Hearing from consumers before a food brand’s leadership summit

The question

The brand’s leaders were preparing a summit to set its next chapter. They wanted to start from one broad question: what premium means to consumers in the category.

They wanted to hear the answer from consumers firsthand, in time to bring it into the summit.

Our approach

We designed the immersion to feed the summit directly, so what the leaders heard was still fresh when they came to plan.

We chose consumers as much for their openness and curiosity, people at ease with strangers and keen to explore, as for their fit with the brand’s target.

Each pair of leaders spent their time with one consumer: a unit of three, built for real conversation. In store, it was the consumer who pointed out what felt premium, and the leaders who listened.

The routes went deliberately in and out of the category, through other places where people experience luxury as well as the stores where they shop, so the leaders saw premium the way consumers live it.

What the team came away with

A regroup and a guided reflection brought what every pair had heard into the summit, the point the immersion was built to reach.

We then gathered everything, from consumers’ own pre-task to the leaders’ photos and notes, into a keepsake record, so the wider business could see the evidence too.