Consumer Connects: The Psychology Behind Choices and Behaviour

A researcher, a client, and a consumer meet up in a kitchen…no, it’s not the start of a questionable joke—it’s the magic of a Consumer Connect. The perfect excuse for researchers to legitimately nosey around someone’s kitchen cupboards and bathroom cabinets without needing to apologise.

If you’ve never experienced one, imagine a 90-minute immersive tour into your consumer’s home. It’s not a quick chat or a scripted focus group in a conference room. This is a backstage pass to the real-life world of your consumers. Cups of tea, rogue pets, and the odd sight of forgotten laundry lurking in the corner. It’s a beautiful, unfiltered snapshot of life.

Ever wondered where your product really ends up once it’s in the hands of a consumer? Enter the world of cupboards and storage solutions, where you might find your pasta maker shoved in a corner, or worse, relegated to the garage with the rest of the items which have only ever been used once. (Toastie maker, anyone?)

Watching a family turn their cereal boxes into cupboard Jenga, you might realise that sleek packaging might need a redesign to better fit into the lives of consumers.

Forget the carefully crafted survey responses. Consumer connects are like the no-holds-barred open mic night of product feedback. Imagine a consumer telling you, “I only buy this when it’s on special offer”.

While we might spend a lot of our waking hours thinking about a specific product category, consumers don’t. These sessions help us understand the real motivators for purchase. Buying a product because it’s on special offer. Trading down when shopping just before a payday. Buying because it’s one of the few things their child will eat. Not because of unwavering brand loyalty.

Consumers don’t know – or often care – about your mission or vision, but they care whether the product meets their need, and if it’s good value for money. If you’re looking for honest feedback, you’re in the right place.

In the consumer’s home, you get to see the real competition up close – not just other brands, but also inventive DIY solutions. When your high-end detergent is being used to clean kitchen surfaces and your fab con is diluted to spritz onto clothes to freshen them up, sometimes the competition isn’t another brand but a bit of creative ingenuity.

It’s a reminder that your product is not just fighting for shelf space but for a place in the everyday routines of your consumers. Seeing how they improvise with what they have can be eye-opening and offer clues on how to better position your product, or how to innovate to address unmet needs.

Consumer connects offer more than just product insights; they provide a glimpse into the lives of the people who buy them. From the cluttered countertops to the family photos on the wall, you see the human side of the purchase. It’s a reminder that behind every product purchase, sales number and customer segment is a person with a unique set of needs, preferences, and life circumstances.

These interactions often reveal a lot about consumer priorities and challenges, helping you understand them not just as data points but as real individuals, with real stories, and real needs.

For researchers and clients alike, consumer connects are a reminder that the world outside the boardroom is messier, more unpredictable, and far more interesting than we might imagine.

It’s where products meet real lives and where brands can actually get closer to their consumers, not just through surveys or focus groups, but through meaningful observation in their natural habitat.

So, next time you’re considering ways to learn about your target audience, why not try a consumer connect? You might just discover an unmet need, a new space to innovate in, or a great new idea for pack development.

And at the very least, you’ll leave with a few good stories to tell at the next meeting!

Article written by Karen Schofield, Head of Qualitative and Head of People at Blue Yonder Research

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