Breaking Out of The London Bubble: Creating a Customer Closeness Programme

The Challenge:

A national food company wanted to 'break out of the London and Southern Bubble', to connect with real people and ultimately use this research as a springboard to develop products and propositions that were customer-centric.

They wanted to really deep-dive into people’s households to discover rich human stories to bring to life their ongoing quantitative research.

What I did:

I recruited 30 UK households to take part in this programme, which involved running four topics in a year. These households were as close to being nationally represented as possible. Crucially the households covered most areas of the UK and included a variety of life stages.

The process included:

On-boarding:

• On-boarding households onto a community where research activities were hosted.

• Sending designed welcome packs to all households, as well as a welcome call.

Topic exploration:

• This stage included desk research and synthesis of existing client research.

• A scoping session with stakeholders, where I looked at hopes and fears, what they already knew and where the gaps in their knowledge of customers were.

Wider stakeholder engagement:

• Working with designers to create a look and feel for the programme, helping the programme to be 'famous' within the business.

• Writing and creating stakeholder emails to explain and ignite interest in the programme including having 'Topic Champions'.

• The creation of a launch event.

• I also populated the socialisation platform Pulse, where all insights and details on our households were kept. I did this so that all insights could be understood widely within the business and to ensure interest and buy in from the rest of the business.

Research design:

• I created and designed topic research design, by linking the methods with the stakeholder objectives. For example, one of the topic objectives was to understand the household’s repertoire of meals in the run-up to December, so I created a diary task over a whole month which tracked our households meals and snacks.

Lunch and Learn (debrief)

• Working in iterative steps with the main client to analyze our research and presenting our research in a deck back to the whole business in order to maximise interest into the program.

• One limitation that we found was that attendance levels to our debriefs were not as high as we would have liked with some teams within the business such as sales. On reflection, if I were to do this programme again, I would put more emphasis on encouraging sales teams to become interested in the program by hosting individual sessions with them to explain the program and how it could help them directly and making more connections outside of the main client.

Results:

• Insights from each topic were delivered at 'Lunch and Learn' events (debrief) with all outputs freely available via Pulse. I created a Workshop pack with platforms that the insights team could use in their teams to embed insights and create customer-inspired change.

Reflection:

• One of the biggest challenges of this program was simply organising all the households communications. Initially I had used WhatsApp in order to brief the consumers as the community got very low engagement. However, in the end this proved unworkable for me and meant that other team members further down the line in this year-long program could not pick up the line of communication as it was on my personal WhatsApp. As a result, I pivoted all communications solely to email.

• If I were to do this programme again, I would also not use Pulse as our socialisation tool. Some stakeholders found it hard to navigate and find, instead a micro-site would have been a better option. Similarly, the biggest impact of this programme on stakeholders came when they interviewed and spoke to the households themselves if the budget allowed I would have increased face-to-face interactions as this was the heart of the project.