Co-Creating the Future: Leveraging a Qualitative Approach for Smarter Product Innovation

The Objectives

The DRG worked closely with the CPG firm’s R&D and marketing teams to fully understand their needs and audience, and dive deeper into their goals for the study. This helped us gain the insights we needed to design a creative qualitative study framework that would meet their audience where they were, provide the CPG firm with the richest insights, and give them a clear path to developing relevant NOPC products and marketing strategies.

The DRG proposed the following actions:

• Develop an experiential roadmap for the target market encompassing point of purchase through product disposal. Capture all consumer-product, product-environment, consumer-environment touchpoints.
• Uncover and translate key consumer insights regarding NOPC products and the select touchpoints based on importance and ability to influence.
• Evaluate emotional and functional perceptions/expectations for each of the defined opportunity touchpoints.
• Develop a consumer co-creation community to gather feedback from a core group of NOPC consumers over the course of time. This included gauging their initial reactions to a concepts and prototypes, then refining and testing until we reached a product that could potentially go to market.

The Solution

The DRG recommended a multi-phased approach and developed a structured, iterative study framework to accomplish the objectives outlined above. We primarily leveraged qualitative methods, but included a quantitative component, as well. The study was designed to capture both deep consumer insights and broader validation of key themes.

The methods included:

• Online Diary & Discussion Board: Participants would record their shopping, usage, and disposal habits in real time, sharing insights via video, photos, and written reflections. This allowed The DRG to capture authentic experiences and identify key touchpoints in the consumer journey and help the CPG firm understand consumer habits and practices shopping for NOPC products from point of purchase through discard.
• In-Person Focus Groups: A subset of engaged, highly articulate participants from the online diary study would then take part in in-person focus groups to further explore their emotional and functional perceptions of NOPC products and identify critical factors influencing purchase decisions. Additionally, the focus groups would help us better understand their experiential journey at every touchpoint.
• Quantitative Web Survey: Conducted between the qualitative phases, this survey engaged the same consumer community to validate early insights and measure broader sentiment. This helped keep the community engaged, as well.

Our iterative approach ensured that findings could be continually refined and expanded, with the goal of creating a comprehensive experiential roadmap of the NOPC consumer journey.

Insights laid a foundation for understanding consumer beliefs, impressions, and expectations of natural and organic personal care products. ​These findings helped guide the CPG firm’s ongoing line extension initiatives, particularly in the areas of preferred ingredients, product efficacy expectations, and packaging claims.​