• "There is nothing more practical than good theory"

    K. Lewin, father of organisational psychology

  • Let's see what happens when we make a decision or perform an action...

  • How we behave depends on how we feel about something.

  • How we feel about something depends on how we perceive it.

  • And how we perceive something depends on how we make sense of it through our personal experiences, cultural conventions and the universal stories we all unconsciously share.

  • The process looks like this...

The Hidden Depth Method was developed by Massi Tedeschi, in collaboration with leading figures in Depth Psychology, to address the depth deficit in both qualitative and quantitative research.

Over the past decade, the method has proven itself in more than 100 projects across 25 markets, accounting for thousands of hours of in-depth research with people around the world.

The Hidden Depth Method is a structured framework of research and analysis to examine the 3 layers of human reasoning and their interplay   

SELF-REFLECTIVE. Introspection into the feelings and emotions that people, when stimulated, are aware of. Verbalising of how personal experiences and thinking have affected their choices and actions.

SYMBOLIC. Implicit thoughts, feelings and sensations that we have just by being part of a certain group and which determine how we see something, although we are not aware of their impact on our actions.

UNCONSCIOUS. Where deeply held beliefs, drives, fears and desires are held. They are not directly accessible, and people are not aware that they exist but they are the ‘unknown’ foundation  of our thinking and behaviours.

Let’s be clear

We’re not about giving you more data, or an entertaining picture dense with with interesting insights. We’re about precisely identifying, within the myriad of fascinating psychological truths at play in any human experience, what is going on that affects your business and how to change it.

The Hidden Depth Method is built on robust academic thinking drawn from Depth Psychology and Semiotics to go deep into psychology and wide into the cultural world of signs, codes and symbols they inhabit.

Our outputs offer a clear rationale and concrete recommendations on how to change people’s behaviour through actions, language, visuals and modality of communication.

The Depth Deficit

Standard qualitative research uses self-report methodologies, which are based on a linear-rational model for human behaviour and are often insufficient to explain the complexity of what people do in the real world.

Growing awareness that ‘hard’ cognitive data is not enough to make sense of the rather ‘soft’ matter of emotional engagement has led researchers to integrate new and non-linear techniques to fill the depth deficit that direct, even very detailed, questioning inevitably generates. These techniques may include creative, indirect exercises such as personification, metaphor, and role-play, or more observational techniques such as ethnography.

While adding non-linear techniques can add some richness to a piece of research (for example, describing a brand through archetypes or identifying associations with a new product) it’s not enough to understand the core of motivations, tensions, desires and fears that unconsciously affect behaviour.

At the same time, although emotions are central to decision making, it proves almost impossible to affect people’s emotions directly and predictably through marketing. (There are exceptions, like screening an ad from a charity within the context of an emotionally-charged movie. And as with most exceptions, this helps reveal the dynamics in question.) This is because emotions don’t happen in isolation, but within a complex and ever-changing context. Outside of the controlled conditions of a cinema, you have very little visibility into, or control over, the emotions that people bring into the conversation with you. Whether that be the fight with their spouse, the thrill of landing a new deal, or the sadness of seeing a flower that reminded them of a long-lost love. And then the emotions you want to access are happening alongside and interacting with many others. People rarely feel just happy or sad or angry. A number of different emotions blend into nostalgia, anticipation, ambivalence, and contradiction. The more you try and isolate and control emotions, the more they scurry away and dissolve under the light of observation.

Equally the promise of behaviouralism has often revealed itself insufficient to explain the complexity of human reasoning and not always able to make a real difference when applied to strategy. Behavioural psychologists treat the mind as a ‘black box’ and limit their focus to observable phenomenon. This means it can only explain behaviour via its link to another behaviour.

It’s against this backdrop that the Hidden Depth Method has been developed and applied. It’s comprised of a structured protocol based on Depth Psychology and an analytical framework that uses Structural Generative Semiotics as an interpretative tool.

In this sense, the Hidden Depth Method is truly unique within the landscape of research today, offering a fresh perspective on the decision making process that has scientific rigour and relies on established paradigms for over a hundred years in psychology, anthropology, linguistics and sociology.

What we have done is study, test, select and integrate those tools that are optimal for the task of answering complex and strategic business questions.