Putting real lives behind a snack segmentation

The question

A snack company had commissioned a new segmentation that sized its market and profiled every segment. Its teams could read the numbers, but few could picture the people.

The business wanted every segment to feel familiar enough to plan for, across its brands and teams. For each one the question was practical: what could the brand solve for these people, in the moments they reach for a snack and the routines around them?

Our approach

We recruited with the segmentation’s own typing tool, so everyone we met belonged to a segment by the same rule as the survey.

Each segment mixed loyal buyers, occasional buyers and other brands’ buyers, and we spent longest with the people who embodied it most clearly. Day-in-the-life missions and films caught snacking as it happened, inside the routines around it.

What the team came away with

Every segment arrived as a debrief and a film, each ending in a needs statement: a problem the brand could brief against, with the lived context behind it.

The segmentation stayed the source for how many people each segment represents. The ethnography added who those people are, the moments that matter to them and the routines a product would have to fit into.

An online immersion brought the business’s teams into the material, working in small groups on the segments that mattered most to its plans, so the people behind the numbers became familiar to everyone who would plan for them.

A team briefing a new product could now start from a defined problem for a defined group of people, and go back to the films whenever it needed to check a detail of daily life.