How to Gain Deeper Insights Through Communities: Four Projective Techniques

Target consumers’ experiences, emotions, and brand perception.

by Finch Brands

Challenge

Whether your brand is a leader or a challenger, the competitive “arms race” for consumer relevance is hotter than ever. With a large and diverse portfolio of brands, Hain Celestial Group is constantly looking for ways to create relevance and drive brand advantage with speed, scale, and efficiency. To meet this need, Hain sought an ongoing strategic insights partner that could go beyond functional insights to help deepen its understanding of target consumers’ ideal experiences, underlying emotions, and brand perceptions across its portfolio.

Solution

Hain Celestial Group and the brand consultancy Finch Brands partnered to create a leading-edge insights community called Grow & Tell with several thousand consumers in natural foods and personal care. In addition to handling functional insights needs such as concept testing, product home-use testing, packaging optimization, product assortment, and pricing, the team has leveraged System1-based projective research techniques to gain deeper insight into consumer beliefs, needs, and motivations in an agile fashion.

Finch Brands recently used projective techniques to deepen the understanding of both occasional and regular users of personal care products. Upon aligning on the business objective, they quickly recruited 40 consumers within the community to participate in a two-week study with four different activities designed to create a rich, detailed picture of opportunities to drive brand relevance. Consumers received products to ground responses in the product experience.

Projective techniques included the following methodologies:

Emotional Imagery Digital Safari – Consumers collected images to visualize how body wash and facial care products make them feel during and after use.

Metaphor Making – Consumers completed a fill-in-the-blank metaphor-building exercise that reframed how they think about the benefits that the brands provide.

The Dating Game – Consumers created a mock dating profile for themselves that described their needs, qualities in their ideal product “match”, and which brand they would most want to commit to in a long-term relationship. After using the products, they created dating profiles for key brands that would attract people like them.

Best Self Transformation – Consumers reflected on how the products might “transform” them, and help them accomplish new things. This included exploring the feelings before and after the transformation and what about the products makes this transformation possible. After using the products, they created dating profiles for key brands that would attract people like them.

Outcome

A more human understanding of Hain Celestial’s brands.

Thanks to the creative use of these projective techniques, Hain Celestial now has a much deeper understanding of the people they serve. These insights are informing decisions in areas such as brand positioning, advertising campaigns, packaging design, and new product innovation.

More impactful creative.

With a deeper understanding of consumers through the community across several brands and separately deployed projective techniques for testing campaign ideas, Hain Celestial has consistently seen top quartile performance vs. category benchmarks in advertising copy testing.

Significant cost savings.

By fielding this strategic brand research in an insights community, Hain Celestial has saved between 40-60% compared to if it had invested in stand-alone research projects.

Header Image: Karolina Grabowska, Pexels

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