Hunch’s Vibe Method® is a positioning strategy and research approach for business innovators who want to either create something new or change things up on their current brand and need help to:

  1. Nail their ideal customer profile and lead story

  2. Turn their ideas into proven concepts

  3. Know in their gut that they are making the right moves

 … without wasting time and money on generic frameworks or bloated research methods that leave them still foggy about which way to go.

Do NOT be the one who missed something good.

There’s nothing worse than investing in up-front research only to still miss something little that could have made your launch a bigger success.

We’ve been there - it sucks.

From over 20 years studying how business decisions actually play out in the market after a new product or marketing campaign goes live, one thing is clear … most approaches will tempt you to ignore your own honed instincts in favor of vague metrics and mediocre outcomes.

… and we bet YOU are not in this to be mediocre.

 

And that’s what the Vibe Method was built to solve.

To make sure you don’t miss the little things. Because … little things are BIG.

Our approaches are designed to sharpen your instincts for what customers really want by tapping their instincts along the way.

And yes, we use AI but our AI models do not pretend to be human. They’ve been designed and trained for over 8 years by consumer behavior experts and go-to-market strategists to make our analysis more efficient and to help you spot the signals that others miss.

How it works:

Step 1: Hone Your Hunch

Because your honed hunch is the best “validation” you got.

A hunch is not a guess, and it’s definitely not luck. It’s a deep rooted instinct that can only be harvested from YOU - the person closest to the heart of what your customers feel and really want.

Below are the approaches we use to help you explore and shape your ideas in the early stage of development:

  • You don’t always need to start from scratch. Sometimes you need to sharpen what’s already there.

    The Vibe Power score is an assessment tool we’ve refined and proven for the last decade with dozens of clients and via hundreds of live in-market launch cases. We use this tool at the onset during our 90-minute Game Plan session, during our Storyline Building process, and after testing to help you strengthen working ideas, refine existing messaging, and decide which ideas deserve more exploration - before you do any further research or spend the big bucks on the launch plan.

    The Vibe Power Score™ is based on the proven traits of customer allure and stopping power to identify if your working ideas or existing message is strong enough. You’ll leave with sharper positioning and clarity for what your next moves need to be.

  • The Vibe Check is a lean version of our Vibe Test approach with a small pool of potential customers to explore your lead hunch and refine your game plan.

  • An iterative do-it-together process designed to dial in your ideal customer profile and explore for problems worth solving. This stage also includes custom foundational research as needed.

Step 2: Nail An Alluring Vibe

Because nobody should settle for mediocre.

Every mediocre launch we’ve studied goes back to one thing - a concept that lacked allure. The earlier you nail an alluring vibe, the less time and money you’ll waste trying to research and refine your product, your strategy, and your message.

A vibe-led approach is how we help you see the little things that are BIG for nailing an offer people can’t resist.

  • Discover your ideal customer profile and nail a story that cuts through the noise.

    When you can really feel the potential in a product or brand, the hardest decision isn’t whether or not to pursue the idea. It’s deciding the right message that will get future customers to feel it too.

    After studying thousands of launches, we’ve seen the same pattern every time - every success story roots back to the same thing: one specific situation that triggers a problem worth solving. Not just any ole problem, but a problem that people really FEEL, and that nobody else in the category is talking about.

    Through a series of short iterative sessions with you, we uncover high-heat situations and shape them into structured storyline narratives, then bring the strongest into Vibe Testing to nail a distinctive positioning and prove your offer has what it takes to attract ideal customers and lure them to buy.

  • When you need to decide if or how to launch a new product or campaign concept, nothing is more powerful than hearing how people react in their own words. The problem is scale. A handful of interviews is not enough, and most teams do not have time to sift through thousands of open-ended responses.

    The Vibe Test™ solves that.

    It is a simple, 2-minute open-ended reaction module placed at the start of a survey or interview. Participants give an unprompted, raw reaction which reveals the proven signals of attraction, distraction, and rejection that other approaches miss.

    Over the past decade, we have built a hybrid human-plus-AI analysis method to detect these signals at quantitative scale without losing nuance.

    Clients love the Vibe Test for:

    • Early-stage idea validation to prove market potential

    • Idea screening and version testing

    • Positioning development

    • Ideal customer profile design

    • Concept testing and optimization

    • User experience validation

    • Market sizing at any stage along the way - based on predictive signals derived from raw emotion and unprompted vibe, not forced ratings and vague metrics.

Step 3: Love What You Launch

Because if you don’t, why should they?

  • The Launch Lab is a mini test market where we test the vibe of your Launch Concept™(s) to optimize lead elements and predict market size, as well as attract people to try out your prototype or initial offer so we can we make sure their expectations live up and spot tweaks worth making before you sink a bunch of money into the full launch.

The Vibe is Your Guide

The Vibe Test for predicting success potential, spotting fixable elements and revealing prime customer mindsets was built from studying thousands of new concepts to identify proven traits of attraction, distraction, and buying behavior from raw open-ended reactions.

Our Vibe Sensing AI has been trained to guide you to the full story and think with you, never for you. The Hunch library of over 50 Vibe Traits™ was built by consumer behavior experts over a decade of protoyping and validation testing.

“Hunch's Vibe Method has played a key role for us at Starbucks in both the concepting and creative spaces. The beauty of their approach is balance. They've really nailed how to blend the depth of qual with the confidence of quant. Too often we are forced to make trade-offs due to time or budget, but with Hunch we know we're going to find those emotive insights that bubble under the surface while also getting the hard numbers to optimize and prioritize with confidence.”

— Erich Besmen

Nestle Starbucks
Senior Manager, Consumer & Market Insight