Activating Segmentation

CHALLENGE

These days, grocery shoppers face an overwhelming array of choices every time they set foot in the store. There are more brands offering more products than ever before, which means more competition for that coveted cart space. Therefore, reaching consumers in this crowded market depends on having a deeper understanding of their needs, desires, and tensions.

Recently, a global food and beverage client reached out to Burke, Inc. with a need to better understand their consumers in the grocery channel – now and into the future. Burke and Seed Strategy answered the call with an in-depth segmentation initiative, leveraging both proven research tools and cutting-edge strategic innovation.

SOLUTION

As Burke began the project, a few key questions came to light: Were certain beverages a better fit for certain lifestyles? How value conscious are target consumers? What need states are not being met? Did shoppers really need all these organic SKUs? Burke aligned with internal stakeholders to create an effective learning plan:

• Qualitative research helped answer the initial questions, tease out differences in consumption patterns, and hypothesize potential segments.
• Quantitative analysis helped identify segments in terms of size, profitability, and findability.
• Illumination brought each segment to life.

Working side-by-side with client teams, Burke developed a comprehensive segmentation solution that identified future innovation areas and created a delivery plan that provided a storytelling report, fact books which gave key stakeholders access to foundational knowledge on an ongoing basis, and typing tools that set the team up to identify segments in all research going forward.

However, we took it further with Seed Strategy – Burke’s very own strategic “special forces” team – and brought the segmentation to life, strategically and visually. Once the segmentation was complete, Seed worked closely with client teams to refine marketing strategies and develop more targeted product innovations for specific segments of consumers. These critical steps helped ensure that all learning translated into actionable, tangible outcomes, including a new line of products currently available at grocery retailers nationwide.

OUTCOME

With the goal of providing strategic support for present and future marketing initiatives, Burke and Seed’s segmentation project delivered on many fronts:

• Assessed the sizes of key segments to prioritize marketing and product development innovation efforts.
•  Served as a strategic foundation for brand architecture development that better-connected consumers to products they desire.
• Succinctly summarized insights segment behavior (e.g., lifestyle and shopping) to inform new product development and marketing efforts.
• Identified unmet consumer needs in the category (i.e., white space) to fuel innovation pipelines.
• Guided development of innovation platforms for core products so that expansion could be done in a strategic way.
• Created a “typing” tool to assess the impact of new products on the category and help ascertain an optimal mix of benefits, RTBs and package design for specific consumer targets.

Having gone well-beyond its intended scope, this segmentation research has been leveraged as a company-wide tool to support marketing strategy, stretching its value, and impacting the client’s bottom line.

Visit Burke at www.burke.com.

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