Choosing an audience to grow a staple ingredient brand

The question

A food company sells a staple ingredient under its own brand, made with production technology it believed set its products apart.

It wanted to know which shoppers could grow the brand, and what it would take to win them. The audience it chose would decide where its product strengths had to count: in the range, in its claims and in the story its sales team told.

Our approach

We defined opportunity audiences from a survey of category buyers, each framed by what the brand could already offer it, so none was a wish list.

Each was sized and set against shared criteria, from its value and its fit with the range to how hard it would be to deliver and how crowded the competition was, so the team chose among them on the same terms.

The chosen audience’s most engaged buyers then took part in a digital ethnography over time, showing us how they cook with, choose and talk about the products.

What the team came away with

The first stage produced a knowledge bank of the category and a summary of each opportunity audience, with its size, its profile and the brand’s right to play.

The second produced a playbook for the chosen audience: a strategy, a set of plays and ideas for products, claims, digital and the sales story, each paired with examples from other brands and categories as sparks.

Product, marketing and sales could now work from one picture of the customer they had chosen. The other audiences stayed in the knowledge bank, sized and profiled, for later choices.