Some of the FBI (Finding Better Information) team at work during our empathy & interviewing skills session, wonderfully hosted at Astrolabe Winery in Marlborough.
The team starting the process of mapping our what they knew, and who we might need to talk to in-market.
The team mapping out the high-level structure for the discussion guides across end consumer, retail and importer & distributor.
The ever fascinating process of doing in-home consumer insights interviews, and the all-revealing 'Can you show me what wines in the fridge right now?' Bring on the bling...
Testing value propositions as part of the interview process, in this instance with a sommelier.
This work was undertaken as part of the Better by Design New Programme Pilot.
The objective of the engagement was three-fold:
- To test the new Better by Design programme;
- To test the process of working with an open coalition of companies to do in-market consumer insights work (and effective way for small New Zealand companies to band together to share the costs of this work);
- To build the capability of each of the wineries to engage in their own consumer insights work in the future and effectively translate these into new products, services and experiences that meet the needs of their target consumer.
The companies involved were Allan Scott, Astrolabe, Kono, and Spy Valley. Each of these companies were interested in understanding their US consumer in more detail.
The process was for us to:
- Work on understanding and clearly defining what we already knew, what assumptions we were making, and what else we needed to find out about why consumers in the US were buying their product.
- Define our target consumer in the US in more depth.
- Define a value proposition from each of the wineries to test with those target consumers.
- Use the mobile ethnography platform, dScout, to conduct initial high-level research across the US, and in our target market (state) specifically, to understand consumer perception, purchase behaviours, wine drinking habits etc. etc.
- Use this dScout research work to inform the recruiting of a more tightly defined group of respondents for in-depth, one-on-one video interviews with end consumers, retailers, wine buyers and sommeliers in the US.
- Conduct the in-market research work, and use Slack as a platform to upload and share videos, insights & observations.
- Work with the wineries to share out and work through these insights.
Following this, another duo of Better by Design coaches worked with the wineries to help translate all of this work and insight into action, the second stage of the new Better by Design Programme.