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

Trade Me, a pioneer in NZ online trading since 1999, asked TRA to help them understand 16 - 26 year old's relationship with fashion and retail, so they could shape an impactful offering tailored to their needs.  

Our team took a cultural trends approach, paired with extensive digital qualitative immersion. Through nearly 70 videos, our participants expressed themselves through thrift haul videos, mood boards, and wishlists.

The research identified  significant opportunities for Trade Me, from product development, internal and external communication strategies to improve relevance with this valuable demographic.  

With a newfound understanding, Trade Me was poised to adapt and develop offerings aligned with their discerning tastes and preferences. 

The brand assets for Coopers, an independent, family-owned brewer since 1862, has been relatively untouched for over 25 years.

For established brand drinkers Coopers stands for authenticity and reliability, but the next generation of beer drinkers are different. The challenge was to identify the sweet spot between maintaining connections with existing audiences, whilst building relevance with new audiences. No easy task in a tightening and highly competitive beer landscape.

A collaborative project with TRA, design agency Cowan, and Coopers set out to identify those distinctive brand assets that would retain the core brand value for loyalists while exploring the fresh assets that would appeal to new drinkers. Finally, assessing the in-situ impact enabled optimisations.

Coopers has successfully rolled out the refreshed pack design for the Coopers Ale range maintaining a top-5 beer brand position and sales in a declining category, and with uplifts in awareness and brand perceptions with their target audience.  

More than 50 per cent of the Australian population was born overseas or have a parent who was, and the biggest growth is coming from culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) communities.

Creating Meaningful Connections, new research from The Growth D_Stillery (News Corp Australia's research and intelligence service) and TRA, sought to better understand how marketers and advertisers can best engage with these communities.

TRA consulted with key opinion leaders in cultural communities, immersed themselves in the stories and challenges experienced by CALD people and validated the work with a robust quantitative study of 2,000 CALD Australians.

The work identifies the critical moments where brands need to engage these Australians in order to establish brand salience and develop life-long relationships, as well as a set of actionable brand principles and opportunities to engage these important communities.

TRA and The Growth D_Stillery are collaborating to share these insights with Australian brands to support their strategies and activations with these communities.

To meet New Zealand’s global emissions targets under the internationally binding Paris Agreement, and New Zealand's own legislated emissions reduction targets, New Zealand needs to make faster and greater progress to reduce the harmful greenhouse gas emissions in our atmosphere.

EECA is the Government agency responsible for promoting energy efficiency and conservation to all New Zealanders.  Businesses account for 50% of New Zealand’s total energy and use 40% of New Zealand’s energy-related emissions. So for EECA, enabling businesses to decarbonise plays a vital role in meeting our overall targets.

The collective impact of small and medium-sized businesses (SMEs) matters. EECA partnered with TRA to develop insight and strategy to help them decarbonise. Our research showed businesses were motivated, but didn’t know where to receive information. It identified the most compelling tone and language to use to encourage action and address the barriers of it being too hard or too expensive to start. From this EECA developed a campaign specifically for SME’s and redesigned the information journey on their website.  

EECA has seen 250% increase in businesses wanting to get started on reducing their emissions off the back of these initiatives.

Edgewell, better known for its famous brand names Hawaiian Tropic, Carefree, Schick, Wet Ones to name but a few, is in the business of skincare. Their products offer tangible benefits to users, and their brands are imbued with emotional and cultural meaning.

The challenge for Edgewell was to future-proof their brand portfolio. Emotional needs are enduring but cultural meaning is always changing.

Edgewell tasked TRA with creating a roadmap for their brands and product innovation that would be culturally relevant in the future for the women of Australia and New Zealand.

The approach included 135+ hours of qualitative engagement, gaining ethnographic insight into behaviour and beliefs towards sun care and hair removal, alongside applying a cultural foresight lens that resulted in a highly actionable and strategic Cultural Compass^TM for the Trans-Tasman business.

The work was so effective that it has been adopted across the global business (with local adaptations), from C-suite through to marketing teams.

Kmart has known strengths in categories catering to younger kids, through to adults and parents. Teens, however, were stuck in the middle and hard to reach as they seek to form their own identity.

Over 3m Australians are aged 10-19. That is 12% of the population. It’s an important audience, and one that Kmart believe they can better serve.

TRA partnered with Kmart to deep-dive into the teen audience across Australia and New Zealand. We needed to understand their lives, social contexts and aspirations on their journey of self-discovery and use that insight to build a bridge to their shopping needs, tensions and behaviour.

The work was multistage: ethnographic qual, followed by an extensive quantitative survey to validate and size the key insights and opportunities.

The research uncovered clear platforms to drive engagement with both teens and their parents, resulting in a pipeline of new initiatives to market over short and longer term horizons.

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.

As New Zealand’s largest health insurer and as a not-for-profit Friendly Society, Southern Cross had unique strengths. On the back of COVID there was a huge opportunity to leverage the elevated importance of health and wellbeing, and reignite growth.

The marketing team had a remit to:

• Increase net member growth

• Create unassailable market leadership by becoming more relevant to New Zealanders – unlocking a sleeping giant.

This called for not only a new strategy but new creative and insights partners, who along with the existing media partner would form a core team with Southern Cross. TRA was appointed research partner.

Core to our relationship is an ongoing brand tracking monitor that feeds into brand and communications planning, optimisation and evaluation.  Southern Cross leverages the full spectrum of TRA capability including cultural insight, innovation, and communications development.

Two years into the relationship Southern Cross knows New Zealanders better than ever, and has been able to use this knowledge to grow its membership to a 30 year high time high, up 6% to 940,000 in 2023. Communications are performing well above New Zealand norms, and the brand is becoming more and more relevant to all Kiwis.

TRA and Smartly, a market leading payroll platform, formed a strategic partnership in 2019. Together, we have developed a comprehensive framework to gain insights to help drive decision-making and empower Smartly to deliver even greater value to their clients.  

We have used a range of research methodologies, including qualitative and quantitative tracking, market sizing, and brand and communications tracking. These robust approaches provided Smartly with the insights the needed to make decisions about product extension and pricing, driving their strategy forward.  

This partnership exemplifies the power of data-driven insights in guiding strategic decision-making and achieving sustainable growth. Since working with TRA, Smartly has seen a remarkable 25% growth in their customer base.

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

Pitcher Partners is Australia’s eight largest accounting and business advisory firm focused on serving clients in the middle-market.

To demonstrate their leadership in this area, Pitcher Partners explores contemporary issues faced by middle-market businesses across Australia through their regular Business Radar publication.

TRA is the insights partner that has worked with Pitcher Partners to design research, capture and lead analysis on a range of topics. To-date this has included: the ongoing impact of COVID-19, flexible work arrangements, Generative AI, Environmental social and governance (ESG) frameworks, cybersecurity.

The outcome of the work is an increase in Pitcher Partners Business Radar publication from annually to quarterly. In addition, report views have doubled and engagement with the content has increased. It has also cemented their reputation for being middle-market specialists and helped win new work through the inclusion of Business Radar insights in proposals.

New Zealand still has relatively low cyber resilience as a population. Since 2018, New Zealanders have reported more than 17,000 cyber security incidents to CERT NZ, with associated losses exceeding $55 million. CERT NZ partnered with TRA to improve cyber resilience in New Zealand with the goal of developing effective behaviour change strategies.

The project involved desk research, expert interviews, quantitative studies on individuals and SMEs, and qualitative validation boards. We developed a segmentation model to inform campaign development and online qualitative boards to validate and test behaviour change interventions.

The research shaped marketing strategies, campaign direction, and policy for CERT, enabling targeted cyber security initiatives. TRA wrote and designed a Cyber Nudge Booklet, providing practical guidance to promote cyber resilience, which achieved global recognition as best practice in the Behavioural Economics Guide 2023, highlighting the project's contribution to the field.