HOUDINI: Building a Brand Strength Matrix From the Ground Up

Client: Houdini Sportswear Category: Outdoor / Premium Apparel Role: Research design, analytics model, archetype framework, questionnaire development, brand strategy recommendations Scope: Quantitative consumer study, 1,049 respondents, nationally representative, Sweden

The Brief

Houdini came to Above the Clouds with a strong conviction about the brand, but no clear view of how the brand performed against competitors in the mind of the Swedish consumer, and no clera view of why people buy, no tracker, no segmentation model, and no evidence base to confirm it, challenge it, or act on it.

The brief was open by design: Don't just create a survey; build a decision-making tool with models and archetypes that the teams can act on to direct marketing, brand development, and sales. Create a research foundation, decide what matters and what to measure, create a hypothesis, design a model/matrix, and turn it into a framework and desicion making-tool that could be integrated into the Houdini Business System.

The Approach and Methodology

Every study I run is built on a tested architecture, a repeatable structure I adapt to the

category and the client’s specific questions, rather than reinventing from zero each time.

Turn volume into a short list of clear priorities

A niche brand means a small group of deeply familiar respondents. The study had to do competitive benchmarking, brand-specific diagnostics, and persona-building at once.

The analysis had to lean on clearly labeled directional findings rather than overstate their weight. Dozens of attributes, brands, and segments are a challenge.

The model had to force volume into a short list of clear priorities.

The Approach: Six Stages Built in a Sequence of Steps

Every stage had to exist before the next one could be trusted. The model came before the questions, and the questions came before the data.

1. Workshop to define Challenges, Competitors and Consumers

   Defined the key challenges, needs, and potential white spaces to win in the market.

2. Form the hypotheses

   Based on workshop and insights from The Future Series, created hypotheses on consumers, competitors, cultural shifts and functional vs. emotional attributes.

3. Design the Analytical Model and Brand Strengths Matrix

   Created the analytical models and a Brand Strength Matrix of emotional and functional attributes, compared to competitors and consumer importance when choosing brands, emotionally and commercially.

4. Designed the Archetype Model and direction

   Created the model and foundation for three consumer archetypes and one Houdini

   buyer persona to map the behavior of loyalists and find whitespaces in mass market.

5. Designed the Questionnaire

   Translated the hypothesis and analytical model into a questionnaire that suited both

   data gathering and a future integration into the internal business systems and CRM.

6. Data gathering, analytics, and recommendations

   Gathered data and created a brand report with recommendations and explanations for brand development, internal integration setup, and archetype development.

Forming the hypotheses first. Before writing a single survey question, I worked through where Houdini’s opportunity and risk most likely sat: product, price, positioning, or simply reach. This wasn’t guesswork; it was a structured hypothesis built from category logic, competitor context, and Houdini’s own market position, designed specifically so the study could prove or disprove it rather than create a story afterward.

Designing the analytic model. A pile of attribute scores tells you very little on its own. I

designed a Brand Strength Matrix, plotting how Houdini performs on each attribute

against how much that attribute actually drives brand preference, so the output would be a prioritized action list (reinforce / monitor / improve), not a spreadsheet of averages.

Developing the archetype hypothesis. I proposed a three-archetype consumer

segmentation, built on motivation rather than demographics, before any fieldwork existed. This meant the questionnaire could be engineered from the start to test whether the archetypes were real and where Houdini’s actual customers sat within them.

Designing the questionnaire. Every hypothesis and model above had to survive.

translation into questions a real person could answer in one sitting. I mapped them onto the ten-pillar architecture described, then wrote and sequenced the actual questions—

balancing depth against respondent fatigue.

Fielding, analysis, and synthesis. I oversaw fieldwork through a nationally representative panel (1,049 respondents, balanced on gender, age, income and geography, fielded May–June 2026), then ran the full analysis: scoring the matrix, validating the archetypes against the data, and synthesizing into a set of prioritized, actionable recommendations.

Complexity is the enemy of action. Nine functional attributes, nine emotional attributes,

six brands, three archetypes, the raw output could easily have become a 60-page report nobody used.

The matrix and the archetype model existed specifically to force that volume of data into a small number of clear priorities.

The Result HOUDINI: Building a Brand Strength Matrix From the Ground Up

The project delivered a strategic foundation of where the Houdini brand stands, strengths and weaknesses in attributes compared with key competitors, drivers and barriers for consumption, consumer personas, and archetypes. Replacing an internal belief with a structured, defensible model:

• A validated three-tier market map, showing exactly where Houdini sits relative to mass-market and aspirational competitors.

  
  

• A Brand Strength Matrix, giving the brand team a ranked, prioritised list of what to reinforce, monitor and improve, reusable as a framework for future studies and own D2C tracking, not a one-time snapshot.

  
  

• A validated three-archetype segmentation model, tested and confirmed against real data, giving Houdini a shared language for talking about its consumer base strategically and identifying whitespaces.

  
  

• A set of prioritized strategic recommendations, translating the analysis directly into direction for brand, commercial, and marketing decisions, not just findings, but recommendations for the next step and growth.

  
  

• A file of raw data to integrate into internal business systems for continuous tracking and analysis compared with own D2C data. 

Beyond the specific deliverables, the project produced something Above the Clouds carries forward: a proven method for building analytic models and an archetype framework and turning a wide, open brief into a tool a brand team can use.

Above the Clouds designs the research foundation, analytic models, and consumer

archetypes behind brand strategy turning insight into direction that teams can act on.

What i Do and How i Work