Making A Material Difference

Becoming a global leader in customer experience transformation

Since its founding nearly 50 years ago, LRW (originally known as Lieberman Research Worldwide) was at the vanguard of the consumer insights industry, helping many of the world’s biggest brands solve some of their toughest challenges.

Thanks to the company’s innovative thinking and methodologies, we were able to keep a pulse on consumers, culture, and the marketplace better than most. Of course, this also meant we had a deeper understanding of how relationships between businesses and their customers were changing — and would continue to change.

Once, brands determined what (and how) people wanted to buy. Soon, however, consumers would dictate how brands needed to serve them. Rapidly advancing technology was making it not only possible, but inevitable.

We could see that these brands — spanning every imaginable industry and geography, and many of them already our clients — would need a different kind of partner to help them achieve new levels of customer centricity. It was a matter of survival. And so we began our own evolution to become a global customer experience transformation company.

Expanding our capabilities

First, that meant deepening our expertise across qualitative research, social listening, digital analytics, and more — a feat we achieved through the acquisitions of Tonic, MotiveQuest, and Greenberg. By bringing these three agencies into the LRW fold, we were able to expand an already comprehensive suite of insights capabilities.

But that only got us halfway there. To become the new kind of company we were striving to be, we knew we needed to integrate a family of renowned strategy, technology, CX, marketing, and design firms. And so over the course of the next several years, we did exactly that, joining forces with Strativity (customer experience consulting), Kelton Global (insights, brand, and strategy consulting), T3 (loyalty, innovation, digital marketing, and product design), Salt (brand strategy and brand design), Karma (communications and public relations), Killer Visual Strategies (visual communication and graphic design), and Aruliden (digital and product design).

With the combined expertise and offerings of these industry-leading consultancies and agencies, we quickly became capable of delivering the kinds of solutions we knew our clients needed. From insights to action, we could now build truly transformational customer experiences.

Creating a new identity

Of course, our evolution demanded an evolved identity. No longer only an insights firm, a new company name and brand presented opportunities to signal our expanded expertise. Our creatives set to work — and delivered Material.

Overlapping layers of content bring materiality to our design language, tying our name to our brand expression, while the chosen color palette carries a vibrant energy and references the diverse skills we bring to the table.

In other words, the new-look company embodies the literal meaning of /məˈtirēəl/ — the matter from which a thing is or can be made. It’s reminiscent of building blocks or sticky notes, the starting components of larger structures and ideas — and an acknowledgement of where we began as a dozen separate entities. It’s a confident, elevated brand that empowers those who see it and use it, a visual beacon for people looking to build with us into the future.

Looking forward

The beautiful thing about evolution? It never ends.

Whether we’re designing new products for Google or guiding Yamaha through a comprehensive digital transformation, our goal is to help the clients we serve to stop simply hunting transactions and start building brands that play an ever-present role in the lives of their customers. Our world-class teams are prepared to innovate ever better ways to make this happen.

We’re looking forward to the future. Meet you there?