Human Insights

Understanding Behavior, Building Empathy, Driving Change.

ILLUME’s Human Insights Practice Area combines thoughtful research and strategic solutions to help you uncover the nuances of human behavior, culture, and market dynamics. We utilize diverse disciplinary perspectives—from anthropology to behavioral economics to cognitive science to linguistics—to make sense of human and market behaviors. Our collaborative approach and attention to storytelling ensure you have actionable insights that foster empathy with your customers, influence markets, and create impact. 

Our Services

Market Segmentation

We help you analyze the complexities of human behavior and help you define meaningful customer groups and personas for focused outreach. We use multiple methodologies to uncover critical insights capable of building awareness, shifting perceptions, and resolving pain points to guide you toward more inclusive and effective strategies.

Multicultural Research

Culture is a key factor in your customers’ perceptions and decision-making. We provide you with the research you need to bridge gaps and foster alignment between your work and the needs and concerns of the people and communities you serve.

Behavior-Change Research

ILLUME helps you decode the beliefs and motivations behind your customers’ actions, helping you integrate behavior-change strategies into your initiatives. Our researchers carefully design qualitative and quantitative studies as well as market tests to give you field-tested solutions that create meaningful impacts.

Customer Experience Strategy

Your customers’ experiences shape their trust and loyalty. Using tools like journey mapping, ethnographic interviewing, and stakeholder interviews, we create data-informed approaches to enhance your customer experience strategy. We deliver insights and strategies to help you design seamless, meaningful interactions that align with your strategic goals, elevate your brand, resonate with the people you serve, and impact key performance indicators like JD Power scores.

Communications Strategy

Clear, compelling communication drives understanding and action. We craft strategies that ensure your messages reach your audience effectively, inspiring engagement and building lasting connections. We do this by drawing on expertise in marketing, education, outreach tactics, and linguistics and through carefully designed A/B message testing. 

Market Characterization and Transformation Consulting

We provide strategic design and consulting services in market characterization and transformation to help you deliver interventions that customers are eager to adopt and capable of achieving market scale. We bring a national perspective to market behaviors and dynamics, providing you with a clear understanding of market mechanics so your interventions are impactful and grounded in behavior-change theory.

Sharing Their Knowledge

Meet Our Experts

  • Alexandra Dunn

    Senior Director

    Dr. Alex Dunn is a cognitive scientist and psycholinguist with more than a decade of experience helping clients understand human behavior and its impact on energy programs and services with a focus on rate…

  • Liz Kelley

    Senior Director

    Dr. Liz Kelley is an anthropologist with nearly 15 years of experience specializing in ethnographic and qualitative research to address her clients’ policy, program, and customer engagement investments across energy domains and technologies.