DON'T GO INTO 2027 NOT KNOWING FACT FROM FICTION
Before deciding what to do next, look outside.
Four weeks to challenge what you think you know, uncover what you're not seeing and get clear on where to focus next.
The view from inside
You know the customer. You know the category. You know what works.
Over time, experience becomes knowledge, knowledge becomes accepted wisdom, and assumptions can start to look a lot like facts.
The problem is, the world outside the business keeps moving.
Customers change. Culture moves. Categories blur. New behaviours emerge. New entrants rewrite the rules.
Suddenly, something you've known to be true for years might not be true anymore.
Or the opportunity might be somewhere you haven't thought to look.
You know what they buy. What the research says. What worked last year. What the category tells you they should care about.
What the hell are they actually doing?
That's why we go outside.
What's fact and what's fiction? What might you be missing? What's changed without you noticing?
In four weeks, we look beyond your business — at your customers, your category and businesses solving similar challenges elsewhere — to uncover what you're not seeing and get clear on where to focus next.
Three worlds
Customer
01We talk to customers to understand what's changing in their lives, behaviours, needs and expectations.
Not simply what they think about your brand, but the wider context in which they're making decisions.
Category
02We look at how the category is moving, where conventions are being challenged, what established competitors are doing and which new players are bubbling up.
Elsewhere
03We deliberately look beyond your category at businesses tackling similar problems in completely different markets.
Sometimes the best answer to your problem is sitting in a completely different category.
We're interested in what happens tomorrow.
AI is brilliant at finding, analysing and synthesising what already exists.
But it's not so great at understanding what is happening now. The behaviours emerging, the shifts gathering momentum, the things customers are doing that haven't made it into the case studies yet. The new players rewriting the rules and the answers sitting in places you wouldn't think to look.
You're not making decisions about where the world has been. You're making them about where it's going.
WHO'S DOING THE THINKING?
I've spent twenty years getting underneath why people do what they do, what makes brands matter and why businesses grow — or stop growing.
I've worked with global organisations, household names, scale-ups and founder-led businesses across food and drink, health, beauty, consumer goods and beyond.
Outside In brings that experience to one question your business needs to answer now.
20 years. Different categories. Big questions. Real experience.
Then we look back in
And what does that mean for where you focus next?
How it works
Customer conversations. Category exploration. Inspiration from elsewhere.
We investigate the things that could change how you see the challenge — rather than researching everything for the sake of it.
Sprowt synthesis, provocations and point of view.
We join the dots, challenge what doesn't hold up and identify the opportunities that deserve attention.
One focused day with the right people from across your business.
We put the evidence on the table, combine different perspectives and make choices about where to focus next.
You leave clear on what happens next.
Outside in, in practice
The businesses might look different. The questions don't.
How do you create growth? Change behaviour? Find the white space? Understand what customers really value? Work out what happens when the thing that made you different becomes expected?
Outside In starts with the question, then looks beyond the walls of the business for the answer.
MALE GROOMING
Behaviour change / Customer understanding / Category
The challenge was behavioural: getting men to rethink the way they cared for their hair meant challenging routines many had followed for years without giving them much thought.
Customer
We got underneath men's real relationship with their hair — what they cared about, what they didn't and the habits and assumptions sitting behind their routines.
Category
We looked at how male haircare was being sold and the assumptions the category itself was making about men's interest, knowledge and involvement.
Elsewhere
We explored categories that had successfully persuaded people to care more about previously functional routines and what had made a new behaviour feel worth adopting.
What we saw
The opportunity wasn't simply to create a better product.
It was to give men a reason to rethink a behaviour they'd never really questioned.
FOOD INNOVATION
Customer understanding / Proposition / Commercial opportunity
The business had invested in genuinely differentiated technology. But technical superiority doesn't automatically translate into customer value.
Customer
We went back to the progress people were actually trying to make — what they valued, what problem they thought they were solving and why the product mattered in their lives.
Category
We explored what customers compared the product with and the expectations created by the existing category.
Elsewhere
We looked at how other businesses had turned complicated innovation into something customers could immediately understand and value.
What we saw
The technology mattered enormously to the business.
But it wasn't necessarily the reason somebody would buy.
The opportunity was to build the proposition around what the customer wanted to achieve, rather than asking them to care about how the product made it possible.
FMCG: FOOD
Growth / Customer understanding / Category / White space
A food brand had built strong equity with a specialist audience. The growth question was whether the proposition could travel much further without losing the people who already loved it.
Customer
We explored what people actually valued. The specialist credential mattered, but taste, enjoyment and the experience of eating the product opened up a much bigger conversation.
Category
We found a category largely defining itself by what its products didn't contain — potentially keeping brands within a specialist frame.
Elsewhere
We looked at mainstream food brands that created desire first, allowing functional or dietary credentials to strengthen the proposition rather than define it.
What we saw
The white space wasn't in becoming a better dairy-free alternative.
It was becoming a delicious product people wanted to eat that happened to be dairy-free.
A subtle shift that opened up a much bigger potential audience.
CONSUMER GOODS / SOCIAL IMPACT
Future growth / Customer understanding / Category / White space
The business had built its proposition around a powerful social mission. But as sustainability became an expectation rather than a differentiator, the question was what would drive the next phase of growth.
Customer
We found that sustainability mattered, but people's motivations were far more layered. Convenience, cost, quality, aesthetics and personal relevance all influenced whether good intentions became actual behaviour.
Category
The category was increasingly crowded, while consumers weren't prepared to sacrifice ease, quality or the way they wanted to live simply to make the more sustainable choice.
Elsewhere
We looked beyond the category at brands and organisations people genuinely admired, including Patagonia, The North Face, Greenpeace and Surfers Against Sewage — to understand how purpose can create desire, community and action.
What we saw
The answer wasn't simply to shout louder about the mission.
It was to make doing good feel desirable, easy and personally relevant — without feeling like a sacrifice.
WELLNESS / FUNCTIONAL DRINKS
Customer understanding / Behaviour / Category / White space
The business had built distribution. The next challenge was harder: building mental availability in an emerging category customers didn't necessarily understand or trust.
Customer
People weren't organising their lives around an ingredient. They were thinking about moments when they wanted to feel different: finishing work, winding down, sleeping better, finding focus or simply creating a boundary between one part of the day and another.
Category
Credibility, efficacy and trust mattered enormously. The category couldn't rely on novelty forever; consumers wanted brands that felt clear, consistent and capable of delivering long-term value.
Elsewhere
We looked beyond the category at the wider shifts around wellbeing, drinking less and the small rituals people were introducing into everyday life.
What we saw
The white space wasn't simply in becoming a better CBD brand.
It was in owning the moments when people wanted to change state and becoming part of the ritual that helped them get there.
That created a much bigger opportunity than the ingredient alone.
Then we put the outside world on the table
Together, we turn what we've learned into choices.
Not more ideas for the sake of ideas. Not twenty opportunities that disappear into a deck.
Strategic choices about what matters, what doesn't and what you're going to do about it.
No enormous strategy deck that nobody opens again.
A clear answer. And what to do about it.
What still holds true.
What doesn't.
Where the opportunity lies.
Where to focus.
What not to do.
What happens next.
Captured in a concise What Comes Next report.
£25,000 + VAT
If 2027 is going to look different from the last few years, it starts with understanding what's true now.
From the outside in.
Tell us what you're trying to work out. What you suspect but can't prove. The question that keeps niggling. We'll start there.
Prefer email? carly@sprowt.uk