The Good People Research Company is a United States-based applied ethnography and advisory firm. For 25 years, we’ve helped leaders understand the stories their customers and employees live by and built the frameworks to act on that understanding.
Most research tells you what people do. We surface why people do what they do – the internal narrative that drives their behavior. That distinction is where brand and organizational decisions either land or quietly miss.
Our work is built for leaders navigating consequential decisions: whether a brand is genuinely connecting with the people it serves, whether an organization has the shared narrative it needs to move through change, whether the research they’re relying on is telling the whole story.
A Guiding Narrative® is the internal story every person tells themselves about how the world works and their place in it. It operates largely below conscious awareness through assumptions, beliefs, and values that no survey question can reach directly. It’s the filter through which your brand is perceived, your messages are interpreted, and your organization’s decisions are either trusted or quietly resisted.
The Guiding Narrative® Method was developed over 25 years of applied fieldwork from inside the LAPD during a period of mandated cultural change, to living rooms and boardrooms across the country. It’s a proprietary framework for surfacing, reconstructing, and validating the inner narratives that drive behavior, and translating them into brand strategy, organizational clarity, and communication that resonates at the level where decisions are actually made.
Craig Honick is a narrative strategist and applied ethnographer with 25 years of experience helping organizations understand the stories their customers and employees live by. He’s the founder of The Good People Research Company and the creator of the Guiding Narrative® methodology.
His fieldwork spans some of the most consequential organizational change work of the past three decades, including three years embedded inside the LAPD during the post–Rodney King reform era, when he became the first social scientist with unfettered access to the department’s daily patrol division activities.
Craig currently serves as Entrepreneur-in-Residence at UVA’s Darden School of Business, where he advises students, faculty, and alumni building ventures under the Batten Institute for Entrepreneurship, Innovation and Technology.
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