Path-to-Purchase Research: Helping FHP Obtain a Market Leadership Position by Understanding its Customers

Immediate pain: Freudenberg Household Products (FHP) and their leading brand, O-Cedar, lacked an actionable map of the shopper "path to purchase" for mops & brooms, preventing them from confidently leading customers and optimizing their go-to-market strategy.

FHP and O-Cedar needed a clear, evidence-based understanding of the shopping journey to guide product and market strategy decisions. Under pressure to strengthen retailer relationships and win at shelf, they wanted to identify the exact decision points, inflection points, and purchase drivers that shape consumer choice in the brooms and mops category.

This situation demanded focused market research (MRS) to reveal where shoppers decide, what influences their choices, and how the end-to-end journey could be optimized.

The core question we set out to answer: how can FHP and O-Cedar map the shopper path-to-purchase for brooms and mops and translate those insights into a go-to-market vision that secures customer leadership and drives better product and merchandising decisions?

Key differentiator:

We leveraged our proprietary journey-mapping and path-to-purchase solution that enabled real-time, in‑the‑moment shopper and end-to-end segment-level insights.

1. First: Conducted on-site workshops with FHP executives to identify breaks in existing research and gaps in shopper understanding.
2. Then: Studied multiple shopper segments across key channels — Big Box/DIY (Wal‑Mart etc.), Grocery/Drugstore (Safeway etc.), and Online (Amazon.com etc.).
3. Next: Captured real-time, “in-the-moment” shopper reactions across the path-to-purchase: pre-store awareness, brand consideration and selection, channel choice, in-store and online shopping experiences, brand switching rationale, in-home usage, and re-purchase/referral behaviors.
4. Then: Applied combined qualitative and quantitative analytics to identify inflection points and quantify opportunity areas across retail, online and multi-channel journeys.
5. Finally: Delivered customized journey maps by shopper segment and channel linking end-to-end shopper actions to manufacturer and retailer outcomes.

Delivered on time and within budget while providing nationwide, projectable shopper insights that established category leadership.

1. On-time, in-budget delivery
2. Nationwide coverage & projectable national shopper base
3. Integrated qual + quant for deep, actionable insights

Client Testimonial:

“Gold Research successfully executed the project on time and within budget. They also represented us well in front of our retail partners and shoppers. I would definitely recommend Gold Research to anybody wishing to conduct journey mapping and path-to-purchase research, and obtain a leadership position in their industry.” - Alec Lenenfeld, Director, Shopper Insights & Category Management, Freudenberg Household Products.

FAQ

1. How quickly were results delivered? Within 60 days.
2. What was the ROI? Recovered multimillions in revenue leakages. Established category leadership and strong retail alignment.
3. Was the method scalable or replicable? Yes — nationwide coverage and integrated methodologies demonstrated scalability and repeatability.