Researching hair care language for shoppers and salon stylists

The question

A personal care company wanted the words on its hair care packs, shelves and claims to work harder.

For its hair brands, the question was what part language plays from noticing a need to buying and using a product, and whether shoppers in two markets treat the same words the same way. For its salon brands, the company needed to hear how stylists talk about hair and products.

Our approach

We ran it as two connected pieces of work, one with shoppers and one with stylists, so each could answer the part of the question it was built for.

Shoppers in two markets took us from the first moment something caught their eye to the shower at home, with shop-alongs in one market and store explorations led by a semiotician in the other.

In salons in one market, we watched stylists through whole appointments, with a researcher in the chair as the client, then interviewed them to hear both how they talk in the moment and how they describe their work afterward.

What the team came away with

The hair brands had a map of where words reach shoppers in both markets, and the salon brands a dictionary of salon language.

A session merging the evidence from both markets set the way shoppers in each read the same words side by side, before anyone wrote a line.

With both in hand, a claims writer could check a line against how stylists talk, and see where on the way to purchase a shopper would meet it, on pack, on shelf or at home.