How do you help a leading UK charity bring their supporter segments to life – and help them raise over £5m additional profit?
A leading UK charity commissioned us to help them drive fundraising performance among their priority audiences. The challenge was to elicit honest responses about charity giving and motivation, with a particular focus on reasons for not giving.
The insights resulted in a supporter-centric approach with our research being utilised to influence fundraising strategy and allocate a substantial innovation pot to help develop and promote new products. In addition, supporter journey planning has been reframed and new fundraising projects raised an additional £5.4m for the charity.
How do you deliver the largest customer closeness programme in the UK?
The challenge for Waitrose was to get senior managers closer to their customers. We worked with Waitrose to deliver ‘Pulse’, a series of consumer closeness sessions. The scale and reach of Pulse is unprecedented in the UK and has now been fully embedded into the business. We are proud to be involved in research which was described by Waitrose Marketing Director, Rupert Thomas, as: “One of the most influential research programmes the organisation has ever initiated”.
What makes a pack ‘pop’ on a shelf in a category that is typically shopped in auto pilot?
Should the packaging of a well-loved brand be overhauled for greater standout? Using our MockShop approach, we explored the impact of alternative pack designs in the context of their competitive set to understand if and how a new design might impact brand perceptions. The results were surprising. Appeal and relevance varied greatly depending on how the designs were exposed to consumers. As a result, our client was confident that the ‘winning’ design would facilitate standout from the competitors.
How do you get women to reveal the intimacies of their facial cleansing routine?
Using our ReelMe video approach, we asked women to keep a week long video diary of their morning and evening facial cleansing routines. Results were revelatory. Left to film themselves without inhibition, we saw what really happens at ‘the moment of truth’. These self-made videos challenged many of the client’s hypotheses and preconceptions about facial cleansing, the learning from which fed directly into their NPD pipeline.
How do you help a children’s brand identify great concepts to create their first ever NPD pipeline?
Using our Concept Kitchen approach, we took 20 consumers, 4 moderators and 5 clients, and in the space of just one day, allowed our client to immerse themselves into consumer’s worlds and understand the potential of their NPD concepts. We then married the consumer view with the brand and commercial reality achieving:
- Clear direction over future growth territories
- Learnings and optimisation pointers on early stage concepts
- Solid foundations for an NPD pipeline
When creating a brand new product proposition, how do you ensure all elements of the concept mix are sufficiently motivating whilst still being true to the product?
Our client approached us with an idea for a brand new product. But where to start? As with any NPD research, there is a need to understand the power of the new product in its own right, as well as the most motivating way to bring the product to life. Our Proposition Plus approach allowed us to tackle this using a ‘bottom up, top down’ approach. By pre-placing product samples, it allowed half of participants to respond based on product experience. But this did not reflect shopper reality. To address this, by exposing the other half of participants to the marketing mix elements first, gave us a ‘clean’ read on the motivational pull of shopper touch-points. Finally, by marrying the outputs it gave us a clear direction over the best way to bring the proposition to market.
How do you identify the key trends in Street food to help inform NPD?
An online community tasking street food aficionados to video and commentate on their street food journeys helped identify the multi-sensorial and immersive nature of street food, as well as key trends in cuisine. Couple this with co-creative sessions with our street food aficionados and a live illustrator, we captured 13 consumer-generated dishes in real-time to help form our clients NPD pipeline.
How did we help the FA release its ambition to transform the future of Women’s Football?
One MS conducted simultaneous deep dive sessions with daughters (aged 7-15years) and their dads to understand the perception of the women’s game in general and review a suite of visual identities for the FA Women’s Super League. We supplemented this approach with intercept interviews conducted at the Women’s FA Cup final to capture immediate system 1 responses to proposed visual identities.
