How Cotton On’s insights team used Juno to hear from parents in two markets

Before Cotton On committed to anything, Nicola, the group’s Insights Manager, sat down for a Juno interview herself. As the participant.

“What surprised me was how well it probed beyond my initial answers and uncovered attitudes I hadn’t consciously recognised,” she said. “That gave me confidence in its ability to surface the emotional and sometimes irrational drivers of behaviour that are often hard to capture through surveys alone.”

Cotton On’s insights team already had the craft. What they wanted was reach: hearing from more customers, more often, without growing the team at the same pace. A colleague recommended Juno, and Nicola wanted to know whether AI-moderated interviews could support the research program the team already ran.

The team put Juno to work on Cotton On Kids. In Australia, the question was why some once-loyal families had drifted away from the brand. In the US, a newer market, it was whether Cotton On Kids could win over parents who might never have heard of it.

Both are open, exploratory questions, the kind qualitative research is built for and the kind that’s hard to run at reach. Juno shaped each study with the team, then ran the interviews in each market, following every parent’s reasoning wherever it went.

“It’s not a replacement for researchers,” Nicola said, “but a way to gather deeper customer perspectives from more people, more quickly, allowing researchers to spend more time interpreting insights and driving action.”

That’s how Juno is meant to sit in an insights team. It works like an extra researcher who takes on the interviewing at scale, so the insights team spends its time on what the findings mean and what to do about them.