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The stories you should be telling.^®

AI just got human.

Guiding Personas™ confidently validate your marketing strategy.

Guiding Personas^™

Collaborate on storytelling and product innovation.

Brand Equity Focus?

Make your brand indispensable.

Organizational leader. Marketer. Content Creator?

Reveal the Guiding Narrative® driving your customer's decisions

Our ethnographers go deep into your marketplace to learn the story your
customers tell themselves about their life and your brand.

Discover

We learn how your customers make meaning of their identity, what they value, and why.

Segment

We create Guiding Personas™, based on the differences in what customers value most.

Guide

Real-time Guiding Personas™ teach you what stories to tell and products to develop.

Do you know your customer’s Guiding Narrative^® ?

Building a Brand?

If you’re successful, your customers define your brand as a vehicle to amplify their values in daily life.
So the future of your brand depends on the stories you tell about it.

Are You Telling The Right Stories?

It’s hard to know what story will connect and resonate with each of your audience segments.
Most market research tells us what our audience thinks and does, but not why, leaving us to guess about what they truly value and trust.

What if there were a BluePrint?

A guide to what your audience values and trusts?
A blueprint that showed you the kinds of stories about your brand that your audience would embrace and promote.

There is.

As humans, we tell ourselves a story about how the world works, and the role we play in it. This story tells us what to value, what to trust, and what to promote.

At The GoodPeopleResearch Company, we call this internal story— this blueprint — a Guiding Narrative^®
And we’ve developed a way to surface and reconstruct it for our clients.

You might say we’ve disrupted brand communication.

Understanding your customer’s Guiding Narrative^®

The Foundation to your marketing strategy.

Build on how customers make meaning.

Brand Storytelling

When your brand content reflects the customer’s Guiding Narrative^®, the customer welcomes your story into their lived experience as something they want to support and promote.

Imagine your storytelling is cultural Velcro^® — we make sure the audience “loops” will catch the “hooks” you encode in brand content and behavior to form a tight bond.

Surveys, focus groups, interviews, and tracking behavior on their own are not equipped to discern how customers make meaning and decide what to value in daily life; Guiding Narrative® Insight is designed specifically to do this.

Our advisors will help you decide which stories to tell to optimally position your brand and products.

Product/Service Innovation and Go-to-market Strategy

The most effective path to innovation and efficient GTM strategy is understanding what the customer values, as well as what the customer creates in their minds as optimal living conditions. The Guiding Narrative^® provides a blueprint for both, placing product utility and storytelling in context.

Additionally, we have the capability to teach AI how to think like your customer, enabling you to leverage the power of AI to create and roll out products that you know sync with how your customers frame the world.

Marketplace Trust and Crisis Mitigation

We’re leaders in understanding marketplace trust, having completed years of research on behalf of the Better Business Bureau, the FINRA Investor Education Foundation, one of the nation’s largest metro police forces, and multiple brands.

For the Better Business Bureau, we created the “5 Gestures of Trust” a new paradigm for customer- business relationships which outlines why consumers trust some organizations and not others in today’s climate.

We can help identify trust issues may have with your brand and provide concrete direction to remedy them.

Thought Leadership Development

Thought leadership is about having the marketplace take notice of your brand and promote it to others.

Effective thought leadership is tied to customer narrative and therefore if it is in sync with your audience’s Guiding Narrative®, it rings true. Using our Guiding Narrative® insight, the stories you tell in posts, webinars, white papers, podcasts – all your communication — will be refreshingly authentic, respected, and promoted by the marketplace.

Some good People We’ve Worked with.

Kind Words.

I hope to be able to work with Craig and his team for my entire business career. Their work is unparalleled. They can explain the results and make them actionable. Their unique and highly relevant ethnographic training works very well since it allows them to put themselves “in other’s shoes” better than anyone I know. Their patience, professionalism and attention to detail help drive consistent, accurate business conclusions.

Craig and his team are my resource-of-choice for research projects of any scale; they’re the first call I make and frequently the ONLY call I make. We’ve worked on a number of projects together, and I trust completely their science, productivity, good humor, and business practices. They’re clear, focused, timely, authoritative, insightful, professional. I never hesitate to have them interact with my clients, who respond very well to their work, his presentations, and his analyses. I’ve come to rely on their good counsel, and respect their opinions, especially when they’re different than mine — I trust them to tell the truth and I value their judgment immensely. I never hesitate in giving them my highest recommendation.

Craig and his team have shown us how our customers see our solutions and their relationship with our company, and why. This enables us to understand how and where we can deliver greater value to our network banks every day.

Craig and his team were instrumental to the creation of BBB’s 5 Gestures of Trust, an exciting new framework for consumer – business relationships. Their work supported our effort to keep a 100-year-old brand relevant for today’s audience.

I worked with Craig and his team at Ergobaby for consumer insights, specifically ethnography studies, with complicated recruiting criteria and the objective of gaining a deep understanding consumer segmentation. They came up with a comprehensive plan and delivered in-depth analysis and clear recommendations, on time, and on budget. Working with them was a real pleasure, they listened carefully and asked great questions.

Craig immediately took measures to win the confidence of hundreds of beat cops through whom he observed the operations of the LAPD. By force of his pleasant personality, communication skills, calm demeanor, professionalism and display of sincerity, he won the officers over to his cause. Across the board they quickly accepted him as qualified, sincere and well intentioned.

There is no doubt that Craig Honick played a very special and critical role in bringing about process improvement in one of the largest and most well-known police agencies in America.

What we're learning

Nov
18
2025

Project + Reject

Craig Honick
Substack

Often we look to outside guides to help us with the meaning of things: scripture, science, statistics, our education, authorities, influencers. But the extent to which we internalize these sources is also a product of our imagination as we make room for them based on what our imagination allows and values.

Nov
16
2025

Imagination as Reality

Craig Honick
Substack

Below is a brief historical account of the evolution of the notion that reality is a product of of our imagination, and that we, as humans, collectively construct the reality that lives in our minds.

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