Case Studies

Real Problems. Real Decisions.

A sample of the complex questions NuThinking has informed, across categories and formats. Notice the pattern: every engagement ends in a decision your team can act on.

Why our clients recommend us

Knows our business and our consumer and truly acts as business partner.

— CPG Client

Relevant and meaningful communications

Full-Mix Brand Relaunch National Food Brand

  • Semiotics
  • Digital Ethnography
  • Focus Groups

The Challenge

Ahead of a full-mix relaunch, the brand needed to understand its perceptions, bonds, and barriers, its competitive dynamics, and the cultural codes shaping how consumers read the category.

What We Did

A multi-method design combining in-depth brand and category semiotics with digital ethnography across two markets, and evaluative focus groups reaching heavy users, lapsed users, and competitive buyers. Semiotic analysis traced the brand's codes back to its origin story, while digital ethnography captured real purchase and consumption moments as they happened. Focus groups pressure-tested the most important insights.

Why It Worked

Combining semiotics with digital ethnography and focus groups delivers both depth and breadth, richer engagement across more consumers, at better value than either method alone, on a timeline built to hit a hard relaunch deadline.

Speedy communication alignment

Strategic Planning Workshop Community Engagement

  • FourSight
  • Facilitation
  • Divergent/Convergent

The Challenge

A fast-growing chamber needed to align its board around a single, clear message about community growth and development, then choose the right channels to deliver it.

What We Did

A facilitated, 3-hour strategic planning workshop grounded in the FourSight framework. The team reviewed five to six existing messaging options, worked through structured divergent and convergent exercises, and converged on one priority message along with the optimal channels to carry it.

Why It Worked

Cross-functional stakeholders, leveraging each other's strengths with a trained creativity framework, reached alignment in a single session, replacing months of back-and-forth with one clear, shared answer the team could act on immediately.

Agile innovation

Hispanic Consumer Co-Creation National Snack Brand

  • Co-Creation
  • Design Thinking
  • Innovation Map

The Challenge

The brand needed new product platform ideas grounded in real consumer usage, occasions, and unmet needs, developed fast enough to feed an active innovation pipeline.

What We Did

A two-day, in-person co-creation workshop pairing the client team with creative consumers, guided by an Innovation Map that translated qualitative findings into a focused set of "burning problems to solve." Techniques spanned creative problem-solving and design thinking, moving from roughly 20 platform bundles to 12 to 15 test-ready platform concepts, each with a name, headline, and consumer insight behind it.

Why It Worked

Pairing client teams (inside-out brand knowledge) with creative consumers (outside-in thinking, free of category assumptions) generated ideas neither group would have reached alone, run through a trained, structured process for turning insight into concepts a team could test.

Bring Clarity to Your Next Big Decision

If you're tackling a complex challenge and need insight that leads somewhere, let's talk.

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Every one of these engagements started with a conversation with Marta. Meet her.