What really appeals about Motives is the ability to talk to people inthe moment of usage - because then you get unfettered, unfiltered,emotional reactions."— James Mackenzie, Head of Insight, PZ Cussons
Background
PZ Cussons is the group behind some of the UK's best-loved personal care brands, including Original Source, Carex, Child’s Farm, and St. Tropez. Among the studies they've run through Motives, their work on St. Tropez's self tan range is a particularly good example of what real-time research can unlock. Self tan is an intimate category: people use it alone, in their bedrooms, as part of a private routine they may rarely talk about openly. Asking them about that experience in a focus group, surrounded by strangers, is not often the most effective approach. James MacKenzie, PZ Cussons’ Head of Insight came to Motives for help.
The challenge: you can't bring a bathroom to a boardroom
For a brand like St. Tropez, understanding how and why people use self tan, and what frustrates them about it, is critical. But the experience is intimate. People apply it alone, at night, in their own space. That context disappears the moment you put people in a room together.
Take overnight tanning. Consumers apply the product in the evening, they may sleep in older pyjamas to avoid staining, and wake up to mixed results. Understanding the frustrations and workarounds that come with that routine requires people to open up about something quite personal. In a group setting, with strangers, that rarely happens naturally.
Then there's the process itself. From drafting a discussion guide to recruiting participants across the UK, running interviews, and presenting findings, a traditional qual project could easily take six weeks. As James puts it: "Businesses don't work at that speed."
The solution: real-time, AI-moderated research
Motives ran the study for PZ Cussons in just four days from start to finish. Speaking at the MRS Annual Conference 2026, James explained what that looks like in practice:
The Motives AI Moderator spoke to people one-on-one in their own homes. The lack of a human moderator or other focus group participants meant no social pressure, no fear of judgment, and no subtle cues about what the "right" answer might be.
The research gave the St. Tropez team something they couldn't get from quant alone: a clear sense of emotional intensity.
"What is great about seeing people's emotional reactions is what you don't see in the quant work. You might ask somebody to talk about their functional needs or emotional needs. But you don't see how much they like a part of it, or how much they really hate a part of it. And when you see that emotion, that helps you prioritize the solutions that you have to talk about in the marketing execution."
Consumer language captured in the interviews is now being used to shape product and range names, using the words real people reach for rather than internal shorthand. The team also has a clearer picture of the pain points that matter most at shelf, and can speak to retailers about them with evidence.
When it comes to presenting those findings internally, the video format makes a real difference too.
"What is really useful is the ability to take those snippets and drop them into presentations. There's a world of difference between putting a verbatim in and showing the video clip. Because actually when you show the video clip, you don't have to do any work as an insight person, the person on the screen is doing all the work for you, and they're really talking genuinely."
Motives' Ask the Researcher feature, which lets clients query all of the interview transcripts using AI, meant the study didn't end when the interviews did.
"Not only did we get that insight quicker, we got a richness of open and honest response because people weren't speaking to a human. And the ability to go back into each one of those interviews and ask the researcher more and more probing questions outside of the generated summaries meant we kept going back to the source material time and again, and even now, three months afterwards, we're still going back."
What changed internally
The impact went beyond a single project. It changed how insight works across the whole organization.
With traditional agency research, a polished deck lands in an inbox and gets filed away. With Motives, the source material stays accessible and alive. At PZ Cussons, marketing, product, and R&D teams have all gone back to this study months after it wrapped.
James sees this as a shift in ownership. When a team owns the insight directly, rather than receiving it second-hand through a presentation, they engage with it differently. They reference it in meetings, bring it into conversations, and apply it with more confidence.
"The rising tide lifts all boats," he says. "It's not about, ‘Do I have a better insight team?’ It's ‘Can I enable the business to be better at insight?’"
The bigger picture
For James, this self-tanning project is one example of a broader shift in how PZ Cussons approaches consumer understanding. The brands in their portfolio sit in some of the most personal spaces in people's lives. Getting genuine insight from those spaces used to mean compromise on depth, speed, or both.
Motives changed that equation. The research is faster, the responses are more honest, and the insight stays useful long after the project closes.
"It's dynamic," James says. "It's not a static presentation of fact and opinion."
PZ Cussons is a global consumer goods company and the group behind brands including St. Tropez, Carex, Original Source, and Child’s Farm.
