Researching a food brand’s market entry from target to pack

The question

A food company was taking its brand into a new market. Once media money flowed, a wrong target or a weak creative platform would be costly to put right.

Who should the brand speak to there, what should it stand for, and how should each campaign piece say it? The team wanted every answer grounded in the new market’s shoppers, and strong enough to persuade partners at home.

Our approach

We shopped and cooked with the category’s buyers before any creative existed, because a food brand is chosen at the shelf and judged in the kitchen.

The client’s creative and PR agencies worked alongside us, and in the creative groups we built paper prototypes on the spot and refined the visuals between sessions, so each piece took shape with the people it had to reach.

Our research was one strand of the client’s wider entry program.

What the team came away with

Guidance ran from the target and positioning to a direction for the creative platform, then to the detail of each campaign component.

The agencies had seen the evidence gathered and the components refined with shoppers, from video and digital ads to landing pages, pack and point of sale, so they could brief and develop their own work from it. The marketing team could check each finished piece against the same evidence.

For partners at home, we made a short film about the new market’s shoppers, so the case for the entry could reach them in shoppers’ own words and pictures.

“By deeply understanding our consumer segment, we were able to target them in a way that has achieved significant ongoing success.”

Global Manager, food company