Sapio Research, a London-based leading professional business and consumer market research company delivering valuable evidence to clients to support them in understanding their audience, shone bright at the 2020 UK Business Awards, securing Gold in the Professional Services category.
This July, the UK Business Awards celebrated online the finest accomplishments from the world of British business. After a whole day of the Finalists’ presentations, Chair Judges had the honour to announce the best of the best in their category.
One of the winners was Sapio Research, a global full-service market research consultancy with particular expertise in working with marketing services & PR agencies and freelancers.
CXM had the pleasure of speaking with Jane Hales, Managing Partner and Co-founder of Sapio Research about the company values, the challenges they had faced during the crisis, and what winning an award means to the team…
- Tell us about Sapio Research and the area of expertise of the company.
Sapio Research is a London-based full-service consumer and B2B market research company, delivering valuable evidence to clients to support them to understand their audience, make vital business decisions relevant to their market, and create extraordinary headlines and content. Launched in 2016 we are 3 co-founders, with 5 (soon to be 6) employees.
We have access to over 100 million people worldwide in 150 countries through our online surveys and we can dig deeper through qualitative and secondary research too.
We focus on 3 key services, the “ABC”:
- Audience understanding – unmet need identification, buying behaviour understanding, customer satisfaction, persona development, media consumption, messaging strategies
- Brand research – brand perception and competitor mapping, price optimisation, product feature prioritisation
- Content generation and thought leadership research – online polling surveys
We provide market research to all sectors, but have a particularly sweet spot with PR & Marketing Agencies. We use a range of analysis techniques such as Max Diff, market segmentation and gap analysis. We commit to using our skills for good, delivering fanatical service and developing a company culture we’re proud of.
- Given the current unprecedented situation, what particularly stood out as the challenge over the past few months?
All our sales are on an ad hoc basis, we don’t operate a subscription model so the speed at which so many projects were cancelled during the first week of UK lockdown was a tough and frightening time. Our main concern was to have enough activities to keep the team busy, as we were extremely keen to avoid redundancies or the furlough situation.
So we quickly embarked on a number of self-initiated projects, such as the UK business barometer and collaborations with organisations such as The Marketing Club. This gave us new learnings and content and opened up the doors to being able to provide the Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy with vital data for making decisions around the Covid-19 crisis ahead of ministerial briefings. I thought we worked hard before the pandemic, but we seem to step it up a level and strengthened relationships as a result. So for me, the largest challenge is maintaining the new reactive fast pace longer term, so goodness knows how the nurses and doctors will do the same?!
- What does winning an award mean to you?
For me personally, it was a positive nod that my ideas aren’t always crazy. But most importantly for the team it’s a public recognition of all the great things we do as a matter of course. It was really uplifting to receive such lovely testimonials from clients in support of our entry. We typically play the support rather than the lead role in projects, so blowing our own trumpets feels awkward.
- What did you like the most about the Awards experience this year?
I was amazed by how much of a buzz and anticipation an all-day Zoom meeting could engender. To be honest, it knocked the socks off my usual Zoom meetings! I enjoyed the opportunity to learn from the presentations of other entrants and talk to some of the judges afterwards.
- What would be your message to a company wishing to win at the UK Business Awards?
The effort is worth it, even if it’s just using it as an opportunity to reengage with old clients. Get your team involved with the practices and use the assistance of a awards professional.