Role Description 

As a Research Strategist at Provoke, you are responsible for executing the full research process, from defining the approach and conducting desk research to running interviews, facilitating group sessions, and collaborating with local partners. You engage with research not just as a way to collect information, but as a lens to understand communities, behaviors, trends, values, and cultural movements. Through sharp synthesis, structured thinking, and clear communication, you translate findings into clear, structured insights, identifying what the research reveals, what it means through a strategic lens, and how it can inform brand choices, creative direction, audience engagement, and future opportunities.

You know how to translate local conversations into global meaning, and you never lose sight of the humans behind the data. You’re not just reporting findings, you translate research into clear, focused insights that explain how people form opinions, adopt behaviors, participate in scenes, or relate to categories like fashion, sport, or identity, and how these patterns shift over time depending on place, culture, and influence. You then turn those insights into practical audience strategies, defining which cultural spaces or platforms a brand should activate in, what narratives will resonate with specific groups, and how to build meaningful relevance across scenes, communities, or lifestyle categories. Your work turns deep research into actionable frameworks that help clients better understand their audiences and create meaningful impact.

Key Responsibilities

Research Planning & Design

• Design and scope research programs across markets, audiences, and themes.

• Develop qualitative and mixed-method methodologies tailored to client needs.

• Build research frameworks that link insight gathering to creative and business objectives.

Fieldwork & Data Collection

• Build and manage worldwide partnerships with local researchers, cultural experts, and community contacts across markets.

• Lead and organize field-based research activations and events that bring researchers into direct contact with communities.

• Conduct or oversee primary research: in-depth interviews, ethnographic studies, group sessions, and trend observations.

• Ensure all fieldwork reflects sensitivity to context, identity, and lived realities.

• Build and coordinate a Databank full of relevant references

Insight Development & Storytelling

• Synthesize findings into rich, layered insight narratives that uncover behavioral truths, cultural tensions, and human motivations.

• Translate research outcomes into clear opportunity spaces that inform strategy, unlock new creative thinking, and guide brand, product, and campaign development.

• Create reports, visual frameworks, and story-driven presentations

Collaboration & Influence

• Work closely with strategists and creatives to ensure insight feeds concept development. Make sure you’re involved in project lifecycles to ensure research isn’t isolated, but actively fuels ideation, execution, and iteration.

• Contribute to strategic thinking by embedding research insights into positioning frameworks, creative briefs, and campaign direction.

• Ensure that cultural nuance, behavioral context, and community relevance are reflected throughout strategic development.

• Bring clarity and depth to strategy by translating evidence into strong points of view and creative potential.

• Present research outcomes to clients with clarity, energy, and conviction.

Growth & Method Innovation

• Proactively identify emerging research themes, social shifts, and behavioral patterns that can shape future clients and our thinking.

• Help optimize our research practices, tools, and cultural mapping approaches.

• Take ownership of internal & external knowledge-sharing initiatives. Including recurring formats such as a quarterly insight newsletter.

• Explore, optimize and experiment with our tech-enabled tools to evolve and optimize our research methodologies.

• Act as a mentor to junior researchers and interns.

Profile

You’re an experienced Research Strategist with 3+ years working in cultural, brand, or qualitative research. Whether agency-side, in-house, or freelance. You know how to design and execute multi-market studies, and you’re comfortable working across a range of themes, from youth and lifestyle to fashion, sport, and identity. You combine methodological rigor with cultural sensitivity and human intuition.

You’re skilled in translating unfiltered, real-world input into clear, structured insight, moving from fieldwork to frameworks, from observation to opportunity. You understand how research connects to strategy and creativity, and you collaborate confidently with strategists and creatives to shape ideas that matter.

You're a clear communicator, a thoughtful listener, and a sharp synthesizer. You know how to build meaningful narratives from complexity, and you’re not afraid to take a point of view. You’re fluent in English (other languages are a plus), and you're always seeking new ways to deepen your practice, whether through tools, formats, or ways of working.