Incite

Incite, now trading as STRAT7 Incite, is a strategic research and planning consultancy headquartered in London, England. Founded in 2000, the firm was created to blend specialist market research insight with management consultancy, positioning itself between a conventional research agency and a strategy adviser. Rather than simply delivering data to clients, Incite set out to help brands and businesses answer difficult commercial questions with evidence, and to turn that evidence into decisions about brands, portfolios, innovation and growth. That founding proposition has remained central to the business through two changes of ownership, first as part of the group that became Kin + Carta and, since 2021, as part of the STRAT7 group.

Today Incite describes itself as a human-centric strategic consultancy, combining consumer and commercial insight for clients in technology, financial services, healthcare, retail and fast-moving consumer goods. Its published client roster at the time of its move to STRAT7 included Novartis, Gilead, Johnson & Johnson, Microsoft, LinkedIn, Nestlé and PepsiCo.

Founding and Early Years in London

Incite was founded in 2000 by Sid Simmons and Elaine Kent-Smith. Contemporary trade coverage described the young agency as Covent Garden-based and working across all types of research, with clients drawn from sectors including fast-moving consumer goods, alcoholic drinks, financial services, media and information technology and telecoms. Simmons went on to serve as the firm's chairman, while Roger Banks served as managing director and later chief executive during its first decade and beyond.

The agency grew as a senior-consultant-led business. A technology case study published when the business was eleven years old described a team of more than forty employees, and named Capital One, eBay, Vodafone and Royal Mail among the companies its senior consultants advised. It summarised the principles on which the business had been built as talent, rigour, debate and communication.

Trade profiles of its leadership from this period described an agency specialising in branding, segmentation and innovation research, with much of its work conducted internationally.

Growth and the Sale to St Ives

By the beginning of the 2010s Incite had built a substantial independent business. It reported revenue of £8.1 million for the year ending 28 February 2011. On 28 February 2012 the marketing and print services group St Ives acquired the whole of Incite Marketing Planning Limited in a deal that could be worth up to £17.5 million, structured around an initial payment linked to the agency's earnings with further performance-related consideration for the following years.

Incite continued as a subsidiary within St Ives, and its management team, including Simmons and Banks, remained in place. Simmons said joining a larger group offered financial backing for expansion, opportunities to work with the group's other businesses, and freedom for Incite to continue managing itself. St Ives was repositioning away from commoditised print towards higher-value marketing services, and Incite became one of the consultancy businesses at the centre of that strategy.

Under its new owner the agency invested in people and in overseas offices. St Ives later rebranded as Kin + Carta, and Incite spent the rest of the decade as part of that group, building the North American presence that would later make it particularly attractive to STRAT7.

Three Practices: Research, Planning and Strategy

Before its move to STRAT7, Incite restructured its offer into three core practices designed around three distinct types of client. The Research practice was aimed at insight buyers and promised insight-based evidence and inspiration. The Planning practice supported marketing, innovation, portfolio and strategy leaders with informed strategy and pragmatic implementation plans. The Strategy practice worked with business leaders and investors, helping them take informed decisions on investments and future direction.

The restructure was led by global managing director Peter Kneale, working with United States managing director Kevin Waters. The Research practice was led by director Stefan Schafer, Planning by deputy managing director Pranay Jeyachandran, and Strategy by director Helene Mills. Kneale described the practices as centres of excellence reflecting each client group's different needs, while stressing that each could draw on the others' expertise when a brief demanded it.

Uniting the three practices was the firm's ethos of putting people first: consumers, clients, employees and, in healthcare work, patients. That ethos survives in its current positioning as a human-centric consultancy combining commercial acumen with empathy, curiosity and creativity.

Joining the STRAT7 Group in 2021

In September 2021 STRAT7 acquired Incite from Kin + Carta in a deal valued at £18 million. The acquisition came less than a year after STRAT7 had bought cultural trends specialist Crowd DNA, and made Incite the sixth brand in the group, alongside ResearchBods, Bonamy Finch, LiFE, Crowd DNA and STRAT7+. STRAT7 itself had been formed in 2019 from research and analytics businesses ResearchBods and Bonamy Finch together with LiFE. The enlarged group reported a pro-forma revenue of approximately £35 million following the deal.

For STRAT7, Incite strengthened the group's position in healthcare, technology, fast-moving consumer goods and financial services, and brought a much stronger United States presence, described by chief executive Barrie Brien as the world's largest market for research, trends and insights. Brien characterised Incite as a highly respected, award-winning consultancy with an experienced management team and a history of consistent growth.

For Incite, joining STRAT7 gave it access to the group's proprietary software for consumer and customer data collection and enrichment, its advanced analytics expertise, and an extended footprint into Asia-Pacific. Kneale welcomed joining a community of researchers, planners and strategists, and identified the group's customer analytics, cultural insight and research technology platforms as an immediate boost to Incite's offer. The firm now trades as STRAT7 Incite.

What Incite Does: Capabilities and Approach

Incite describes its approach as method-neutral: the client's business challenge comes first, and the firm designs bespoke solutions around it rather than starting from a fixed product or technique. Its current published capabilities span seven broad areas. Strategic foundational understanding helps organisations build a deep, insight-driven picture of the people, cultures and systems that shape their environment, whether they are entering a new market, evolving a brand or planning long-term strategy.

Segmentation, targeting and forecasting work identifies meaningful segments, defines priority audiences and projects future behaviour. Brand strategy work helps brands define purpose, position and relevance, based on how people perceive and emotionally connect with them. Its communications work grounds campaign ideas in human understanding, while a dedicated behaviour change model uncovers the social, psychological and contextual forces behind behaviour.

Innovation and new product development support runs from early-stage exploration to concept testing, helping organisations identify unmet needs and shape relevant, differentiated ideas. Customer and user experience work, from journey mapping to ethnographic deep dives, looks for insights that support brand and growth strategy. Across all these areas, the firm's stated aim is to create clarity and empower clients to make evidence-based decisions for profitable, sustainable growth.

Sector Expertise

Incite has built deep industry expertise across a defined set of sectors. In healthcare, its team works with pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies of all sizes, from large pharmaceutical groups to start-ups, as well as organisations in medical devices and nutrition, typically on complex, business-critical projects. Its recruitment and published work emphasise problem solving, creativity and intellectual rigour in this team, and its heritage in the sector was one of the attractions cited by STRAT7 at the time of the acquisition.

In financial services, the firm addresses an industry being reshaped by the fading role of physical branches, the growth of fintech challengers and the effect of artificial intelligence on customer interactions. Clients engage it for foundational insights such as usage and attitude studies, segmentation and consumer journeys; for strategy and planning covering innovation, brand, communications and growth; and for work on pricing, portfolio optimisation and behaviour change. Published client commentary from Lloyds Banking Group has described the value of sharing Incite's insight across the organisation so customers' views sit at the centre of decisions.

The firm's other longstanding sectors are technology, retail and fast-moving consumer goods, extending to food and beverage and leisure, where its work connects consumer understanding to choices about segments, portfolios, innovation and brand positioning.

Clients and Case Work

For Burger King in the United Kingdom, Incite carved the quick-service restaurant market into occasion-based segments, informed first by in-restaurant ethnography and then validated through quantitative research. Workshops with the senior leadership team helped the business choose where to play and how to win; the resulting direction had implications for marketing communications, promotions, restaurant format, estate planning and the product offer, and Incite continued to support the roll-out, including validating the decision to remove plastic toys from children's meals.

For Dole, one of the world's largest producers and marketers of fresh and packaged fruit, Incite designed a three-stage programme to support a growth strategy for Asia. Qualitative fieldwork using pre-task diaries and in-home interviews fed into a quantitative segmentation identifying six segments across the region. An action-planning workshop then turned the segmentation into a clear regional and country-level plan.

For fashion retailer White Stuff, which had a strong presence in the United Kingdom and Germany but had lost sight of its identity, Incite ran a quantitative segmentation study across both countries and leadership workshops to prioritise target segments. The work gave management confidence to make difficult decisions, including phasing out childrenswear. Its wider published portfolio includes launch strategy work for Novartis on a first-in-class cardiovascular treatment and brand updating work for the Weight Watchers from Heinz range.

International Footprint

Although Incite is London-headquartered, international work has been part of its model since its independent years. By the time of the STRAT7 acquisition it operated from four offices: London, New York, San Francisco and Chicago. That North American footprint was a central part of its value to STRAT7, whose own offices at the time included Leeds, Amsterdam, New York, Singapore, Stockholm and Sydney.

Within STRAT7, Incite sits alongside sister businesses including ResearchBods, Bonamy Finch and Crowd DNA. It continues to operate from London with offices in three United States cities, working across consumer goods, health, financial services, technology, leisure and retail.

Position in the UK Research Industry

Incite occupies a distinctive place in the UK research industry: it operates, in its own description, at the intersection between consulting and primary market research, using research to build answers to clients' business problems. That positioning explains its ownership history and the prices it has commanded, from a deal worth up to £17.5 million in 2012 to £18 million in 2021.

Its longevity rests on a consistent idea: that rigorous evidence about people, properly debated and clearly communicated, allows businesses to make better strategic decisions. Now, as STRAT7 Incite, that idea is applied with the data technology, analytics capability and global footprint of the wider group behind it.