Women’s personal health is a complex category where functional, emotional, and cultural needs intersect with personal identity. When in comes to family planning, these competing dynamics are intrinsic to a brands success. We gave our client the deep insights that they needed and evidence-based strategies to grow their business. Women’s personal health is a complex category where functional, emotional, and cultural needs intersect with personal identity.
As a major international company with many iconic brands in the healthcare and consumer goods market, our client faced increased competition in a maturing but profitable category they had dominated. The strategic decision facing them was how to defend their business and convince retailers they could grow their business better than the competitor.
Adding to the strategy story complexity, they needed to convince the retailers of their strategy and to have them help implement it. These retailers covered grocery, pharmacy, and department stores that operated across store and online environments.
To develop an evidence-based strategy, our client needed deep, actionable consumer insights. These insights would need to help our client with short term communication development and retail activation as well as guide longer-term product development and brand development.
Providing the needed insights required a design that understood the current market dynamics, path-to-purchase, decision-making, and what barriers our client needed to overcome to convert more women into buying into the category and the brand.
Our research design included a breadth of techniques to ensure we delivered insightful and actionable recommendations.
Our insight discovery approach
- Data. Initial data exploration of the current sales and distribution in the market to uncover broad behavioural trends.
- Context. Visiting stores and sites to understand the shopping environment and the types of questions customers were asking of staff.
- Social. Analysis of online reviews to see the types of areas that delighted and disappointed consumers.
- Influencers, Survey of pharmacy staff who have front line engagement with consumers to understand what they recommend and why.
- Consumers (digital ethnography). Depth interviews using an ethnographic diary approach that got consumers to actually go shopping online and in store.
- Consumers (profile and opportunity). An online survey uncovered who the consumers were, how their journey influenced their decisions, and how our client’s brand performed.
Outcome
The project delivered many key insights that the client was able to adopt. Including how adjacent products at the shelf were turning consumers away; how the client could develop their packaging to dominate at the shelf; and how the client could address the different paths to purchase and needs of different segments to grow their sales. The end results were a strategy adopted by the business and the retailers and sales growth.