The Chambers Group Pairs Consumer Research With Digital Marketing as Brothers Expand Family Agency

The Chambers Group’s next chapter joins a long-running discipline—testing what consumers respond to—with digital advertising, search and content. Eric and Branden Chambers have expanded the agency their father, Keith, founded in the mid-1970s, carrying its brand-building work into channels that did not exist when the business began.

Keith built the firm around helping companies shape new brands and refresh existing ones. Its services included positioning, product naming, packaging design and consumer research, with clients such as Clorox, 3M, ARM & HAMMER and Yoplait. The brothers grew up around that work. Their later careers in entertainment added experience in storytelling, production and finding an audience—skills they now apply to marketing.

Testing the message before spending at scale

Research remains central to the agency’s approach. Keith and his sons developed Connectics™, a process for testing consumer responses to different marketing messages before clients commit substantial budgets. The idea is to learn which claims resonate while changing course still costs relatively little. A 1999 trademark application records the process’s first commercial use as Nov. 8, 1997, long before today’s digital advertising platforms.

The agency has also worked with Hoffy products for more than 30 years, developing names, packaging and marketing for lines including Bill Bailey’s premium packaged meats and the Hollywood Hot Dog brand featured at Pink’s in Los Angeles. That history gives the firm a long-running example of how research and creative decisions can shape a consumer product.

Bryan Harpine, formerly director of Global New Products at Church & Dwight, credited the process with helping expand product businesses. “In working with The Chambers Group process, our new products grew in size from $10-$20 million to $50-$100 million,” he said. “The key was mining consumer desires for extraordinary benefits which set our products apart.”

The creative execution matters alongside the research. In a 2023 analysis of nearly 450 consumer packaged goods advertising programs, NCSolutions found that creative drove 49% of incremental sales, the largest contribution among the factors it measured. For brands weighing where to put limited budgets, the finding underscores the commercial value of the message itself, as well as the reach bought to distribute it.

The Chambers Group now combines consumer research with product development, creative services, search engine optimization and paid advertising. It also works with celebrity talent: according to the agency, a program featuring Alessandra Ambrosio, Lele Pons and Hannah Stocking helped Ambrosio gain more than 500,000 Instagram followers in three days. Ambrosio called the brothers “marketing rockstars,” a description later used in a 2024 USA Today headline.

Digital growth puts more pressure on measurable returns

The agency’s expansion comes as marketing budgets face competing demands. Gartner’s 2026 CMO Spend Survey found that 56% of chief marketing officers say they lack enough money to carry out their marketing strategies. Paid media accounts for 31.4% of the average marketing budget, increasing the pressure on companies to connect advertising spend with business results.

Eric and Branden’s digital operation combines paid advertising, search visibility and organic content, with consumer testing used to help decide which messages merit further spending. Eric argues that relying on one channel can create trade-offs: paid advertising can bring higher costs when spending stops, while search and organic social may take time to produce results.

“The ones running all of them simultaneously are the ones seeing a 3X to 6X average ROI, which is what we deliver,” Eric said. That figure is the agency’s claim; the source does not provide a broader sample or methodology for the average. For clients, the practical question is how the mix performs against their own costs, sales and timing.

Alan Morell of Creative Management Partners, which manages both The Chambers Group and Bryan Nitriceuticals, connected the two businesses. Morell said their work together over several years helped drive sales growth for N1o1 and No2U. “CMP has worked with The Chambers Group for over 10 years, servicing over 40 clients, all of whom have been pleased,” he said.

One client example is N1o1, a nitric oxide wellness and skincare company led by Dr. Nathan S. Bryan. The Chambers Group says that over a year, coordinated advertising across Google, Meta and Amazon lifted net revenue by more than 46%, while spending on ads increased less than 13%. Net profit rose more than 90% year over year. Those figures describe the agency’s reported results; the source does not detail the measurement period or other factors that may have contributed.

The agency is also helping N1o1’s sister brand, No2U, rename, redesign and reposition nutritional supplement products. Dr. Bryan told OK! that the company’s business increased by 6X within six months of working with the agency. The account points to a broader part of the firm’s work: updating product identity alongside media and audience strategy.

The approach extends beyond consumer goods. Sentant, a nationwide IT provider serving startups and venture capital firms, hired the agency for search engine optimization. The Chambers Group says Sentant reached the top national ranking for “IT services for startups,” based on campaign data. Sentant CEO James Murphy linked that visibility to commercial results: “It’s not just rankings and traffic; it’s translated directly into closed business,” he said. “We’re up 40% year over year, and I credit a huge part of that to the machine they’ve built for us.”

Entertainment experience informs the agency’s digital work

Before expanding the family firm’s digital operation, the brothers worked in Hollywood. They created, directed and produced The Ultimate Gamer for Spike TV and co-directed Cheech & Chong’s Animated Movie for 20th Century Fox in 2013. Branden has described the connection between entertainment and brand marketing in terms of distribution and tested content: “A great film with no distribution doesn’t exist. A great brand without tested content for social and paid ads will fail.”

Artificial intelligence and changing digital platforms are adding new demands to the agency’s research work. Eric says Connectics™ continues to evolve as tools and content delivery change. That leaves the firm’s next stage tied to a familiar challenge: keeping consumer insight useful as the ways brands reach people shift.

Keith remains chief creative officer more than 50 years after founding the agency, while Eric and Branden serve as co-CEOs. The brothers say their digital division extends the business’s original foundation. Their test will be whether that combination of research, creative work and channel coordination can keep producing results clients can measure across different products and markets.