Turning a snack segmentation into briefs for innovation

The question

The brand already had its segments, each with a profile and an estimate of its size.

The innovation team’s question was practical, and the same for every segment: what could the brand solve for these people? Answering it meant picturing the people inside each one, the moments they reach for a snack and the routines around those moments.

Our approach

We went into people’s lives across every segment, through ethnography, depth interviews and day-in-the-life missions.

The missions followed whole days, so snacking could be seen inside the routine around it, where the choices are made. The depth interviews went further with individual people.

The synthesis took each segment from a statistical profile to a lived snacking context, and ended every one on the same question: what could we solve? We wrote each answer as a needs statement, framed as a problem a development team could brief against.

What the team came away with

The innovation team had a needs statement for each segment, written as a problem it could brief against.

Each came with a picture of the people to design for and the lived context to design into. It was built so development could start from a defined problem and a defined group of people, with the original segmentation still the source for how many people each one represents.