CASE STUDY
Industry: FMCG
Category: Home care
Location: UK
Solution: Experience Mapping
We brought unparalleled actionability and precision to experience mapping to deliver superiority for our client’s leading global brands…
The Challenge:
This brand has been a market leader in the homecare category for many years across the world….but that was starting to change; a competitor brand was gaining traction in core territory. With a strong ambition to retain the ‘leader’ position and aggressively drive SKU growth, we needed to ensure we were delivering superiority through exceptional, holistic experiences. The challenge was that traditional Qual and Quant testing showed no perceivable consumer differences: why were they losing market share?
We needed to identify precisely why the competitor was winning, and crucially, we needed to deliver the route to superiority. We needed to regain their competitive edge.
The Solution:
We took the core principles of Experience Mapping, and we put it on steroids; using innovative qual solutions to understand the product experience holistically – from the first thought of purchase, to the at shelf experience, through usage across the life span and final pack disposal:, we brought R&D, Brand and Category teams together, unlocking semiotics, behavioural science, implicit and explicit views through scavenger hunts, IDIs, story boards, image galleries, sensory deprivation and ethnographic observations. Over 2 weeks, combining real world behaviour with experimental product use to decode the moments of truth and the attributes that really mattered. We looked at direct and indirect competitors, learning precisely how and where to focus time, effort and budget to deliver superior products to the market.
The Result:
The results were game changing. For the first time, the client understood the challenges with the product – tiny design and marketing elements which has a huge impact on the holistic product delivery and design. Key moments were missed. The competitor product delivered delight where it mattered most. Urgent changes needed to be made to pack structure and fragrance delivery mechanisms. By delivering hard and fast ‘rules’ and guardrails for each touchpoint, we created a playbook of ‘how to win’ – far more specific than had ever been seen before. With changes made, products were put back into large scale quant tests: the questionnaire was reset to use the language of superiority as a basis for KPI setting – JAR scales didn’t cut it anymore! The methodology was so successfully, uniting teams across the business, that it is now used globally, cross category, cross brand – and forms the foundation point of the ‘Design for Superiority Programme’.
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