Background
A leading life sciences company supplying products and services to the pharma, biotech and diagnostics sectors has spent the past decade running periodic research on its main brands — assessing brand health and gathering customer feedback on both new and established offerings.
This wave focused on awareness and usage across the company's leading brands, and on how professionals perceive the suppliers they work with. The requirement was not simply to find people working in life sciences, but to find people who use these products in their roles and carry real influence over what gets bought — across six markets with quite different laboratory cultures and purchasing structures.
Our Approach
The programme ran in two rounds across the USA, UK and Ireland, Germany, India, South Korea and China — 60 interviews in the first, 80 in the second — split between two professional groups: research and applied roles, and process roles. Each market carried its own target, so no single geography could quietly fill the shortfall left by a harder one.
Every participant completed a short screening conversation before being invited to a 60-minute qualitative discussion, confirming both their professional role and their influence over purchasing decisions. Recruitment drew on our panel and previous participants, with desk research used selectively where a market needed depth the panel could not yet reach.
Outcome
One hundred and forty 60-minute depth interviews were delivered across the two rounds and all six markets. The engagement combined both halves of what we do: recruits handed to the client for interviews they ran themselves, and full-service delivery where we conducted the interviews — in every local language required, without routing participants through a second language they think less precisely in.
We also analysed the complete set of interviews across both rounds, so the client received not just the fieldwork but a read across all six markets.
Key takeaway: Brand-health work only holds up if the sample genuinely buys. Screening for purchasing influence rather than job title alone is the difference between measuring recognition and measuring preference.