“My camera is a bit big, so the phone does the job.”
Woman, 20s, São Paulo · focus group on camcorders, 2010 · read what happened next
That was said in a São Paulo focus group in 2010, as an aside, while the discussion was about which camcorder to buy. Brazil rarely reveals itself in an answer. It reveals itself in the aside. We have been listening here since 1980 — and we bring the numbers back with the story.
Ethnography · Interviews
Surveys · Data science
EN · ES · PT
The whole study, or the part you can't run from abroad
Some clients hand us the entire project. Others already have the design and need a partner who can actually find the right people in Brazil and sit in their living room. Both work. Quoted in USD, itemized.
Participant recruitment
Consumer and B2B, screened against real criteria — from category users to professional profiles nobody else can reach. Screening documents shared before fieldwork.
Ethnography and in-context research
In-home visits, shop-alongs, immersion. Read through anthropology and psychology, not just observed.
In-depth interviews and focus groups
Online and in person, moderated in Portuguese with simultaneous translation to English or Spanish. You watch live if you want.
Fieldwork coordination
Logistics, incentives, consent, quality control — across regions and social classes that behave like different countries.
Quantitative surveys
Questionnaire design, collection and statistical analysis to size what the qualitative work uncovered.
Data science and AI-assisted analysis
Big data, modelling and AI-supported synthesis of transcripts — faster reading of large material, with human judgement on top.
Where we already know the terrain
Categories we have run fieldwork in, repeatedly. Where a study touches sensitive ground — money, body, health — the difference between a good and a useless interview is entirely in who is asking.
Financial products
Digital wallets, crypto exchanges, cards and credit, small business banking. Qualitative and quantitative studies with consumers and executives.
Health, wellbeing and quality of life
Patients, caregivers and physicians — including chronic treatment adherence and stigma. An open interest of ours: how weight-loss injectables are reshaping food, body image and secrecy in Brazil.
Food, drink and CPG
Concept and product tests, snacking, hydration, flavour and blends. Decades of category work, from launch to repositioning.
Streaming and entertainment
Viewing habits, subscription trade-offs and major live events — studies run for global platforms through partner agencies.
Retail and shopper
Shopping journeys, in-store observation, assortment and channel behaviour across formats.
Public and social research
Public bodies, universities and multilateral programmes — impact evaluation, opinion and satisfaction studies.
Anthropology and physics at the same table
Most partners give you either the human reading or the numbers. We are a small firm, which means the person who sat in the interview is the person who writes the analysis — and the person modelling the data was in the same project, not in another building.
Marilene has been doing research in Brazil since 1980. Bruno is a physicist turned data scientist. That combination is unusual, and it shows up in the work: cultural reading that doesn't flatten people into segments, and measurement that doesn't pretend a sample of twelve is a market.
International agencies have come back to us for nearly twenty years. Usually because a study needed something a remote team simply cannot do from abroad.
Brief to insight, without friction
Proposals in USD, itemized by line — recruitment, incentives, moderation, translation. Payment usually 50% at kickoff, 50% at 30 days.
Brief
Send us a written brief: the business question, the target profile and the timeline. We read it before we talk, and come back with questions if anything is open.
Proposal
Transparent, line-by-line quote in USD — typically within days, in your language.
Field
Recruitment, moderation and coordination by our own team. Live viewing, daily updates, no black box.
Insight
From raw transcripts and data to a full strategic report — you choose how far we take it.
Two generations, one method
Marilene Golfette
Psychologist trained at the University of São Paulo, in research since 1980 — starting with IBGE census fieldwork, then consulting projects at FIA and FIPE-USP. Three decades leading ethnographies, in-depth interviews and focus groups for Brazilian and international clients. She still moderates.
Bruno Golfette
Physicist turned data scientist, working with machine learning, big data and AI applied to consumer and market problems. Physics training shows up as discipline about sampling, error and bias — and as suspicion of any number without a method attached.
What we publish
A study is a photograph of a moment. The interesting question, years later, is what the photograph was already showing. We go back into three decades of dated transcripts and check — including where we were wrong. Always with the method attached: sample, period, and what the data cannot tell you.
In Brazil, money is something you learn not to show
They described the card as a security device before a status object. Eight years later, the transcripts read like a specification for what Brazilian payments became.
Archive · 2010 · methodThe answer was already in the room
Focus groups about camcorders. The sentence that ended the category was said that night, as an aside, and nobody wrote it down.
Archive · 2014 · health & wellbeingWe asked what the gym would look like in ten years
Owners and trainers predicted the next decade of fitness. Right about the mechanism, wrong about who it would hurt.
Planning a study in Brazil?
Send the brief. You get a clear, itemized proposal back — in English, Spanish or Portuguese.
email us