Maine Insights Lab
Understanding What Makes Maine Think
When You Understand Your Audience, Every Message Works Harder. The Maine Insights Lab is the home for the thinking behind our thinking. It’s where decades of statewide marketing experience, real audience data, and sharp brand strategy come together to help Maine organizations understand how Mainers think, act, and decide.
Born from Sutherland Weston’s ongoing research and client work across the state, the Lab exists to give Maine’s business and community leaders something rare: clarity about their audiences.
Whether you’re marketing to visitors, residents, donors, or decision-makers, the Lab’s work helps you move past assumptions and toward insight, because knowing why people buy, believe, and behave the way they do is the key to more effective communication.
Maine may be one state, but it isn’t one mindset.
Across counties and communities, we see unique attitudinal patterns that influence how people respond to messages, make decisions, and engage with brands. Understanding Maine’s mindset differences helps leaders:
✓ Build trust with audiences who value local voice and credibility
✓ Avoid costly marketing misfires by aligning message & mindset
✓ Communicate with more authenticity and relevance
The Lab turns raw data and lived Maine experience into actionable guidance so your marketing doesn’t just sound local, it connects local.
From Insight → to Action
Here’s how we help you understand and engage Maine audiences
Quarterly Insight Briefs
Themed reports on what’s trending in Maine’s consumer and business landscape.
Custom Maine Mindset Briefings
Expert-led sessions that translate our Mindsets of Maine framework into practical guidance for leadership and marketing teams.
Insight Sprints
Fast, facilitated workshops that help teams apply data and research to real business challenges, from campaign direction to market expansion.
Market Readiness Assessments
Fast, facilitated workshops that help teams apply data and research to real business challenges, from campaign direction to market expansion.
As the Lab grows, it will serve as a resource and a partner for organizations ready to sharpen their understanding of Maine audiences, adding new ways to help businesses understand and engage with Maine’s ever-changing audiences.
Insights from the Lab
Your five-minute Maine marketing advantage.
For now, every other week, we’ll share a short, practical takeaway to help you make your marketing more effective when talking to Mainers.
As you step into 2026, here’s a simple truth…Read More
Which Mindset of Maine Is At Your Holiday Table? Here’s a quick (and decidedly unscientific) quiz to play with the family…Read More
Being real works better than being impressive, especially in Maine….Read More
Why the same message won’t work everywhere, even inside one state…..Read More
Want to Go Deeper?
Contact the Lab today or subscribe to The Strategy Brief to get practical insights delivered to your inbox.
The Maine Insights Lab helps organizations turn data and experience into actionable strategy. If you’d like to understand which mindset your audience fits, and how to speak their language, let’s talk.