Abbey Teunis

We help our clients understand their consumers and how they feel or behave so that they are confident with how they’ve spent their budget, that they’re proud of the marketing they’ve produced and ultimately see sales skyrocket without spending hours doing it themselves or spending a fortune.

Embark offers both qual and quant research, primarily in the UK, but we have excellent partners abroad that we work closely with when need be. Typical projects are ad and concept testing, pack and product testing, audience understanding, customer journeys, innovation and idea generation. However, we believe market research is simply about understanding behaviour and so if the question is about understanding/exploring/establishing something linked to a human’s behaviour (e.g. making a donation or buying something), then we help out clients understand that behaviour.

Embark was founded on the idea of driving action: seeing the world differently so that our clients can cut through and disrupt consumer behaviour. All of our research and the ultimate recommendations are grounded in this principle, which means research isn’t just delivered with a report and a debrief – research is always, for example, workshopped with the end client to make sure they’re taking away action points and acting on the research. We strive to make market research more accessible, by having faster turn around times, being agile in our decision-making and by costing projects at an investment level that means small and medium businesses can also conduct research.

I’ve been in the market research industry for over 14 years, my last role as a senior director at one of the bigger agencies. I started Embark for two reasons: because I wanted to get closer to the research again, feeling one step removed at that very senior level, and to gain a better work-life balance, enabling more time to spend with my son. I’m experienced in both qual and quant research, across a range of industries, with clients as diverse as Vita Coco, Peroni and WaterAid through to Amazon, Hiscox, Capital One and Helly Hansen. Nowadays I frequently work with small businesses and start-ups too. I have a wealth of experience in ad and concept testing, pack and product testing, audience understanding, customer journeys, innovation and idea generation.