Research and cultural intelligence: the groundwork behind good cultural projects

Every cultural project that goes wrong in an expensive way tends to share a root cause: somebody skipped the groundwork. The strategy was written before anyone checked what audiences actually wanted, what already existed in the landscape, or whether the gap the project was meant to fill was real.

Research and cultural intelligence is the part of my practice that exists to prevent exactly that.

What cultural intelligence covers

Commissioned research, market analysis and cultural mapping — three overlapping tools that help organisations understand audiences, sectors, places and emerging opportunities before they commit.

• Audience research asks who a project is actually for, what those people already do, and what would genuinely change their behaviour.
• Market analysis looks at the sector — who operates in it, how value moves through it, where it is growing and where it is saturated.
• Cultural mapping reads a place: its institutions, its informal scenes, its gaps, and the dynamics between them.

Who commissions it

Institutions weighing a new programme or building, government entities shaping policy, consultancies who need sector depth behind a bid, brands entering a cultural space, founders testing whether an idea has room to exist. Some of this work is public; much of it is proprietary — research that gives one organisation a clearer view than its peers.

What separates useful research from a shelf document

Three things. It is honest about what it does not know. It is written to be used — findings ranked by what should change a decision, not by chapter logic. And it ends in implications, not just data: because this is true, you should do this differently. Research that cannot change a decision was decoration.

The quiet advantage of good groundwork is that everything built on top of it — strategy, narrative, programmes — inherits its confidence. If your project is still at the “we think there is something here” stage, that is precisely when this work pays for itself.