The solution to many marketing problems can be found in conversation with your consumer, your customers, your employees.  But too often, we decline to engage, or we ask the wrong questions.  

We believe in the power of that conversation, and in using the insights we glean to inform your marketing strategy.  We've done it for some of the biggest brands in the world, and some that weren't that big, but were really interesting.

How?  With face-to-face (F2F) and digital encounters with people where they live, so we can take in the context of their lives.

Hummingbirds are the over-achievers of the bird kingdom.  They flap their wings up to 200 times a second, fly at speeds up to 35 miles an hour, and use oxygen at 10X the rate of elite human athletes.  But they’re most fascinating without the math.  Just watch them when they’re after nectar -- hovering, dipping and drinking from hundreds of flowers a day.

It's what we aspire to do when consumers invite us into their lives.  In a short time, we get to understand them deeply, one after another.  Then we take what we've learned and develop deeply resonant ideas for our clients’ brands.  

We love people and we love finding out what they care about, what drives them, what gives them ecstatic joy and quiet contentment.  And when we get to know them in the context of their own lives, we uncover potential links between their passions and our brand clients’ offerings, links that are otherwise hidden from view. 

Hummingbird Strategy was founded by Michael Selz, who left the ad agency world in 2001 to help grow an ethnography startup -- HoundDog -- that developed a particular style of ethnography that broke all the usual rules about how a researcher is to behave in the field.  A style that works.

Since then, we've led projects in the US, Canada, Caribbean, Mexico, Brazil, Russia, China and Korea, and worked for CPG, retail and B-to-B brands including MillerCoors, Diageo, Brown-Forman, Kimberly-Clark, Mary Kay Cosmetics, Corner Bakery Cafe, Chili’s, TGI Friday’s, Del Taco, Dave & Buster’s, Gillette, Walmart, Network Solutions, The Great Courses, Unilever, Irving Oil, Frito-Lay, Pizza Hut, Coca-Cola, Dr Pepper Snapple, Southwest Airlines, Nestle, Dickies, Mission Foods and others.