01.

Articulate was repositioning as an AI-first company with no structured evidence of how the brand actually landed with anyone: current users, new buyers, or the people who'd never heard of it. Brand and creative decisions were being made at speed with no research infrastructure inside Brand to check them against. User Experience Research resources existed but were at capacity, so the project had to originate on the brand side or not happen at all.

02.

Nobody at Articulate had ever tracked brand perception before. Repositioning as AI-first without knowing how any audience actually experienced the brand meant flying blind at exactly the moment perception mattered most, and no comparable research existed to check any of it against.

03.

I designed and owned the full end-to-end research methodology which spearheaded the first brand-led research program for Articulate. This required significant cross-functional buy-in and influence since I was effectively borrowing resources from outside my team (resources from User Experience Research, Product Marketing, and Messaging Design) during a very busy Q3 season. Since their role was consultative, I had to drive the research brief, discussion guides, screeners, moderator guides, survey instruments, project plan, scheduling, data tagging schema, and a weighted synthesis framework. After the research was collected, I developed a three-factor weighted synthesis model so that all data wasn’t weighted the same based on audience. Future Strategic Relevance at 40%, Brand Risk if Ignored at 35%, Signal Quality at 25%, since equal-weighting five audiences would have produced contradictions that skewed the research. Nine executives, including the Founder, CFO & President, Chief Commercial Officer, and Chief Product & Operating Officer sat for 35-to-45-minute interviews. At the end of this project we had deep, objective brand perception research that would help guide us into the next chapter of Articulate and validated my brand hypothesis.