Start the year behavioural!

It’s a new year and likely a new calendar of research projects planned. Budgets reset, strategies are revisited, and research plans get a fresh look. It’s often the moment you ask, how can I maximise the insights and squeeze out every bit of value in each project I run this year?

The answer is not more research but better techniques and approaches. Methods that can give you more depth, more accuracy and ultimately a better sense of where next.

Behavioural science can answer these questions. Offering a more accurate, more human way to understand consumers, that gets past surface level insights to let you better predict the future.

Behavioural science is an ever broadening field uncovering behaviours and motivations while also providing a framework for behaviour change. Methods include implicit reaction time, behavioural conjoint, emotion measurement, narrative quant and qual, and various other tools. You can run fully behavioural research projects, or make smaller behavioural adjustments to existing quant surveys to get more depth from your respondents.

So, where do you start?

You can start with Irrational Agency’s Guide to Behavioural Market Research. Written to help teams make sense of behavioural science and apply it thoughtfully in your own projects.

Why now is the right moment to rethink your approach

Traditional research still plays a valuable role, but it relies heavily on conscious explanation: what people say they think, feel, or intend to do. Behavioural science starts from a different assumption—that much of decision-making happens automatically, quickly, and often without conscious awareness.

This distinction matters when you’re planning the year ahead. Questions about pricing, innovation, pack design, advertising, or long-term strategy often hinge on nonconscious processes: emotional reactions, mental shortcuts, imagined futures, and contextual cues. If you’re not measuring those processes, you’re missing part of the picture.

Behavioural research doesn’t replace surveys or qualitative work. It strengthens them by uncovering the hidden drivers that traditional methods tend to smooth over.

Innovative methods, explained clearly

The guide also provides a practical overview of the most widely used behavioural research tools today, from fast and scalable techniques to deeper, more immersive approaches. These include implicit reaction time measures, behavioural conjoint, emotion measurement, narrative research, experiments, and simulated real-world decision environments.

Rather than presenting these as “cutting-edge” for their own sake, we focus on what they are genuinely good at, where they can mislead, and how they can be combined with traditional methods to answer bigger strategic questions.

This is especially useful when planning projects for the year ahead. Knowing which tools are best suited for early-stage exploration, optimization, validation, or forecasting can save time, budget, and frustration.

A practical starting point

We created the Guide to Behavioural Market Research as a practical resource for marketers, researchers, and strategists who want to make smarter choices about how they study people. 

If you’re looking to refresh your thinking, explore innovative techniques, and set your research projects up for stronger results this year, behavioural market research is a good place to start. 

You can download the Guide to Behavioural Market Research here