Who We Are

Phil Wyckoff, Chief Insight Officer & Founder at Wyckoff Partners, is a forward-thinking marketing professional with a track record of uncovering insights that create impactful marketing strategies for his clients.  

As a research consultant and moderator with over 30 years of agency and client-side experience, he is skilled at designing and executing world-class research that is laser-focused on addressing critical business issues while building deep relationships with his clients’ cross-functional teams.  

Phil’s experience spans diverse industries including healthcare, technology, food & beverage, restaurants/food service, retail, home & personal care, telecom, media, automotive, among others.

Before founding Wyckoff Partners in 2012, Phil served in strategic insights roles at Nestle, Lieberman Research Worldwide (Material), BASES (a division of Nielsen), IRI (Circana) and Leo Burnett Advertising. Phil also was an ex-pat in South America, successfully opening a BASES office in Sao Paulo, Brazil and providing leadership to the newly-formed Latin America region.

Phil is passionate about innovation and brand communications, with particular interest in semiotics and its commercial applications to drive competitive advantage.

Phil holds an M.B.A. from Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management and a B.S. in Business Administration from Miami University.

Our Approach

  • The research brief is the most important document in any research study, and we work closely with clients to understand all the elements of the brief, often providing guidance on ways to strengthen it. Through these collaborations, we ensure that our studies are effectively delivering against our clients’ objectives.

    Curiosity to understand our clients’ critical business issues and “must-win” battles, with an eye toward short-term and long-term decision-making that results from our engagements.

  • 25+ years of research design experience, with a focus on creative approaches that help clients get more out of their research investment.

    Deep interdisciplinary experience designing complex qualitative, quantitative and advanced analytics studies. This unique perspective allows us to better design qualitative studies that may be a part of a client’s multi-phased learning plan, such as when qual informs quant, or vice versa.

  • One point of contact, regardless of the complexity involved.

    Highly-skilled and committed support team of project managers and recruiters who are expert at delivering the highest quality projects to our clients.

  • 10+ years of meaningful interactions with thousands of research participants, from consumers to professionals to physicians.

    Over 2,500 events moderated, leveraging a variety of in-person and digital formats including in-depth interviews, focus groups, online communities, ethnographies, etc.

  • Design is a foundational element in the success of our work, recognizing that poor design can undermine even the best content. A commitment to good design is one of our founding principles, borne out of a desire to make our processes and deliverables as engaging as possible.

    From the way discussions are crafted and served up to participants to the way insights are shared with our clients, everything we do is through a design lens.

  • We differentiate ourselves by bringing our analytic expertise to the storytelling process, often developing easy-to-use frameworks to make the insights come to life. These frameworks are informed by both what participants say and what they do not say during our interactions.

    Observations on and conversations with research participants are transformed into working models of understanding and insight to drive strategy development and decision-making.

  • Culture constantly evolves and shapes consumers’ thoughts, ideas, values and beliefs, hence brands do not live in a vacuum. By examining the imagery and language of culture and brands, we are able to gain new knowledge and understanding about consumers.

    The use of semiotics and our Semio-Qual® methodology are effective ways of decoding the meaning of brands and using cultural codes to shape the future of brands and categories rather than being reactive.

  • We strive to develop a crisp narrative for each study that cuts through the large amount of data often generated.

    We also are committed to synthesizing study results into a highly-visual format to maximize the impact of key findings.

“The team was really impressed by your analysis, and the way you walked us through the results was especially helpful.  It provided very clear direction for the team to move forward.”

Geri Yoshioka
Director, Consumer Planning & Insights

Walgreen Co.