Jess Jorgensen

Overview

Cultural Insight specialist with 16+ years working at the intersection of Culture/Qual/Quant. My heartland is Culture: I can help you with trends, foresight, semiotics, eth/netnography, cultural immersions and analysis while adding senior-level strategic value to the work.

Services

Based in London

For 16+ years I worked agency-side as a Director of Insights at BAMM, Culture Foundry and Flamingo, helping brands get strategic at the intersect of people and culture. I've done so much - across continents, categories and methods, integrating culture/qual/quant, for some of the world's leading brands - but my heartland is Cultural Insight.

I work best as part of your project from proposal to presentation (don't we all?), and am also available for ad-hoc support, for e.g. analysis and report writing or moderation.

As a consultant, I can help you with these types of briefs...
Audience or category deep dive / decoding & encoding culture / demand spaces / mitigating cultural risk / brand & product proposition dev / archetypes / segmentation / multi-market strategy

...through all the usual things us insights folk get up to:
Qual research (groups, online, depth interviews etc), applied semiotics, eth/netnography, desk research, lit review, engaging experts, workshop design, AI and GPT tinkering

Areas we'd work best together:

Africa  - esp. Nigeria, Kenya, South Africa / Gaming / Alcohol / Sustainability / Mushroom culture / Wellness / Global multi-market strategy (one answer with regional nuance)

About

Much of my career has focused on stuff I love:

• 🍄 Mushroom and psychedelic culture- I'm a mycophile. Spent 2023 on a world mushroom tour, interviewing 50+ mushroom innovators and thinkers in 5 countries; semiotic analysis of functional mushroom space. Blog & podcast https://www.runningwithmushrooms.com

• 🌍 Africa- I helped Instant Grass, now Culture Foundry, expand into 18 regions, while helping global brands (like BBC, Jameson, Red Bull, ABinBev, Jägermeister) resonate by honouring cultural nuance

• 🎮 Gaming- Looove gaming. Designed an in-game ethnography method to help brands (like Canon, The Coca Cola Company) understand gaming mindsets, needs, behaviours

• 🍾 Alcohol- Much of my career has been in alcohol (eg. with Pernod Ricard's CI or Cultural Foresights teams) likely because my dad is Africa's 'Ginfather' Roger Jorgensen

• 💚 Sustainability- Love working on planet-conscious brand solutions; helped brands (like plant-based drink by the world's biggest bev company) develop a biodiversity proposition

• 💗 Wellness- Exploring wellness (and it's pushback, like 'healing from healing') is so fun. Recently designed and led a mammoth culture/qual/quant study into LatAm health & wellness, incl. demand spaces and semiotic category analysis for the client's portfolio and comms strategy