Flume is an independent market research agency specialising in making brands easier to think of, buy, and use. Based in the UK and working with major grocery, food and beverage clients, they've built their practice around the principle that the best consumer insight comes from genuine engagement - not just a survey or a studio session, but an ongoing relationship with the people whose opinions actually drive business decisions.
For years they've relied on Qualzy as their qualitative research platform of choice, building research communities that reveal rich, real-time consumer insights for some of the UK's most significant food and drink brands. Their story offers a useful window into how a specialist independent agency uses online communities to deliver work that genuinely moves the needle for clients.
From face-to-face to online communities
The pandemic accelerated Flume's focus on remote and online research - as it did for most agencies - but their embrace of digital methods predates Covid. As the agency innovated to reduce reliance on traditional face-to-face interactions, their use of Qualzy expanded significantly. The result was faster review, faster analysis, faster delivery of results, and at lower cost than equivalent face-to-face programmes.
Debbie Newbould, Flume's Managing Director, describes the shift: "We have always tried to embrace new ways of doing things, and so have been advocates for online and digitally enabled research work for a long time. It doesn't replace face-to-face interactions, but it helps capture rich stories behind people's lives."
That distinction matters. For Flume, online communities aren't a cheaper substitute for what they'd prefer to do differently. They're a genuinely different and often superior way to access the texture of consumers' lives - their homes, their routines, their decisions as they actually happen rather than as they're recalled in a studio two weeks later.
Building communities their clients feel connected to
One of Flume's most effective uses of the platform is white-labelling - presenting the community to participants and clients under the client's own branding, so participants feel they're engaging directly with a brand they have a relationship with rather than a third-party research tool they've never heard of. This matters considerably for engagement quality and participant honesty.
The platform's intuitive interface has allowed Flume to recruit across a wide age range without losing response quality. As Newbould notes: "We have platform users aged from 17 to 70. Qualzy is so intuitive that we get fantastically rich content from them." That breadth is significant for FMCG and grocery research, where the consumer base spans generations with very different relationships to technology and digital communication.
End-to-end journey capture
What makes online research communities particularly powerful for Flume's clients is the ability to track the consumer journey in real time - not as a retrospective reconstruction, but as it actually unfolds. Participants can submit responses at the moment of purchase, at home when cooking, in a shop when browsing. The data reflects life as it's lived rather than as it's remembered.
Newbould describes the impact: "What I love about Qualzy is that you can capture a true end-to-end journey. It helps us bring our clients' customers to life, sharing their opinions about brands first-hand. It reveals quality intelligence that helps clients make business decisions confidently and turn our findings into action."
That phrase - "turn our findings into action" - captures what Flume is really selling. The research isn't an end in itself; it's a mechanism for change. The richness and immediacy of the data they gather via Qualzy makes that final step - from insight to decision - significantly more direct and more credible.
The result
Qualzy has enabled Flume to generate, analyse, and report valuable data in real time through online market research communities across the UK - helping the agency deliver for its grocery and FMCG clients at a pace and depth that wouldn't have been practical five years ago. The work has contributed to Flume receiving industry recognition for the quality of their research output.
For an independent agency competing for clients alongside much larger firms, the ability to run communities that feel premium, deliver rich data, and keep costs at a level that makes the projects commercially viable has been genuinely significant.
If you're an agency looking to build ongoing consumer insight communities for clients - or a brand team considering running your own - book a discovery call to see how Qualzy works in practice.
