For the past couple of years, BBH USA’s Silent Spenders initiative has sought to understand high value audiences that brands often miss.

This year, the project, supported by Shape Insight, looked to focus on understanding people with ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder).

The research identified how brands can better serve ADHD audiences. But also shed light on how we need to re-shape the norms of research for researching – the ever growing – ADHD audience in the future.

Do your research before you do your research

Silent Spenders 2026 initially hoped to focus on a broader audience – people classified as neurodivergent. However, we felt that different forms of neurodiversity would have different relationships with brands, and that it’d be best to focus on a specific form of neurodivergence.

To test this hypothesis, we created a community which we invited people with all forms of neurodiversity to. After discussing our community’s relationship with brands, we quickly had our hypothesis confirmed and decided to focus on understanding people with ADHD.

Be flexible

We had initially planned to use our community discussions purely to inform later stages of research, but the discussions were so insightful that we pivoted and decided that there was value in keeping the community live for the duration of the project. There were two main reasons for doing this: firstly, as each day passed our community was becoming more engaged. We suspected that this engagement would increase even further when we started sharing insights with them – which in turn would cause the community to be more insightful as we progressed.

Secondly, we felt that the community were enjoying the discussions and that they valued the insight into how other people with ADHD thought and behaved.

Re-shape the norms of asking questions

The discussions on our ongoing community also made us conscious that we’d need to adapt how we had qualitative conversations with our ADHD interview participants.

We decided that it was best to shift away from direct questioning, and instead use questioning that was reflective and projective, because direct questioning puts heavy demands on the cognitive functions that ADHD affects most.

For example, a question like ‘why did you do that?’ requires holding the question in working memory, retrieving memories, evaluating them and organising a response. For people with ADHD, this risked testing their working memory, and if we tested it too much, we’d risk making the interview an uncomfortable experience.   

Conversely, reflective questioning that involves playing back what someone has said helps by putting less pressure on working memory. Additionally, a projective technique helps by reducing any anxiety regarding self-disclosure.

Give up control of the interview

In our interviews, we wanted to let the participants control the pace of the discussion, to ensure that we didn’t ask questions that had an excessive cognitive load. We also wanted our participants to feel like it was a conversation, so we didn’t risk an interview feeling like an interrogation – because doing so would be both uncomfortable and not insightful.

Build a continuous feedback loop

Because our community was so engaged, and because we wanted to make sure we were interpreting our results accurately, we used the community as on ongoing feedback loop at the following stages:

• After our qualitative interviews/before our quantitative survey – to ensure our qual-to-quant translation was accurate and fair
• To test our core insights – to be confident ADHD people felt this fairly reflected them
• To make sure our insight content was designed and communicated appropriately – so our communication style would resonate with ADHD audiences.

At each of these stages, we asked for our community’s feedback, adapted our thinking, re-adjusted our next step and executed it. We repeated.

The benefits of doing this were twofold. Firstly, we had the confidence our interpretations and representations of the ADHD audience were accurate and representative. Secondly, doing so gave ADHD people insight into how people like themselves thought and behaved. And in doing so helped reduce the extent to which they internalised shame or anxiety about being non-typical.

What we learned has three core implications for researchers more broadly.

1. Never assume you know about a silent audience

The Silent Spenders research team included people with ADHD. But what we quickly learned is that even this wouldn’t have been sufficient to have effectively designed a relevant and specific approach to understanding the wider ADHD audience. That’s because people who work in marketing are different. Or in Andrew Tenzer’s words, “have a different moral framework to the mainstream.”

2. Too often, research is one and done

We need to be better at feeding back to the consumer groups we speak too and getting their thoughts on our work. Especially when they’re silent audiences who have been under-researched. By doing so, we can create research approaches which are more relevant and insightful. While showing them that you’re taking the time to tailor your ways of working to their unique needs.

3. Silent Spenders are valuable research participants

Often research samples live and die by being representative. Much of the time, that’s appropriate, but there are instances where that isn’t fit for purpose – like innovation research, or concept or creative development.In these instances, we’re often looking for new perspectives; chances for differentiation. We’re more likely to get these from people who think differently to the norm. And such people are often Silent Spenders. So, let’s give these once silent audiences a chance to be heard. By definition, they can provide a new view of what we’re researching.

Alex Holmes is director at Shape Insight

A note on methodology: The 2026 Silent Spenders project, supported by Shape Insight, aimed to understand people with ADHD. The research involved:

•       An ongoing community discussion
•       10 x ethnographic interviews
•       A quantitative survey with n=500 people with ADHD and a nationally representative sample of n=1,500