1. Challenge: Making cessation feel personal and achievable
- The Problem:
Truth Initiative needed to make the experience of quitting nicotine feel relatable and human, especially for youth and young adults. Traditional research didn’t always surface the emotional depth behind quitting journeys. - Knit’s Solution:
Knit’s video-based qualitative research allowed respondents to speak candidly and comfortably from their own space — capturing authentic, self-reflective narratives that brought the quitting journey to life.
“It makes quitting nicotine feel more accessible and achievable… viewers can see themselves in those stories.”
— Sarah Freeark, Director of Brand Marketing at the truth initiative.
2. Challenge: Eliciting honest, vulnerable responses from young audiences
- The Problem:
In focus groups, peer pressure and self-consciousness often prevented young participants from opening up about personal struggles with nicotine. - Knit’s Solution:
Knit allowed respondents to privately record videos on their phones — an interface they’re already comfortable with. This removed social barriers and led to more emotional and revealing responses.
“They don’t have to worry about who's in the room… we’ve seen powerful self-realization in the responses.”
3. Challenge: Representing diverse voices at scale
- The Problem:
Truth Initiative needed to go beyond small focus groups to hear from a broader, more diverse set of youth and young adult voices. - Knit’s Solution:
Knit provided large-scale respondent pools, enabling rapid collection of hundreds of videos — even among hard-to-reach groups like 15–17-year-olds — through self-recorded video surveys.
“The accessibility of the platform allowed us to hear from more young people… who might have been harder to engage in traditional research.”
4. Challenge: Synthesizing open-ended responses efficiently
- The Problem:
Manually coding focus group transcripts and open-ended survey responses was labor-intensive and slow, delaying insights needed for time-sensitive creative development. - Knit’s Solution:
Knit’s AI tools automatically analyzed hundreds of videos, surfaced key themes, and grouped them by emotion, sentiment, or demographic — dramatically reducing time-to-insight.
“We can take hundreds of videos and very quickly summarize them to pull out those trends and themes.”
5. Challenge: Moving quickly without sacrificing depth
- The Problem:
With campaigns evolving quickly, Truth Initiative needed rapid insights that still delivered emotional nuance — something traditional research timelines couldn’t support. - Knit’s Solution:
Knit turned around qual and quant results within 48–72 hours, offering AI-generated summaries and full dashboards that could be used for quick decision-making or deeper storytelling.
“Instead of 500 videos and hours ahead of me… the tool can point me in the right direction and guide through those results in a meaningful way.”
6. Challenge: Connecting quant and qual to build actionable stories
- The Problem:
Truth Initiative wanted to tie emotional insights to real data — making it easier to validate and scale what they were learning from individuals. - Knit’s Solution:
Knit seamlessly combined quantitative survey data with qualitative video, allowing researchers to filter videos by response types, behaviors, and demographics — creating a richer, more holistic story.
“We can cross-section open responses by nicotine use status or demographic… to find little kernels of truth that show up in our creative.”
7. Challenge: Balancing research depth with limited team bandwidth
- The Problem:
Truth Initiative’s team needed deep insights but couldn’t always dedicate the time to manually build stories or comb through every response. - Knit’s Solution:
Knit offered both a DIY AI tool and access to a Managed Services team — enabling researchers to explore themes independently, while also tapping experts to produce stakeholder-ready reports.
“I spend time in the platform to understand directionally where to go… then collaborate with managed services to build the report I can bring to stakeholders.”
