Purpose Brands faced a fundamental shift. Wellness was no longer about “getting in shape.” It had become emotional, mental, and deeply personal. The Business Challenge; Align leadership around a modern definition of wellness, move from product-first to outcome-first marketing, build segmentation that could scale across digital, CRM, paid, and in-studio experience, drive measurable conversion lift. The approach: AI Scaled Depth and Human Strategic Judgement. Quester deployed a Jobs to Be Done (JTBD) framework to uncover what consumers are truly hiring wellness brands to do.

There’s something almost defiant about the Fourth of July. Every year, regardless of what’s trending or how loud the national argument got last week, Americans drag out the folding chairs, light something on fire, and decide, collectively, to feel good about where they live. Or at least try to. This year is different. This year, the number is on the banner: 250. A quarter-millennium. The Semiquincentennial, if you want to use the word nobody can pronounce. America’s big birthday, and like any milestone birthday, it’s equal parts celebration and reckoning.

BBQ smoke, dripping ice cream cones, sunscreen, something frying. Then you turn the corner and there it is: a street that was empty yesterday, now full of strangers acting like friends. A stage where a parking lot used to be. Kids eating things their parents will regret. Someone running the most popular booth at the whole event, completely unbothered by the line. This is a summer festival. And honestly, there’s nowhere we’d rather be. What We Actually Mean When We Talk About Community…

The research industry has spent years optimizing for speed. Faster turnarounds, bigger data sets, smarter dashboards, but the industry has been asking the wrong question. Not: How do we collect more data? But: What makes people tell the truth? Consumers aren’t holding back because researchers forgot to ask enough questions. They hold back because most research environments still make people feel observed, evaluated, and subtly judged. Especially in categories tied to health, identity, finances, caregiving, or personal insecurity.

Thirty-two years ago, the United States hosted the World Cup and mostly treated it like a curiosity. The stadiums filled. The world showed up. America shrugged and went back to baseball. This summer is different. And the language proves it. Quester’s Social Narratives practice has been tracking how Americans are talking about the 2026 FIFA World Cup. Not the media coverage, not the pundit takes, but the actual words people use when they’re talking to each other.

Every research project starts with the same artifact: a brief. Objectives. Hypotheses. KPIs. Target segments. A neat little document that often has already decided what questions should be asked and what the answer will likely be. After years challenging the status quo and pushing insights into strategy, we’ve come to believe something uncomfortable: The brief isn’t a starting point. It’s a fence, which hasn’t evolved like the way we do research and strategy has.