Leeds Launch for New Insight Firm Red Onion

In Leeds, UK, Josh Pearce has launched Red Onion, a new customer intelligence business with clients in the sport, betting and gaming, retail and wellness sectors. Pearce is the former Head of Brand Performance at beauty and sports nutrition group THG.

Red Onion will combine consumer research, analytics and marketing expertise to help brands identify new growth opportunities, and aims to expand into the beauty and FMCG sectors. Pearce (pictured) says early projects include a Premier League football club and work for a major US sports commerce business.

Pearce worked for more than five years at UK retail chain Boots before joining THG in 2021, and most recently spent around a year as CPO at sampling and digital insights company Triyit. Red Onion taps established global research panels, giving access to more than 250 million consumers worldwide, and will bring together continuous consumer research, market mapping, audience segmentation, brand measurement, pricing analysis and in-channel incrementality testing.

'Brands have more customer data than ever, but that doesn't necessarily mean they understand their customers,' says Pearce. 'I've worked in and with countless businesses with substantial research budgets and sophisticated data teams where answering basic questions about who we should target next was still surprisingly difficult. That experience was behind Red Onion. We wanted to bring together the research, analysis and commercial thinking needed to answer those questions, without businesses having to commission several separate projects or piece together findings from different teams.'

Red Onion will use a proprietary approach to quantify brand equity, which it says is 'completely different to that of a typical brand tracker.' The method examines 'salience, uniqueness and meaning' individually, and adds analytical tools to assess pricing power and future growth potential. Pearce says come of the focus will be on customers of competitors, not just the client, adding: 'That's often where the biggest opportunities sit. We want to help businesses understand the whole market and use that knowledge to make better decisions about where they invest.'

Former Samsung strategist Ben Piller serves as the company's Strategy and Ops Lead.

Online at www.redonion.app .

All articles 2006-23 written and edited by Mel Crowther and/or Nick Thomas, 2024- by Nick Thomas, unless otherwise stated.