Better known for its work with online communities, in creating Spirit Join the Dots will be able to work on multi-method projects. Spirit will combine mobile, ethnographic, communities, co-creation, accompanied shops and user testing.

Graeme Lawrence (pictured), director sales & marketing at Join the Dots said: “Spirit is the realisation of many years of great qualitative research and many highly skilled people at Join the Dots. This level of expertise deserves its own success story and Spirit encapsulates perfectly our qualitative offer – creative, courageous and clever.”

Spirit will operate from Join the Dots’ main office in Manchester, but will also service the Singapore office and all multinational clients. 

Separately, Join the Dots recently appointed ad veteran Leslie Butterfield CBE as non-executive chair of the board. Butterfield currently owns marketing, brand and innovation consultancy, Butterfield Harris, but prior to that he was global chief strategy officer for Interbrand, and has worked in a number of London-based advertising agencies.