They’re built on behavioural mechanisms you can observe and repeat – how identity forms, how habits get hijacked, how tribes recognise their own, how rituals take hold, how brand assets get encoded into culture.
Our methodology is grounded in this science. The Behaviour Lab is where we keep extending it – our in-house research unit, run with UK universities and postgraduate researchers, where we test the academic foundations of our work and develop the frameworks and models we use with clients.
The Behaviour Lab is led by Dr Andrew Lumsden-Groom, Managing Partner at 181st Street and the agency’s behavioural economist. Andrew holds a DSocSci in Sociopolitical Economics and Rhetoric, helped shape the now-mainstream seven-tier class system, and was named the world’s #17 performance marketer in Performance Marketing World’s Power 100 (2025).
Working in partnership with leading UK universities keeps the Lab’s work academically current and lets us train our own behavioural scientists from the ground up. This gives our clients direct access to research and rigour most agencies simply can’t offer.
When we tell a founder their identity gap should be located here rather than there, the answer is grounded in the Lab’s primary research, not a hunch. When we recommend a neotribal targeting strategy, the model behind it has been pressure-tested.