The Challenge: The holidays are a competitive time for retailers as shoppers go into overdrive. A leading UK supermarket needed to understand what was driving consumer behavior and habits; they had plenty of data, but data only tells half the story. They required ears on the ground making sense of the data to inform strategic planning for the following year.
The Solution: For several weeks leading up to the holidays and into the first few weeks of the New Year, I'd speak with households all over the UK, exploring seasonal mindsets and understanding shopping behaviors.
This encompassed a whole host of qualitative techniques from online diaries, focus groups and shopping tours around different supermarkets and retailers.
Outputs informed the clients’s Insights team’s yearly seasonal presentation to the board which told them how they performed and importantly why. The work I did over the course of 3 subsequent years changed the way the client thought about their seasonal planning, from advertising on TV, their digital services, POS in store and product development.
Much of which is still in place today.
The agency & my role: Sparkler, working as an Associate Partner.