How Hopeful Monsters built four Gen Z personas that held up in quant

That’s how Hopeful Monsters’ client described the work.

Hopeful Monsters is an independent creative agency in Sydney that helps brands keep up with shifts in culture. They were building a refreshed brand strategy for a client around its Gen Z customer: women aged 18 to 24 in Australia, the UK and the US. The brand already knew what these women buy. What it wanted to know was why. What matters to them, how they see themselves, and what they look for in a brand.

“When it comes to research, speaking to real people is a non-negotiable for us, but we struggled to capture voices beyond our network within tight timelines,” said Tiff Seeto, Strategist at Hopeful Monsters. “Traditional qual would have taken weeks to recruit and run, and guerrilla research only got us so far.”

Before Juno, qual at Hopeful Monsters meant whoever the team could reach. Family, friends, friends of friends, neighbours, ex-colleagues, people in the building. Or heading out to streets, supermarkets, shopping centres and uni campuses to stop people for a chat.

“It was pretty scrappy and often fun, but super time consuming, hard to scale, and our sample always skewed towards people who looked a bit like us,” Tiff said.

“Juno promised us depth at speed, and the team’s approach to research aligned with our own, so we gave it a go.”

Juno ran in-depth interviews with women aged 18 to 24 across all three markets: customers and people considering the brand, from a spread of backgrounds, locations and lifestyles.

This was exploratory work. The team didn’t want to check what it already assumed. It wanted to find out what matters to these women, which meant letting them lead.

Juno doesn’t use a script. It starts from what the study needs to learn, then follows the person. Interviews began with ordinary things: a good week, what they’re working toward, who they spend their time with. When an answer opened something up, Juno went after it.

Here’s one exchange, mid-conversation with a participant in the UK:

Tiff saw that quality of conversation across the whole study. What surprised her most was how engaged people were. “That’s a testament to how Juno runs interviews: it ladders questions in a way that keeps conversations flowing and interesting, and it doesn’t feel like you’re talking to a robot, which makes all the difference when it’s trying to uncover the messy, human truths that drive behaviour.”

It also solved the problem she started with. “It’s like having a skilled qual moderator on call who can run dozens of in-depth interviews at once (a unicorn),” she said. “You get the richness of one-on-one conversations without all the recruitment headaches, scheduling, or limits of your own network. It also frees you up to spend your time on what matters, which is finding the insight.”

The interviews gave Hopeful Monsters enough nuance to hypothesise four distinct personas, defined by mindset rather than shopping habits. Those personas were later put through quantitative research, and they held up with minimal to no adjustments.

For a strategy team, that’s the test that matters. A read from qual that the numbers then confirm.

Their client was blown away.

“For a strategist,” Tiff said, “it doesn’t get much better than that.”