What we do

The world is an increasingly complex place, and finding clarity requires a broader skill set, and a more nuanced and holistic approach than ever before. There are simply no one-size-fits-all solutions any more. It takes experience, expertise and agility to know how and where to look for insight, and how best to apply it.

This is what The Navigators do. We draw on a range of skills, and skilled people, to partner with clients to achieve their aims. Our difference is that we start with the end in mind and shape our offering to your brief.

It’s our ability to combine elements of our 3 core offerings that allow us to find clarity in an increasingly complex world.

RESEARCH & ANALYTICS

CONSULTING & STRATEGY

SOFTWARE & SYSTEMS

When problems arise or opportunities appear, it's vital to know how best to tackle them, overcome them, or take advantage of them. With insights based on evidence, and ideas drawn from data, we can work with you to develop a strategy you can feel confident in.

• Lean Start Up / Minimal Viable Products
• Customer Journey Mapping
• Behaviour Change
• Decision Architecture
• Marketing Planning

Sometimes the problem is not that you don't have the data you need, but that you don't have the means of extracting the information from it. We can supply or build the technological solutions needed to make your data have a genuine impact on your success.

• Dashboards
• Online Reporting
• Customer Feedback Systems
• Knowledge-sharing Extranets
• Custom-built Software Solutions

The Navigators are a handpicked family of specialist consultants – all with an impressive track record and depth of expertise in their field.

When you engage us, we build a bespoke team of Navigators with the range of skills that can uncover the insights, evidence or ideas needed to achieve your objective.

CECILE THORNLEY
Director - AusTRALIA

A marketing and research consultant
with an eye for detail and a mind for
the big-picture.  Cecile has an international reputation for customer insight, solving tough business problems and providing clients with clarity of advice and certainty about what to do next.  She’s also an avid adventurer and traveller who knows exactly what to do if you stumble across an elephant or stand on a stingray.

PENNY TURNER
DIRECTOR - New zealand

A passionate interpreter of words and numbers. Penny gets most excited when she can shed new light on big client problems. Both clever and committed, she is relentless in bringing clarity to complexity.  

DEAN HARRIS
DIRECTOR - AUSTRALIA

A researcher, data scientist and entrepreneur with qualifications in cognitive psychology.  Dean’s perennially involved in helping organisations use evidence and insight to create better outcomes. He’s a little too fond of sport, enthusiastic about music but devoid of talent, doesn’t know much about art, but knows what he likes, is engaged and enraged by politics and cares more about his family than all of the above.

MATT BENSON
DIRECTOR - New Zealand

An insights and strategy consultant who loves drawing straight bright lines through big messy problems. Committed to connecting, curating and concocting.  As a long-time rock guitarist and groover on the dance floor, Matt knows a thing or two about entertaining a crowd.

TESTIMONIAL: TOYOTA

“The Retail Development Division (RDD) of Toyota Australia works in partnership with dealerships to optimise retail performance and constantly improve the return to Toyota Dealers and the Corporation. RDD uses data to understand opportunities for improvement and to monitor the success of improvements to systems and processes.

The Navigators created a powerful online reporting system that provides everyone from Sales Managers on dealership floors, to senior management in Toyota Australia, with timely and actionable insights.

The Navigators have been a pleasure to work with. Their flexibility, business-minded professionalism, and creative approach to solving our data analysis, reporting and delivery challenges will create great value for Toyota and its dealerships into the future.”

Corporate Manager – Retail Development
Toyota Motor Corporation Australia

TESTIMONIAL: LEXUS

“We found ourselves in a situation where we were inundated with a disjointed collection of data, reports, research and measures. We needed to tie all this information together to obtain a simple, relevant and timely understanding of our performance in executing marketing activities, the impact we were having in the market, and ultimately on the value in the Lexus business overall.

The Navigators helped create a framework that does all of this. Equally importantly, they have helped our internal and agency teams adopt a discipline around marketing measurement that will yield powerful new insights and improve the return on marketing investments in the future.”

Corporate Manager
Lexus Australia Marketing

TESTIMONIAL: UNILEVER

“The Navigators undertook a challenging assignment to help our business reach a decision about whether to reinvest in a category – and how to execute a strategy that would deliver a sufficient return on that reinvestment.

 They wholly exceeded our expectations with their thorough, thoughtful and professional approach. They extracted great value from our existing market intelligence, and filled critical information gaps, enabling them to offer clarity through their understanding of our business and the market.

They also demonstrated a high level of strategic thinking and business acumen in relation to the plan and business case, and worked with our people in a collaborative and dedicated manner.”

VP Marketing
Unilever ANZ

TESTIMONIAL: INSTITUTE OF CHARTERED ACCOUNTANTS AUSTRALIA

“The Institute of Chartered Accountants Australia (ICAA) has been conducting brand tracking research for several years. Following a refresh of our brand strategy, we felt it was appropriate to review how we were measuring the equity of our brand. 

The Navigators were able to recommend and deploy an approach that gave our organisation an improved understanding of the equity of the ICAA. 

Their approach yielded actionable new insights, and gave us a basis for building an even more valuable brand in the coming years. We value their deep experience, and their ability to understanding our business problem and bring relevant and effective research solutions to the table.”

General Manager Sales & Marketing
The Institute of Chartered Accountants Australia

TESTIMONIAL: AUSTRALIAN HEALTH MANAGEMENT

“The Navigators worked to deliver great insight, and helped our business make a critical decision about the repositioning of our brand. They identified what market intelligence was required, worked quickly to obtain it, and extracted great value from it in a very short time-frame.

They understood our business and the decision we needed to make. They demonstrated that they think strategically about brands, businesses and marketing, and used data in a very clear and focused manner to address our business problem.”

Head of Marketing
AHM

TESTIMONIAL: PRINCIPALS BRANDING AGENCY

“The Navigators are our partners of choice for brand analytics. They have a talent for drawing a story out of data and sharing it with teams in fresh and impactful ways that point to action.

In fast-changing markets, timely customer and brand analysis can help drive competitive advantage, but too often marketers feel overwhelmed rather than enlightened by data. In our experience, The Navigators can really help to join the dots between diverse data sets, customer insight and brand success.”

Planning Director
Principals

TESTIMONIAL: BRAMBLES

“Brambles is a global provider of handling and storage logistics services and has engaged The Navigators on several occasions to assist with with conducting strategic brand research among customers and potential customers.  The work undertaken by The Navigators has been of a high degree of difficulty, requiring many discussions with senior business decision makers in global markets across a wide range of industries.  It has also required the experienced, no-nonsense and pragmatic commercial approach which characterises The Navigators team.  On each occasion, The Navigators has completed this work with respect for the sensitivity of the engagement and delivered insightful observations with clear recommendations to the very highest levels of management within Brambles.” 

Group Manager
Strategy & Planning for Brambles Limited

TESTIMONIAL: PLUNKET

We started this journey looking for ways to grow donor support for Plunket.  I was impressed at how quickly they absorbed a lot of detail about our [complex] organisation. Right off the bat The Navigators asked some really important questions that changed our thinking and the direction of our focus.  They understood the challenges and provided a simple, clear work plan that made it easy to bring internal stakeholders on board.

The Navigators were a real pleasure to work with.  They had a flexible approach and tailored the project to suit our needs. They led us through an insights process that allowed us to reflect on our purpose and to deeply understand how we were delivering value to the families we work with, our commercial partners and our donors. 

The brand and experience frameworks they used created a new way for us to see our purpose and to communicate and deliver experiences more aligned to who we are and who we aspire to be.

Their regular presentations were insightful and helped keep the wider team engaged throughout.

Beni Berryman
Marketing Manager

TESTIMONIAL: NZ Transport Agency

“NZTA had made a commitment to identify and act on road user insights, however we needed a process to connect a wide range of customer and operational data, and to mine it for insights and turn it into real initiatives.  The Navigators worked with a cross functional team over a series of workshops to conduct analysis, experience mapping, and rapid idea generation.  The result was a set of customer centric initiatives and process improvements that is helping us drive greater value out of the data collation and insight generation process.”

Mark McCann
Customer Development Manager

TESTIMONIAL: Callaghan Innovation

“Callaghan Innovation wanted to understand how it was perceived by its stakeholders and how to improve our relationships with them. The Navigators played a key part in this work, including in survey design, implementation and reporting. The project gave us some really good insights into the state of our stakeholder relationships. We were very happy with both the results and the experience of working with The Navigators.”

Tane Aikman
Communications Specialist