Using Curious COMPASS™ to uncover hidden growth opportunities in a changing patient landscape

The challenge

The client wanted to better understand how people were experiencing, talking about and managing a sleep apnoea, a common but under‑recognised condition in two major European markets.

Despite strong clinical evidence and established treatment pathways, diagnosis rates remained stubbornly low among some groups. Their hypothesis was that women were underdiagnosed, and were interested in how to better engage them. The client needed clarity about how they were showing up online, what other brands in the category were doing, customer personas, and where growth would really come from, not just today, but over the next few years.

This meant uncovering not just behaviours, but emotions, language, and unmet needs across patients, partners, and healthcare pathways.

They also needed insight that could be used day‑to‑day by e-commerce, communications and brand teams, rather than a static research report.

Our approach

We used Curious COMPASS™ , our proprietary insight tool, to map the lived experience of the condition by analysing owned channels, social platforms, forums, search behaviour and wider cultural trends.

COMPASS allowed us to:

• Map how the client and their competitors were showing up online: from their owned content, through to how stakeholders talked about them
• Build a fully rounded patient persona, grounded in real conversations, behaviours and unmet needs
• Find clear evidence that women were being under‑diagnosed and under‑served, partly driven by their own perceptions that sleep apnoea was more common among men, and society’s expectations of women.
• Identify performance and lifestyle‑driven language, particularly among younger people reframing the condition as a threat to energy, cognition and productivity

The results

The COMPASS™  analysis surfaced several insights that challenged existing assumptions:

• Younger audiences are driving a performance trend, talking less about classic symptoms of sleep apnoea, and more about “brain fog”, focus, burnout and optimisation
• Social platforms such as TikTok and Instagram are becoming primary spaces for discovery, normalisation and peer‑to‑peer advice
• Women account for a significant proportion of the potential customer, yet are still more likely to be misdiagnosed or diagnosed later
• Patients actively seek comfort, aesthetic, and lifestyle improvements beyond what reimbursement covers.

One of the strongest outputs was a high‑resolution persona that brought together clinical reality with social pressure, stigma, convenience and willingness to self‑fund solutions. This gave the client a shared, human reference point for decision‑making across teams.

Crucially, these findings weren’t abstract. They were translated into practical, persona‑led opportunities the client could act on immediately.

What this shows

When used well, insight isn’t just about understanding the market, it’s about changing how teams think and act every day.

Curious COMPASS™  goes beyond traditional desk research by combining cultural intelligence, behavioural insight and strategic interpretation. The result is clarity: who matters most, what’s changing fastest, and where meaningful growth and impact really sit.

For this client, COMPASS™  reframed the conversation, from a condition defined by age and gender to one shaped by performance, identity, quality of life, and overlooked audience