Welcome, and thank you for visiting our website! We are so very excited to bring this business to life, and appreciate you taking some time out of your busy schedule to learn more about this.

Here’s the story of how this business came to be, and why we named it what we did.

Over the years, we’ve had the good fortune to conduct applied social science research in partnership with a wide range of clients. We’ve helped specialty retail and consumer packaged goods businesses obtain fresh and accurate consumer insights. We’ve assisted municipalities and state departments that needed research guidance as they planned community outreach and education efforts. We’ve provided program evaluation and needs assessment support to nonprofit organizations that needed to verify the work they were doing was having the desired impact. And over the past few years, we developed expertise in providing litigation research support services to expert witnesses and law firms.

Throughout these successful engagements, it became clear that a greater amount of specialization was needed, as the traditional marketing research work we were conducting was quite different from the litigation research portion of our work.

I therefore founded a new company that would allow us to focus on conducting marketing research for partners seeking guidance to their consumer insights, community affairs, and community impact questions.

Now, the research we conduct doesn’t typically sit in a binder on a shelf… rather, it is applied to address some tactical or strategic demand. We firmly feel it is our responsibility to help our partners navigate this information, to provide them with a roadmap of sorts that allows them to identify and act on what’s important. We excel at identifying the “Key Research Findings” in the information we collect, at isolating and persuasively communicating the “story of the data.” These capabilities and experiences, coupled with our academic pedigrees, set us apart from other marketing research firms.

But what should this new business be called? We wanted a brand name that reflected the essence of who we are, what we do, and how we help our partners. We wanted a name that was unique, avoiding the use of typical “marketing research” keywords. We wanted a name that allowed an oblique reference to our academic credentials. And we wanted a name that was fun to say.

Enter ILLUMINOLOGY

Illuminate = “to enlighten spiritually or intellectually,” “to supply or brighten with light”
(Source: Merriam-Webster)

Ology = “the scientific study of a particular subject”
(Source: FreeDictionary.com)

So there you have it… the five-minute version of a five-month journey.

We can’t wait to see where this journey takes us – and we hope you will join us for some portion of it.