
Andrew Lewis
Managing Director
Our Manifesto
Manifesto
A modern guide to how insight grows business
Subscribe
Receive our latest thinking, straight to your inbox.
Stay up to date with our monthly deep dive into topics critical to your organisation's success. We cover marketing, insights, brand, data analytics, culture, human behaviour and everything in between.
Contents
News
We are an insight agency intent on solving the complex problems organisations face today.
We put people at the heart of the organisations we work with through extensive use of research, analytics, strategy and culture.
AFR Boss Best Places to Work 2023, Runners Up, Professional Services
B&T Awards, finalist, Best Market Research Agency, 2022
AFR BOSS Best Places to Work, 2022, #3, Marketing and Media
AFR BOSS Most Innovative Awards, 3rd Most Innovative Media and Marketing Company in Australasia, 2022
AFR BOSS Most Innovative Companies Awards, Best Innovation Program 2021, 2020 & 2018
ESOMAR Research Effectiveness Awards, Gold 2018
Research Association Effectiveness Awards, winner Innovation Award 2016
Australian Financial Review, 5th Most Innovative Media and Marketing Company in Australasia
Research Association Effectiveness Awards 2016, winner Platinum - Social & Community
Australian Financial Review's 28th Most Innovative Company, 2018
IBM Kenexa Best Workplace Awards, Finalist 2015 & 2016
Westpac Auckland Business Awards Finalist, Employer of the Year 2017 & 2018
Research Association Effectiveness Awards 2016, winner Gold - Media & Advertising
Research Association Effectiveness Award 2014, Gold - Consumer Services
ESOMAR Award for Best Paper, Market Research Society NZ 2013 Conference
Research Association Effectiveness Awards 2014, winner Data Insight Visualisation Award
Research Association Effectiveness Awards 2014, Gold - Media and Advertising
AUT Business School 2016 Excellence in Business Support Awards, winner Business
$5M - $20M T/O category
Westpac Auckland Business Awards Finalist, Excellence in Innovation 2018
AUT Excellence in Business Support Awards 2014, winner Sales & Marketing
NZ Direct Marketing Awards, Nexus Bronze 2016
Insight at TRA is not any one thing, and it’s informed by the passion and skills of our team as much as any organisational process.
Our approaches are diverse, but fundamentally we understand, on an empathic and intellectual level, how brands fit into people’s lives and how this can create change for our clients.
Partners
Spark
Supporting Spark's brand-led transformation
TRA has been Spark’s strategic insights partner since 2015. During that time, Spark has transformed its brand and vision, lifting from a traditional telco to a much wider digital services provider, all while moving to Agile. Core to our relationship is ongoing brand tracking - Market Monitors that feed into brand and communications planning, optimisation and evaluation.
Beyond this, Spark leverages the full spectrum of TRA’s capabilities, including qualitative and quantitative research, data curation, and cultural expertise. We take a collaborative approach to this partnership, working closely with the entire Spark brand portfolio and their supporting agencies.
“Their collaborative, agile approach helps keep insights relevant an accessible and a highly strategic team is valued across our business.” - Hannah Bay, Domain Chapter Lead, Brand, Spark New Zealand
The Warehouse Group
Enabling a group strategy for New Zealand’s largest retailer.
In 2019, TRA started working with New Zealand’s largest retailing group – The Warehouse Group. The Group encompasses The Warehouse, The Warehouse Stationery, Noel, Leeming, Torpedo7 and e-commerce site, The Market.
The Warehouse Group are focused on enabling a customer-centric mindset, and they needed foundational tools to support this. Working with cross-functional teams, we established a tracking programme that captures total brand experience. Enhanced by powerful, simple storytelling, and cultural and category context, customer insight is accessible, well understood and actionable.
“The tracking programme is much more than a monitor. It’s a business tool that lays the foundational brand jobs to do that guide our priorities and serves as critical lead indicators across the business” - Keryn McKenzie, Chapter Area Lead – Insights, Data Science & Services, The Warehouse Group
Lion
Lion needed to identify the next big thing for their largest brand Steinlager. It had been 10 years since the launch of Steinlager Pure, so ensuring continued brand relevance was key. Through two separate waves of customer co-creation sessions involving the Lion team and Steinlager's target market, an opportunity space emerged for a Japanese-style beer - Steinlager Tokyo Dry.
There was a chance to stand out in the market through packaging, and by communicating to a new beer drinking audience in a way that was not only relevant to, but which differentiated from more traditional green bottle lagers. TRA ran a strategy workshop to set a go to market strategy for the new Steinlager Tokyo Dry offering. The business results from the launch of Tokyo Dry have been outstanding, with $4.9m sales in the first year putting the Steinlager brand back in growth. Tokyo Dry became Lion's fastest new product to reach 1 million litres of sales in over a decade, achieving this in only 10 weeks.
Red Bull
How can a global brand activate local insight?
Two years ago, Red Bull New Zealand’s brand tracking data was provided from a source offshore, without localised insight. Working with TRA, Red Bull shifted their local programme from a data feed to strategic tool, with insights delivered during interactive Springboard planning workshops – helping Red Bull’s team gain clarity on the unique local market and consumers.
“TRA have fundamentally changed how the team understand, interact and use insight” - Sophie Ericksen, Marketing Director at Red Bull.
Paymark
Paymark's core business model was under threat from disruption. There was a need to future-proof the organisation by becoming more customer-centric to help build relationships and achieve commercial objectives.
We worked with Paymark to build a data-driven customer segmentation that blended a range of techniques including big data analytics, third party data enrichment, quantitative and qualitative research. The outcome was the largest and most accurate segmentation of the New Zealand retail market, enabling Paymark to become a truly customer obsessed organisation. As a result, Paymark have seen a 40% reduction in customer churn.
EECA
How do you solve a problem like climate change? A cornerstone objective for the New Zealand government is to reduce carbon emissions and by ratifying the Paris Climate Change agreement, the New Zealand Government committed to having an emissions reduction target and regularly updating it.
EECA, NZ’s government agency responsible for promoting energy efficiency and conservation needed to understand the problem through strategic insights – to get to know the barriers and levers and to identify where to focus, what could be achieved and how to go about it. They partnered with TRA to develop insight and strategy to pull together many angles on the problem into a very clear pathway forward. We took a holistic approach employing semiotics, systems thinking, unstructured and structured data, ethnography and cultural analysis.
We would love to say we have solved the problem of climate change, but of course we have not. However, we have solved the problem of where and how to focus resources to achieve significant reduction in carbon emissions. Furthermore, by using multiple data sources we have given confidence, inspiration and direction to the EECA team.
Joylab
In 2016 we partnered with Joylab to transform an existing hospitality location in Auckland’s Viaduct Harbour into what is known today as The Lula Inn. Joylab commissioned TRA to develop a strategy on how to transform the location into a commercially successful bar and eatery.
Through a mixture of methodologies including cultural scraping, focus groups and co-creation, TRA were able to uncover the industry trends driving relevance with the core audience, determine elements that would make the location a success and ultimately develop a comprehensive proposition for Joylab. TRA formed the creative concept of a “beautiful collision” and the idea of a garden lounge at the water’s edge; this single-minded idea was the backbone of the location’s redevelopment, and is still evident throughout the establishment today.
In The Lula Inn’s first year of launch, they managed to increase revenue by 27% from the previous baseline, and since launch, has managed to maintain revenue growth by an average of 13% year on year.
Auckland Transport
Increasing pressure on Auckland's roading infrastructure has seen Auckland Transport investigate new ways to reduce the number of peak hour single car journeys. Auckland Transport commissioned TRA to develop a strategy to get Aucklanders using cycling and walking as a mode of transport, as opposed to reaching for the car keys.
The insights gained by TRA enabled Auckland Transport to develop a new marketing strategy that focuses on removing mental barriers to walking and cycling and normalising behaviour. Since then Auckland Transport have seen a 41% increase in cycling in Auckland, with 52,800 new cyclists in 2018 alone.
We’re defined by ambition, restlessness, resilience, unity, innovation, warmth and respect; for ourselves and for others. We don’t stand on ceremony and certainly don’t stand and wait for things to happen. We’re influential, in touch, intrepid and incomparable. And on a good day, we’re untouchable.