Layering research to drive engagement for Hidden Narratives

Business challenge

Hidden Narratives wanted to develop an interactive mobile streaming platform for non-fiction content covering societal and environmental issues to positively influence people take environmental action; whilst also keeping them engaged with curated nonfiction video content. Our job was to truly understand the climate conscious target audience. Identifying who are they, their personality, what engages them and how best to connect with them. As well as guiding Hidden Narratives on how to build the app (format, content, ads, features etc.), to motivate users to download and engage with the platform.

Human Solution

We layered four different research methodologies, staggering each method so the insights could feed into the design of the next phase.

Firstly, we created sustainability-driven audiences using panel data and segmented them by life stages to deep dive into the behaviour of each bracket. Creating a bespoke quantitative survey, we uncovered their lifestyle, passion points, content/ format preferences and resonance with the Hidden Narratives proposition. Using these insights, we adopted a qualitative approach, exploring in-depth engagement with non-fiction content and video platforms in a weeklong ethnography study. Next, we overlayed social listening tools to further understand what motivates and matters to our climate conscious audience online.

Actionable Output

Our in-depth layered approach enabled us to develop a series of actionable insights on how best to design the mobile app and get people to use it. We proposed upweighting certain formats and genres of content, developing a variable reward system within the app to keep users hooked, leveraging trusted experts and authority figures in a range of content category bracket, building a seamless monetisation strategy, and ultimately keeping everything relevant to the user with a strong algorithm, all of which provided Hidden Narratives with a valuable springboard into the next stage of the platform development.