A tailored approach to research and insights delivering fresh perspectives, practical actions, and creative output to organisations in the UK and around the world
Experienced | Strategic | Creative | Adaptable
Who we are
A boutique, independent research and consulting agency
Founded in 2016, Synergy Research and Consulting offers comprehensive, end-to-end research solutions tailored to address each client’s specific challenges.
From quantitative surveys and in-depth interviews to strategic market and product development initiatives, our personalised approach gathers valuable information and audience opinions. We transform these insights into practical, actionable results for our clients.
Research expertise every step of the way
Our research and consulting services help clients drive sales, grow audiences, and improve products and services. Whether you need support for specific projects, or want us to serve as your dedicated in-house consultant, we’re here to guide you at every stage. Our clients value our personal approach, and we pride ourselves on being friendly, agile, relevant and reliable, consistently exceeding expectations in every engagement.
Synergy supports organisations of all sizes
At Synergy, we support brands of all sizes, from startups to global leaders. We deliver projects that focus on either a single country, or multiple markets, whether aiming for broad mass-market coverage or tailored target audiences in specific locations. No project is too big or too small, and our clients’ span sectors including media, advertising, technology, retail, consumer goods, education and the public sector.
What we do
Advertising and campaign impact
Our survey-led effectiveness programme goes beyond traditional digital metrics to measure advertising and campaign performance and gathers insights from the audiences our clients really want to reach. Our goal is to help brands understand the real impact of their advertising and campaign impact across channels, formats, and creative executions. We measure key campaign metrics, conduct brand funnel analysis, and assess human perceptions of the creative. We also specialise in engaging hard-to-reach audiences, including senior decision-makers and C-suite leaders.
Brand and product research
Synergy provides research support to help our clients evaluate their brand positioning and discover opportunities for growth and development. We help organisations identify unmet needs, validate ideas, refine positioning, and make confident and informed decisions. Whether refining or re-launching existing products and services, or exploring NPD initiatives, we provide evidence-based guidance at every stage of the journey. Our research combines consumer and market analysis, competitor evaluation, concept testing, product or service refinement and performance monitoring.
Insight-led thought leadership
Our research-driven thought leadership projects generate original and credible insights that help clients communicate meaningful and authoritative content about an industry, market, audience, or hot topic. We combine quantitative and qualitative research, expert opinions, and industry intelligence, transforming evidence into clear, data-led stories. This approach helps build awareness, credibility, and competitive edge for our clients, while shaping conversations and supporting sales. As experienced data journalists, we deliver content in multiple formats that align with client objectives, creating impact through PR and communications activity.
Audience and sector insight
We help organisations understand their audiences and the sectors in which they operate. Our research profiles audiences, revealing their needs, interests, and motivations, as well as how they interact with brands, products, and services. This information allows our clients to align their brands, products, and services with customer requirements. Our insights into audiences and sectors help organisations identify commercial opportunities and make informed strategic decisions. This strengthens their positioning, enhances brand engagement, drives growth, and informs their marketing and communication strategies.
Strategic research
We work on insight-driven strategic projects for senior stakeholders, addressing key business challenges with actionable solutions. Our research-led consultancy services help clients drive growth, enter new markets, increase sales, strengthen market share, and improve profitability. Using a mixed-method approach, we analyse data, benchmark competitors, and gather stakeholder and customer insights to identify opportunities and align products and services with market demand. We deliver clear, evidence-based recommendations with measurable impact, tracking outcomes to support continuous improvement.
Fractional partnerships
Synergy offers flexible research support tailored to meet the current needs, priorities, and timelines of organisations. Whether clients need extra capacity during peak periods or interim support during organisational changes, we provide fractional assistance to fit various situations. This includes setting up research functions from scratch or enhancing the value, efficiency, and deliverables of existing research and insight departments. Our goal is to ensure the right resources and processes are in place to maximise the return on research investments. We can quickly integrate into your business to deliver immediate value.
Advertising and campaign impact
We offer a range of survey-led advertising and campaign measurement methodologies amongst relevant target audiences to align with client objectives and preferences
- Brand lift studies: Isolating the effect of a campaign on brand perceptions and associations analysing campaign recallers vs. non-recallers
- Pre- and post-campaign testing: Measuring awareness, attitudes and behaviours before and after a campaign
- Channel effectiveness analysis: Cross-platform analysis to understand which media channels deliver the greatest impact
- Creative testing: Exploring creative preferences, and the impact of specific campaign messages, visuals, or narratives on brand metrics
- Campaign and brand tracking: Longer-term campaign measurement to assess how campaigns impact brand metrics over time
Brand and product research
We provide mixed qualitative, quantitative, and intelligence gathering methodologies to uncover core insights to help create, enhance and refine brands, products and services
- Concept testing: Evaluate reactions to new concepts, propositions, and campaign ideas among existing, potential, or lapsed user groups
- Product development research: Gather and analyse audience, market, sales, and competitor insights to inform and guide brand, product and service development
- New Product Development (NPD): Generate actionable insights that guide NPD from ideation, through the entire product development lifecycle, to launch readiness
- User and customer experience research: Gather and analyse user and consumer feedback to optimise brand, product and services experiences
- Market and brand positioning: Identify how brands, products, or services are positioned and how well they resonate with target audiences versus competitors
Insight-led thought leadership
We combine market and sector intelligence, expert perspectives, and qualitative and quantitative research to create content with impact
- End-to-end project management: Manage the full thought-leadership process, from ideation and strategic scoping to research, analysis, and content creation
- Creative data analysis: Turn data into meaningful, engaging insights that capture attention and support decision-making
- Data-driven storytelling: Create insight-led narratives, data journalism and content that spark conversation and build authority
- Creative output: Develop high-impact thought leadership assets, including white papers, reports, articles, infographics, executive briefings, and presentations
- Visual impact: Bring insights to life through impactful design, data visualisation, charts, and infographics
Audience and sector insight
Our quantitative and qualitative research and intelligence gathering solutions enable our clients to gain a deep understanding of audiences, markets and sectors
- Audience Profiling: Build a detailed picture of audience characteristics, providing deep insights into their profiles, purchasing behaviours, needs and motivations
- Audience segmentation: Identify and categorise your audience into distinct groups to understand their individual needs and how best to engage with them
- Market and sector analysis: Examine market and sector intelligence for organisations to understand market sizing and value, share of market, industry trends, and opportunities to build strategies for growth and development
- Competitor benchmarking: Analyse competitors based on product and service range, pricing, promotions, messaging and market positioning
- SWOT analysis: Assess strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats for organisations within a particular sector
Strategic research
We combine internal analysis, external and bespoke research, to support strategy, performance improvement, change, and decision-making
- Market, industry & competitor analysis: Assess trends, risks, growth opportunities, positioning, and best practice
- Customer, stakeholder & employee research: Gather insight to inform strategy, service improvement, and change
- Organisational, operational & change diagnostics: Review structures, processes, capabilities, culture, efficiency, and readiness for transformation
- Commercial due diligence & strategic assessment: Evaluate market potential, business viability, strategic fit, and growth options
- Strategy development & restructuring research: Support growth strategy, market entry, restructuring, and business repositioning
- Impact measurement & evaluation: Measure outcomes, effectiveness, and return on investment
Fractional partnerships
We offer flexible research and insight support that aligns with our client’s business needs and priorities
- Establishing teams and departments: Set up and lead research and insight departments and functions from scratch – research planning, defining system requirements, recruiting, directing, mentoring, and training teams, negotiating supplier contracts etc.
- Enhancing teams and departments: Experienced research leadership to strengthen existing research and insight functions by reviewing current capabilities and ensuring the right resources, tools, systems, and processes are in place to increase value and improve service delivery
- Research strategy development: Design and implement comprehensive research plans and strategies to align with organisation’s business priorities and goals
- Extension to the team: A seamless extension of your team, delivering actionable insights and immediate business value. We are proficient in the use of many syndicated surveys, data analysis and digital analytics tools, with experience to easily adapt to client systems and processes
Our clients
What our clients say
“Our first experience of working with Synergy has definitely been a good one. As well as being easy to work with, Synergy are experts in their field, they have really helped us prove the alignment between our audience and advertiser brands using solid data and analysis. Traditional metrics are useful, but Synergy has added another layer to our reporting; providing in-depth insight into how our readers respond to our campaigns across various platforms, proving to our clients the efficacy of 360-degree partnerships which are crucial to our business. Not only this, but we’ve gained valuable data on our core readership.”
“Synergy was an exceptional partner across several high‑priority projects. Through surveys, focus groups, and one‑to‑one interviews with government and public sector decision makers across the UK and EU, they gave us clear, practical insights that helped strengthen our market understanding, shape our product direction, and accelerate our digital transformation.”
“Synergy set up Marketing Priorities to help NewBase establish itself as thought leaders in the global media and marketing space. The results and whitepaper generated a huge amount of interest in the industry, including speaking opportunities and extensive trade press coverage.”
“Synergy’s audience research gave Intelligence2 a comprehensive understanding of our customers and how they engage with our products and services. The insights helped us develop targeted audience personas, quantify key segments, and identify new growth opportunities. The research has been invaluable in supporting business development, opening new conversations, and generating leads. Synergy was a pleasure to work with, and I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend them.”
“There’s no doubt that brand experience is the most powerful way to build brand affinity, and our research project proved the power of experience over other channels… This was one of the incentives for us to partner with Synergy Research & Consulting – to create ‘The Value of Experience Research Report’, a 2-part research program to learn more about the effectiveness of experience against more conventional marketing methods.”
“I had the pleasure of partnering with Synergy at Reuters and contracted Mike to lead our research team and strengthen our offer. He improved the collaboration across the research teams in London, New York, and Tokyo, introduced new reporting systems and processes, and created impactful, award-winning programmes. Mike helped transform our capabilities, and raise the profile of research both internally, and within the industry. His strategic insight and commitment to quality made a real difference, and Synergy proved a trusted, invaluable partner.”
Get in touch
Want to know more?
Mike Jeanes
Director and Founder
Mike is a highly experienced researcher who has worked for well-known media and research brands, including GfK, BMG Research, Reach plc, Time Warner, NBC Universal and Thomson Reuters.
His insight has helped organisations build brand awareness, shape products and strategy, grow revenue, and secure investment. He is passionate about innovative methods that deliver practical, creative outcomes. Projects have earned recognition including IAB Research Awards finalist, Media Week’s Research Project of the Year, and Thomson Reuters Innovation Award, while also generating strong press and social engagement.
Mike founded Synergy Research & Consulting in 2016, providing research services that support product development, business strategy, category insight, thought leadership, lead generation and global ad effectiveness programmes for major media brands.
Sylvia Jeanes
Director and Partner
Sylvia is a senior research and insights leader with over 25 years’ experience across quantitative and qualitative methodologies. She specialises in transforming complex data into clear, compelling narratives that inform strategic, evidence-based decision-making.
Her career includes senior research and insight roles at leading organisations including BBC Worldwide, Reach plc, Bauer Media Group and IGD, building her knowledge in media, FMCG and retail.
In 2022, Sylvia joined Synergy as Research Director and Partner, bringing her extensive experience in consumer insight, audience research and strategic consultancy to the business. Recent projects cover a range of sectors including media, finance, technology, retail, travel, and the public sector, delivering strategic research, brand building and thought leadership programmes including a full series of global white papers for YouGov.
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