The Shopper’s Nest Community: Where Insights are Born, Relationships Nurtured & Sales Grow

CHALLENGE

With limited budgets, and a mandate to deliver gold-standard insights, the Shopper Insights team at Nestlé USA found themselves needing an insights vehicle that was big, yet efficient; specific to their largest retailers, yet centralized so it can be accessed by all; small-enough to generate insights that humanize shoppers, yet quantifiable to ensure stakeholder trust and buy-in. At the time, the primary solution they had in place only enabled qualitative insights.

SOLUTION

The Shopper’s Nest – a private online insight community designed and recruited for Nestlé USA by Maru/Matchbox. The Nest has nearly ten thousand members that represent key targets for Nestlé USA, allowing them to execute a wide variety of strategic and tactical qualitative, quantitative, mobile, social, behavioral and non-conscious research activities in one unified platform. And there was the added benefit of unlocking the power of longitudinal learning for Nestlé USA, fueling always-on, two-way shopper engagement.

OUTCOME

In the four years the Shopper’s Nest has been running, over 150 research activities have been executed across all of Nestlé USA’s major categories and retailers. With the data housed in Nestlé USA’s community platform, Maru/Matchbox researchers have been able to unlock a deep understanding of today’s shopper – which increased retail activation in field and thought leadership in Nestlé USA’s Shopper function.

Outcomes include:

• Maximizing ROI on scale events (validation of strong shopper participation with higher minimum purchase levels; brand sweepstakes engagement preferences and brand impact)
• Providing a detailed view on shopper behaviors for strategic growth channels (including Club and E-Commerce to influence channel strategies for frozen categories)
• Securing distribution for a smaller brand including a gain of ~640 stores with a key retailer resulting in an incremental ~$500,000

All at roughly one-third of the cost of traditional ad hoc research.

Visit Maru/Matchbox at www.marumatchbox.com.

Read more innovative case studies in the Insights That Work eBook.