Your challenge, our expertise 


There are times when relying on intuition works, but more often than not you need to have the evidence that what you are going to do is the right thing for your business and customer. When it comes to decision-making, we provide you with the evidence to feel confident. Just don’t expect us to do exactly as you say. We will challenge your thinking. We will do the pre-thinking. We will provide different perspectives on business problems and help to define the issue.

10 business questions we've answered for our clients

HOW DO WE…

  • identify key growth segments to target through a mid-term strategy?
  • clarify the brand positioning and customer value proposition to differentiate from private label?
  • envisage the future of our category and bring consumers along with our vision?
  • uncover the best new product idea to drive growth and identify the size of the prize?
  • fuel our NPD pipeline with meaningful and high potential innovations?
  • identify theconsumer touchpoints that are most efficient and effective to activate?
  • define the role my brand can have beyond the traditional marketing scope in delivering the retailer growth vision?
  • create an engaging and relevant mid-term communication strategy, based on a ‘sticky’ idea?
  • determine which channels or retailers should be strategic partners for my business?
  • develop and optimize the customer experience?

Explore & innovate

Innovation sits at the heart of Haystack, we apply design thinking principles in everything we do. We ideate and co-create with all stakeholders to generate ideas that enable change and bring profit. We work for products and services, from insight creation and exploration, opportunity identification and concept development to concept validation, consumer taste tests and packaging optimisation.

Our in-house expert panels and sensory scientists have extensive experience with sensory evaluation, profiling and analysis of food, beverages and a wide range of FMCG categories.

Our multisensory approaches don’t just enable our clients to walk in their customers’ shoes – they’re seeing, smelling, tasting, hearing and feeling everything that their customer does and is.

Brand Strategy

We maximize the value brands create for their consumers and their business. Our collaborative and co-creative approaches ensure brand and communications strategies are based on a blend of insight and expertise. We build brands from the ground up and explore and understand the lay of the land within the category. We identify the levers for success and the most powerful strategic, creative and executional ideas by using informative, efficient, effective and engaging tools.

It’s about combining insights with sales and other data to keep the future of the business on a viable path to growth.

Shopper behaviour and retail strategy

Helping brands and shoppers to navigate the retail landscape, creating an engaging multisensory shopping experience, driving in-store traffic, optimising the omnichannel strategy, developing impactful POSM, understanding the consumer decision tree, – we have encountered and dealt with all strategic and tactical business problems, and many more. We are experts in bridging the gap from consumer to shopper, and linking our insights to behavioural shopper data to generate quantified growth plans targeted at specific retailers.

We offer consulting to create and implement long-term strategic game-plans. Our online and offline approaches are bespoke, use the latest technology and often involve implicit techniques.

Stakeholder Activation

It only makes sense to involve the people who may be affected by the outcomes of our insights, or who can influence the implementation of our action plans. Therefore we work in genuine partnership with our clients to inspire action and create impact. We invite stakeholders to be as involved as they want to be along the way via co-creation, meeting customers and consumers in a variety of settings and workshops to ensure insights and recommendations are disseminated and embedded throughout the entire organisation.

Whether it’s to facilitate, present or participate in big-picture discussions or to guide you as sparring partner, we bring a unique perspective and independent thinking. We turn a story into compelling, well-crafted outputs to help convert the audience into advocates.

Customer Experience

We help companies create an effortless end-to-end customer experience to drive customer loyalty, advocacy and growth. Our work ranges from developing a consumer-centric strategy and mapping the customer journey to optimising the brand touchpoints.

We bring the customer journey to life through digital communities. We blend iterative ideation, co-creation and testing to identify critical touchpoints across the customer journey, prioritise the customer moments that matters most and recommend opportunities to improve the customer experience.