The 4 Beliefs That Are Shaping The Future Of Our Agency

I spend most of my time on LinkedIn writing about climate change and nature and staying in touch with all the amazing people I meet, so writing about my work is long overdue.

This post is my answer to all of those of you who have been asking me more about what my business does, so here it is...

I'm Rob, the Founder of Source Nine. I spent most of my career at the University of Exeter, before launching an ecommerce startup that I'm currently exiting and am now focusing on all the things I enjoy the most and am best at: research and strategy.

Source Nine is a customer insights agency that helps Ad Agency Planners, Marketing Directors and Charity Campaigners to make the right decision, see what’s coming next and put deeply human insights at the heart of their strategies and communications.

We're a husband and wife team with a growing number of young, talented and passionate researchers.

We help people have ‘a-ha’ moments (usually in the middle of a focus group!), and better understand the customers that they serve through research that’s deeply empathetic.

The empathy part is really important to us and it's written in to our name as you will see below (look out for the first belief for the clue).

We cover the full suite of traditional qual and quant research and we've seen that our focus on empathy is incredibly valuable as it translates into having happier customers and supporters, coming up with breakthrough creative ideas, designing innovative products and finding clear solutions to tricky problems.

Guiding our work are 4 key beliefs that cover the work we do and the changing world that we do it in.

If you want to know the future of Source Nine, these are the beliefs that are shaping it - I hope some of them resonate with you. Let me know in the comments.

In Short:

1. We believe that information doesn’t change behaviour, emotion does?
2. We believe that the successful companies of the future will be those that can balance Big Data with human insights so they don’t stay stuck in the past
3. We believe that strategy begins with insight, not tactics
4. We believe we are living through a paradigm shift in our relationship with nature that is about to change the world as we know it

In Full:

1. We believe that information doesn’t change behaviour, emotion does?

We believe that our emotional landscapes can be mapped and understood and put at the heart of strategy

This is because we understand that there are 9 universal human needs that drive all of our actions and motivations. When a need is being met, we experience positive feelings. But when a need is not being met, we experience negative feelings.

We’ve indexed over 300 feelings in relation to the 9 needs as well as methods for assessing their intensity so that we can give clarity to what is often a hard to define world - we call this The Empathy Blueprint.

The 9 needs are:

1. Survival and physical well-being: including food, water, shelter, and safety.
2. Love and belonging: including connection, community, and acceptance.
3. Power and control: including autonomy, influence, and achievement.
4. Freedom and expression: including choice, creativity, and self-expression.
5. Fun and play: including recreation, entertainment, and joy.
6. Growth and learning: including knowledge, understanding, and personal development.
7. Recognition and respect: including honour, validation, and appreciation.
8. Peace and stability: including security, order, and predictability.
9. Contribution and service: including giving, helping, and making a positive impact.

We believe that in order to innovate in a challenging environment, we need empathetic analysis more than ever to complement the full suite of qualitative and quantitative methods available to us.

And, as much as we love Big Data, we recognise that relying on it alone is not enough, because…

2. We believe that the successful companies of the future will be those that can balance Big Data with human insights so they don’t stay stuck in the past

AI and big data analytics use data points from our past to predict what may happen in the future. Which is fine if you’re using that data in a system with a fixed context, like a power plant.??

But when we’re talking about humans, the context is always shifting and future behaviour can be difficult to predict. Things are always emerging. Big data often can’t see this until it’s too late.

And although it can tell you which is the worst performing of your ideas it can’t tell you what’s coming next. This is where qualitative research and innovative research methods can more accurately inform predictions of future behaviour.?

To have breakthrough ideas and to restore our humanity to our decision making and our economy, we also need to put more humanity into our thinking in the first place. Which is why we source rich, empathetic, qualitative data that comes from the people you serve.?

We listen, we learn and we connect - as broadly and as deeply as possible.

Focusing on emotion as well as Big Data rebalances the relationship between buyer and seller, brings into view the humanity hidden behind the numbers and strengthens connection.?

And by putting connection at the core of marketing, problem solving and communications, our clients are better able to create messaging and products that resonate and are hard to forget.?

3. We believe that strategy begins with insight, not tactics

Since marketing has become ever more digital, there can be an over reliance on performance data to inform strategy, leading to a ‘let’s throw a lot of things at the wall and test our way to success’. This is fine but it’s not the whole picture and can be financially inefficient.

And, with every new platform or AI tool it’s tempting to run straight towards what may look like where all the action is but the newest tools are always simply tactics.

To create new ideas, take all the guesswork and assumptions out of making the right calls and confidently achieving your aims, you have to start with evidence.?

We think of it like this:

Insights > Strategy > Tactics

When there are a million and one things you could be doing, good strategy development is all about choosing the right thing to do and having a really good understanding of why.

This requires insight from real-world data. Having this data makes strategy development an awful lot easier. Once you’ve got your evidence and strategy, it’s then time to choose the right tools to help you deliver, not the other way around.

Getting this right saves time, money and effort, giving confidence and belief to all your actions, which is great news for your C-Suite, investors and customers alike.

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4. We believe we are living through a paradigm shift in our relationship with nature that is about to change the world as we know it

We recognise that we are living through a climate and ecological emergency.

Our economy is currently using resources faster than the planet can regenerate them and it’s creating wastes faster than the planet can absorb them.

It’s called overshoot.?

We believe this overshoot is happening because of flawed insights informing our current strategies of how to live.

We’re still using an historic paradigm that sees the environment as a subsystem of the economy, a source of materials and something separate from us.

While a new paradigm has emerged over the 20th century that flips this on its head and sees our economy as a subsystem of our environment, that everything is interconnected and interdependent and that we are not separate from nature, we are nature.

Living through this huge shift, with one foot in the old paradigm and one in the new is awkward and uncomfortable.

Addressing it is going to take a while and patience in an emergency is challenging.

But if there’s one thing we’ve learnt it’s that when we work together with a shared mission and purpose, it doesn’t feel like work, it feels like fun, creating a positive feedback loop that can keep things going for generations.

Which is exactly what we need to shift deeply held beliefs that have been used for centuries.

As part of our response to this, we seek to learn from nature and try to help to create conditions conducive to life in all we do. The simplest way we’ve found to do that is to constantly ask ourselves “would the world be worse off if we stopped trading tomorrow?”.?

With every decision we make, we strive for the answer to that question to be ‘yes’.

That’s why we pay a Living Wage, are working to become carbon positive and have built people and planet into our articles of association alongside profits.?

We’ve also designed our business model to commit 5% of our profits to Force of Nature because we want to help young people to stare down the truth of the crises before us and find the courage needed to reimagine the world with full hearts and open minds, free of anxiety and full of power.?

We’re currently working towards B Corporation status to reflect this belief and are keen advocates of Doughnut Economics and regenerative business as we believe that that is what the future looks like and we want to be part of making it happen.

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So that’s us, welcome to Source Nine.?

We hope that’s given you a better understanding of what we do, what we believe in and why we’re here.

If any of this resonates with you, we’d love to connect so don’t be shy to say hi!

With gratitude,

Rob & Becky at Source Nine.