedent.
  • Concept and proposition testing — before committing to a launch, in markets where the response differs sharply by nationality cohort.
  • Market sizing where no data exists — bottom-up construction with the assumptions written down and stress-tested.
  • Due diligence support — independent commercial validation of a target’s claimed market position, customer relationships and pipeline.
  • Brand health and equity tracking — built to your category, not to a generic template.
  • Employee, channel and stakeholder research — where the population is small, senior and hard to reach.
  • Policy and public-sector research — evidence designed to withstand external scrutiny.

How a study is built

1 · Framing

We convert a business question into a research question — which are rarely the same sentence. This stage produces the decision the work serves, the evidence that would settle it, and the threshold at which you would act. It is the stage most often skipped, and skipping it is why so much research is interesting and useless.

2 · Design

Method follows the question rather than the other way round: qualitative, quantitative or mixed; sample frames built for the real population structure of the market; instruments cognitively tested in both English and Arabic where relevant. You see and approve the design, including its limitations, before fieldwork begins.

3 · Fieldwork

Executed with quality controls that are specified in advance and reported afterwards — completion criteria, attention and consistency checks, back-checking of a defined share of interviews, and full disclosure of any deviation from the agreed design. Where a target is genuinely hard to reach, we say what it will take rather than quietly substituting an easier sample.

4 · Analysis and synthesis

Analysis is planned before the data lands, so findings are tested rather than fished for. The deliverable leads with the decision implication and holds the methodology behind it — with every material claim traceable to the evidence that supports it, and an explicit account of what the study could not establish.

That last habit is deliberate and runs through everything we build, including CitationLab, our education software: a result you cannot trace to its source is not a result, and a system that reports its own gaps is worth more than one that hides them.

Timelines and confidentiality

Most custom studies run between four and ten weeks depending on sample difficulty and method. Where a decision date is fixed we design to it, and we are explicit about what a compressed timeline costs in precision rather than pretending it costs nothing.

Confidentiality is assumed by default. A large share of this work is commercially sensitive — pricing, M&A support, launch plans — and stays unpublished. Data-processing agreements and NDAs are standard, and client content is never used to train models.

Related services

Scope a custom study