IX Strategy & Insight
Become the brand worth believing.
IX is a delightfully offbeat insight & strategy agency. With a small core team based in Cincinnati and a global community of expert strategists, researchers, and creatives on hand, we bring divergent thinking and diverse lived experience to our client’s tough challenges.
WHAT IX DOES
We reveal to our clients who they really are and who they really serve, then help them radiate those foundational beliefs through strategic innovation and culture change.
LET’S TALK ABOUT YOU
Need strength and clarity for your brand?
Need behavioral and psychological insight?
Need strategic innovation?
Need organizational alignment?
We formed IX (nine) to restore belief among brands, teams, and the communities they serve. Belief is the backdrop for powerful change: it dares us to dream bigger, to count on each other, and to accelerate our transformations through human connection.
WHY IX EXISTS
Featured: IX Brand Behavior Training
Introducing a new approach to brand decision-making grounded in patterns of universal psychological behavior.
WHAT OUR PARTNERS ARE SAYING
LIFEWTR, Brand Strategist
“This approach to archetype is unique and real; it speaks to creative people in a way other research simply does not. The method of ethnography is so effective. The workshops were very well done and productive. You transformed the team from skeptics, to open participants, all the way to advocates. The work not only feels deeply insightful but also highly creative. I appreciate your commitment to the approach, while also being able to accommodate some flexibility, to get in and do the work yourself, but also willingness to let others in with you. Your passion is contagious.”
GAP VP, Marketing
“The most human-centered, emotionally focused presentation I’ve ever seen at Gap Inc. Here’s to setting new standards for our humanity and compassion.”
Starbucks, SVP Innovation
“I have to say how enlightening it has been working with you. When I talk with leadership about the stuff we’re doing, everyone laps it up.”
Featured: OuterBound
Go where culture is re-born. Always playing catch-up? Driving real change requires working with real change-makers at society’s margins.
CASE STUDY
Leading Retail Apparel Gender Study.
A case study in ethnography and strategy
The need: Retail apparel has traditionally catered to males and females, but this is changing. Clients needed to understand lived experiences of gender non-conforming individuals and parents whose children are gender non-conforming.
The approach: We put participants in the role of researcher to ensure their experience, in their own words, remained front and center. Participants found a live-in liaison to help with on-the-ground research. We collected their photos, video interviews, and written responses prior to meeting them in person.
The result: A 20-minute documentary film captured the work, which the VP of Innovation called the “most human centered emotionally focused presentation I’ve ever seen.”
Just as critical, an organization that began this work focused so intently on size of prize emerged in partnership with real change makers at the edges of culture. They are no longer waiting passively to catch the next wave of trends; they are collaboratively working to incubate it.
Together let’s accelerate our transformations through human connection.
CONTACT US
