Reaching households that rarely use a cleaning product

The question

A household products company saw room to grow a cleaning product among households that used it lightly, or not at all.

An internal review of ideas was coming, and the brand’s teams were already gathering product ideas for it. They needed to know how these households clean, what would make room for a new product in that routine, and which ideas deserved to go further, in time for the review.

Our approach

People who rarely buy a product are hard to understand through it, so we made cleaning itself the subject, filmed by households in their own homes.

We read the evidence through behavior first, then through the differences between non-users and lighter users, and asked households to clean for a while without products they usually reach for.

The brand’s early ideas were sorted and screened inside the ethnography, so each one was judged by people who had just shown us how they clean, while members of the client team followed along on the platform.

What the team came away with

A topline screen of the early ideas arrived in time for the internal review, from households like those the brand wanted to reach.

A full report followed, bringing together how households clean, an assessment of each idea, and the opportunity areas where innovation could go next, prioritized against criteria set out in the report and connected back to the ideas already on the team’s list.

The brand’s teams could now weigh any new idea against a picture of cleaning drawn from the very households it had to win over.