Food Full Circle: Brand Archetypes
Food Full Circle: Brand Archetypes
Food Full Circle, presented by MarketPlace, explores the cyclical way in which the food industry is transformed by consumer demand and through products that are increasingly healthy, sustainable, accessible, and delightful. It unpacks how nutrition industry executives can cultivate meaningful and successful brand experiences—the bridges that connect innovation to consumers and, ultimately, complete this circle of positive transformation. Join food industry veteran Tracy Landau as she interviews guests and panelists and provides a wide view into how companies can better the lives of people and pets. Today’s topic: research and actionable insights!
In This Episode of Food Full Circle
Tracy Landau sits down to interview MarketPlace’s Nicole Hill, Executor Director of Strategy, and Jon Copeland, Research Strategist, on the topic of research and actionable insights. We’ll discuss common research myths and market research misconceptions, as well as, the types of testing and research we conduct in the marketplace. Why invest in market research? How do you apply research with actionable insights? In the process of answering these questions, they uncover why market research and actionable insight can be an invaluable compass that can guide your next innovation.
Transcript
Tracy Landau
Hey everyone. I’m your host, Tracy Landau, the founder and president of Marketplace, a strategy, research, and branding firm that specializes in nutrition and lifestyle brands for people and pets.
Food. It’s grown and harvested, processed, and procured. It’s transformed into the ingredients that go into the products you know and love. Food connects us all. And when it’s healthy, accessible, sustainable, regenerative, and delightful, it betters the lives of people and their pets. After two decades of branding food, technology, ingredients, and CPG brands. We’ve done it all and we have more than a few stories to share. Join us as we talk about what goes into making a meaningful and successful food brand. This is Food Full Circle.
Hello, we’re back again with our second episode. Today we’re talking about research and actionable insights; a topic that I’m very excited to unpack. If you’re an entrepreneur or executive launching a nutrition brand for people or pets, I cannot think of a better episode to listen to than this one. In this episode, I sit down with Nicole Hill and Jon Copeland, an absolute dream team when it comes to research and insights.
I host a panel-style interview to discuss common myths and misconceptions in research, the types of testing and research we conduct in the marketplace, and how it can be an invaluable compass that will guide your next innovation.
Welcome to Food Full Circle. This is episode two, and I have two guests. This time Nicole Hill, Executor Director of Strategy, and Jon Copeland, who is our Research Strategist. Nicole’s been with us a decade and Jon, four years. We’re here today to talk about research and actionable insights. A very, very important topic for a brand firm like ours who seeks to solve problems, create opportunities, and then really just in, in life. Right? So, why don’t you guys just say a little bit about what you do on a daily basis.
Nicole Hill
Yeah.
Tracy Landau
And maybe with a little accent on research and insights.
Nicole Hill
Of course. Well, thank you so much, Tracy, for having Jon and I here with you today.
As you mentioned, I’ve been with Marketplace for almost a decade now, and I’ve had the awesome opportunity to work with so many brilliant people here, Jon and you of course being two of them and a lot of what I do day to day is drive strategy, business and brand strategy informed by some research and the insights we gleaned from that for product development purposes, new product launches, prime product line extensions, brand development. What position should a brand take to have the most successful chance in the market?
And really working collaboratively with our fantastic creative team to develop new brands, rebrand brands that are looking to do something different in the market and inform innovation for the variety of companies in the food, beverage, supplement, and pet space.
Jon Copeland
Thank you again Tracy, for inviting me to be on the podcast. As you said, my name’s Jon. I am the Research Strategist here at Marketplace. And I lead all of our research projects. So, we do a lot of quantitative qualitative research on, help support brand strategy, product development, package design. Really everything that we do here at Marketplace, Research touches it.
Tracy Landau
Thank you both. They are the dream team for sure.
So, topic of research and actionable insights was one that we selected because it is such an important topic. one that is crucial to the success of the brand strategies that we create for our customers.
Jon Copeland
Absolutely.
Tracy Landau
And sometimes one that is, that there’s a tendency sometimes to cut out or maybe ignore if there are budget issues.
Sometimes it’s like, well, let’s maybe not do the research and what do we say to that?
Nicole Hill
Do the research. Do the research, do the research.
Tracy Landau
It’s so critical. And we’re, we’re gonna talk about why.
Nicole Hill
Absolutely.
Tracy Landau
And we are gonna talk about research in the context of people and pets. So, to that end, the humanization of people and pets, let’s talk about pets.
It’s a nice way to get to know us and to you. So, tell us a little bit about your pets. You’ve introduced yourselves.
Jon Copeland
Well, I’ve got a dog named Francis.
Tracy Landau
I love Francis.
Jon Copeland
Isn’t she sweet?
Tracy Landau
She’s the sweetest.
Jon Copeland
She’s the sweetest. She’s a high energy girl. Also got a, a cat named Lionel, and he’s a little lion.
Tracy Landau
Oh, my favorite thing. Yeah. Well, I’ll talk about Francis in a minute.
Nicole Hill
Yes. Francis is amazing. I have a dog named Omar. He is a German Shepherd and a bunch of other things, all mixed in one big lovable pup. Like a teddy bear. And he is definitely one of the, the favorite four-legged creatures that we have in our family.
Tracy Landau
And sometimes you bring them to work.
Nicole Hill
Yeah.
Jon Copeland
Yeah.
Tracy Landau
It’s pretty cool to be able to bring the dogs into work.
Jon Copeland
Francis loves to be a business dog.
Tracy Landau
Yes. Yes. So, what’s one of the most human things that your dog or cat has ever done?
Jon Copeland
So, Frances is a smiler. She loves to just wear big grin whenever she, she’s, she’s happy.
Tracy Landau
I can attest to that.
Jon Copeland
Yeah. So, you’ve seen it.
Tracy Landau
She shows all of her teeth seriously.
Jon Copeland
She’s a smiler and it’s one of my favorite parts about her personality.
Nicole Hill
Mm-hmm. Frances also has some sick dance moves. If we can just acknowledge that for a second.
Jon Copeland
She does. She does.
Tracy Landau
Yeah, she does. She does this like, torque thing, like Yeah.
Jon Copeland
She, she gets down. She does.
Tracy Landau
Francis is a dancer. What about Omar?
Nicole Hill
I would say Omar is, the most human in his expressions. He definitely gives judgy stares when he doesn’t agree with what we’re doing. And also, very sympathetic stares when he knows we need a little extra, extra love. So, yeah.
We love Omar.
Tracy Landau
Aw. Well, that’s, this is a thing, the humanization of pets.
Jon Copeland
Absolutely.
Tracy Landau
So out of some of the bodies of research that we’re asked to do, and keep in mind, we also do proactive research. And this has been an area of interest for us for many years and our customers in the last 12 months.
Especially even though it’s been a trend for what, a decade or, you know, 12ish years. Something along those lines of those, we’ve been pursuing it a long time, but we’ve really gone deep. Right. What are some of the most interesting takeaways from that research that we’ve found?
Jon Copeland
I think that a big part of our job at Marketplace is to turn brands into heroes. And with any hero’s journey, the hero leaves and goes to seek something that’s of great value and then comes back with that thing of great value. And I think for us, that thing is the insights. Actionable insight that gives our clients a competitive edge. And the research gives us a map. It lights up, lights up a path for us to follow to get to that insight.
Tracy Landau
So actionable insights. Do you mind if I grab onto that?
Jon Copeland
Sure.
Tracy Landau
Just real quick, explain that a little bit. For some, they may not be exactly sure what that is.
Nicole Hill
So, for actionable insights, that’s where we’re taking not just information, not just data, but we’re looking at it from a place of learning and also through our industry lens here, because we do have exposure and experience in food, beverage, supplement, and pet.
And there’s so much crossover among those categories that is so true. So, the insights piece is not an actionable piece. It’s not just saying, here’s what you should know, but here’s what you should do or what you could do with what you know, what is the action to be taken that could improve the potential, the opportunity of your brand, of your product to make sure you have the most successful product launch possible, you know, with whatever market you’re entering.
Jon Copeland
I think some examples of that I can think of is we’ve discovered that particularly with like pet parents, they prioritize the needs state for this kind of supplements that they buy, and they associate particular ingredients with those need states. So, what our research as they sort do is to help identify what those need states are, which helps ’em in their product development and what ingredients are gonna matter the most to our target consumer, what those ingredients mean to that target consumer and what attributes of the brand they’re gonna resonate the most.
Nicole Hill
And I think one of the things, just Tracy, speaking to what you were talking about before with the confluence of human trends and pet human nutrition and pet nutrition trends, what we’re seeing is really tracking both on the need states. Like Jon was talking about, what are the benefits that the products offer, but also what are the ingredients people see value in or seek?
So, folks are seeking probiotics increasingly for themselves. They’re also seeking probiotics for their pets. And not just the ingredients and the need states or benefits, but folks are also interested in what we’ve kind of dubbed functional indulgence. So, we saw that emerge in gummies in the human space, soft chew in the pet space.
So now we’re looking at, well, what’s the next wave of that? And that’s what research can really tell us. You know, there’s a lot of great market research data in terms of what’s driving sales, what’s driving revenue. We can tell the volume that certain product types take up in the market, but what we can’t tell from that is where it’s necessarily going.
And that’s where we’re able to do a lot of the custom work. That indicates things like some of our recent research in the human supplement space indicated that yes, chocolate is an opportunity for functional foods or supplements in the human nutrition space, but ice cream was actually pretty close behind that.
So, I think that’s one of the things to look at from a functional food standpoint. Is that a format that people would be interested in or in the pet space? You know, we’ve seen soft chew on the rise for a long time. Functional ingredients in treats, so functional treats, but our more recent research has indicated there’s also an opportunity for functional food toppers that are in more of an indulgent gravy like format.
So, we’re seeing a lot of these more decadent formats really track with what people are saying they would like to see in this space that maybe doesn’t quite exist yet.
Tracy Landau
Was there, is there something recently that you’ve uncovered through research that was like one big standout relating to this dynamic?
Jon Copeland
I think the ease of use and convenience is one of those things that’s just it’s a deal breaker for a lot of, a lot of pet parents. If they view a product that’s gonna be hard to use, if it’s gonna be messy, they’ll just outright avoid it. So that perception of convenience is really a critical factor, I think, in their decision making.
Tracy Landau
Interesting. Yeah. And, and then what plant-based movement has that showed up?
Nicole Hill
It has, but I think that there’s still a little bit more skepticism in the pet space because pet parents typically tend to associate certain protein choices with what their pets enjoy flavor-wise. But also, there is a high value placed on both protein and fiber. And I think that’s where we’re seeing, you know, interesting mixes in blends of things like, you know, instead of just having a beef treat or a chicken treat, a treat be duck and carrot or Turkey and sweet potato. So, combining plant and traditional animal proteins in a treat in a product to bring both that high fiber and high protein associations into it.
Tracy Landau
So, this is all actionable insights. These are the things that Marketplace would be able to help with because we’re constantly reviewing these markets.
Jon Copeland
That’s right.
Tracy Landau
We are executing the research for our customers. We have the industry and consumer lens, so it helps us to be able to make these recommendations that are quite detailed and specific to our customers.
So, Jon, remember the research we did? Yeah in 2019, right? Right before covid, yes, in the supplement space. That was our target industry. And then COVID, happened, and then in June 2020 we retested and found that CBD, for example, was not a focus at that point.
Jon Copeland
But immunity was.
Tracy Landau
But immunity was.
Jon Copeland
And probiotics.
Tracy Landau
It still is. Yeah.
Jon Copeland
And people were doing other things, things with their diet. To improve their immune immunity. We found all sorts of interesting behavioral insights. In just a year’s time. Just a year had passed and there were tremendous changes.
Tracy Landau
Yeah. Even, not even, yeah.
Jon Copeland
Not even a year. And so that’s why it’s just you have to keep your finger on the pulse of what it is that your target consumer believes, what they’re doing, what they’re aware of. All of those things go into the kind of purchase decisions that they’ll make.
Tracy Landau
Well, that keeps it interesting for all of us.
Jon Copeland
Keeps it very interesting.
Tracy Landau
And then we our research is online. We’ve gotten into some video research.
Jon Copeland
Right, right. Yeah. We’ve gotten into some really interesting qualitative methods that; we’ve got some new capabilities to use video to capture qualitative responses.
You’ll get four times as much content in a video capture than you would in a written, open-ended question response. You know, oftentimes cost can be what can be a barrier to doing qualitative research because it’s just so elaborative, it involves getting people to all show up at the same time at a focus group facility.
Tracy Landau
Yeah. And right.
Jon Copeland
Well, with technology we can address a lot of those issues. Make it a lot more cost effective for our clients to do that.
Tracy Landau
Awesome. Technology has helped us so much. And who would’ve thought, I mean now just they’re working at home like in hybrid models.
Well, what’s the big myth? Let’s talk about research itself.
Jon Copeland
Yes.
Tracy Landau
So, what’s one big myth about research that you’d like to dispel?
Jon Copeland
Generational labels.
Tracy Landau
Ah, yes.
Jon Copeland
This is a big one. Generational labels. We’re talking about things like Millennial boomer, Gen X. These are really kind of imprecise ways of talking about age groups; generalizing it, stereotyping even, you know, and by some standards I fall into Gen X, by others, I’m a millennial. And with each of those carries its own set of biases that we bring to the table when we think about them. So, you know, generational labels, they’re kind of falling out of favor in social sciences. And it, I don’t know. We just found that it’s more helpful for us to segment our consumer by their behaviors, by the things that they do. And we find that really helps us narrowing on an ideal target.
Nicole Hill
And those generational labels and targeting based exclusively on demographics before you really get into the behaviors can actually be really problematic and guide brands in a direction that’s, not at all, you know, in alignment with their goals.
So we’ve had customers that have made some, you know, assumptions about who their audience was and luckily we were able, through research to say, “Hey, you know, this is what you thought your, who you thought your audience was, but realistically the prime audience for your product that your product’s best going to serve and whose values align with yours is this other audience over here. And if you built your brand around the audience, you thought you should be speaking to, right, you might miss a significant opportunity.”
Jon Copeland
We had a client come to us with a probiotic product, innovative probiotic product, and they had a very narrowly defined idea about who their ideal consumer was, what they did, their gender, their age, all of it.
And we said, well, let’s take a step back and survey just the probiotic consumer. The people who are taking probiotics at least a couple times a week. And what we found is that by doing so we can cast a wider net, but still have a targeted positioning for the brand. So, we found that that was much more helpful.
And we don’t wanna just throw demographics out. That’s, that’s not what I’m saying. Our approach is to identify that by behavioral segment. And then within that we can start looking at things like age, psychographics, income, other demographics. And that’ll help us with our positioning, our targeting, our messaging.
Nicole Hill
Well, and with that, it’s like, you don’t wanna ever say our products target audience, they’re the millennials, right, or they’re Gen X or whatever. Because first of all, that’s such a huge group of people that have different needs, different priorities, different values. And so, when we can start from that place of behavior like Jon’s talking about, that’s where we can really align on what those, what those needs, values, and purchase intent might be for someone looking for another product in a similar category or with a similar benefit.
And it also, in both the pet and the human space, we really see supplement consumers as early adopters. So usually if you’re talking about a new functional ingredient or a benefit that’s framed a little bit differently, that’s where you’re going to see the groups of folks who are already relatively proactive about their nutrition or their pet’s nutrition.
They’re already doing some amount of research in terms of what products should I buy, investigating what’s out there and looking into things, and so that’s really where you’re also going to have some signals from those groups about what might be coming next.
Jon Copeland
And even the food and beverage category, what we’re seeing recently is more interest in probiotics as an immunity focused ingredient.
And so, these are things we’ve just gotta keep our finger on the pulse of and be aware of because it’s a changing environment.
Tracy Landau
It really is. Give us an example of a research project where bias came into play.
Nicole Hill
I think a lot of our projects do because so many things start with certain assumptions, and we’ve even had them on the products side. A client that we’re working with on the brand front, they had made some tweaks to their product formulation before they scaled up and said, “Hey, you know, we think it has a pretty strong scent to it,” and this was a pet supplement, a soft chew. They said “it has a pretty strong scent to it. We’re concerned that pet parents might be turned off when they’re opening this jar and have to give this product to their pet, and it might keep them from repeat purchase.”
Tracy Landau
So, this was something internally that they had experienced. They were worried about the scent.
Nicole Hill
So, they had that concern, and they communicated that test and said, “Hey, you know, we talked about can, how might we test this?” And we said, “well, that’s a, you know, valid thing to wanna test certainly, yes. But if we’re going to already be sending these prototype products out, why don’t we go ahead and do it in the prototype packaging and also ask multiple questions about the pet parents experience with the product. So, what’s their impression of the packaging in terms of what price point, what level of quality, what level of quality?”
Tracy Landau
It’s the whole experience.
Jon Copeland
That level of information is so valuable.
Nicole Hill
Yes. And with that, we were able also to say what’s their, their personal experience when they open the product, but then when they’re in the presence of their pet, how does their pet react to it, because we are willing to compromise a lot for our pets.
So, we might say, “oh, we don’t really like the smell of this pet’s treat or food. But if they love it, like that’s what brings me joy and I’m willing to kinda move past that.” So, in that research we found out that almost no one mentioned anything about the smell of the product. So that was great. But over 30% of the pets spit the treat or spit the chew out. So over 30% of the pets spit the chew out and spit it out. If you’re talking about a product that you’re about to sell on Amazon, where we all know so many folks shop by reviews. If you buy this product and no matter what great ingredients it has, what great benefits it offers.
Tracy Landau
The reviews will kill it.
Nicole Hill
Your pet won’t consume it. One, you’re not gonna buy it again. Right. Two, you might write a review saying, “I would’ve loved to give this to my pet, but they just wouldn’t eat it,” and then it’s going to impact others’ behaviors in terms of their willingness to buy it.
So, we were able to flag that for the customer and they were able to address that formulation challenge before they scaled up their product production, their packaging, labels, all of that and really proactively address that. And this was, you know, a big product launch for them. This was their first product launch in the pet space. So, it was really critical to the company that it was successful, not just for that product, but also for the other products they intended to launch thereafter. So being proactive about that, and again, testing our own assumptions. Testing our own buyer. Because yes, if you give it to your pet and you are part of this company that’s, you know, trying it out and you’re really excited giving it to your pet or you’re, you know, like, oh, to get my pet to eat this, I have to wrap it in something, that’s not a controlled experience in terms of how that pet’s going to receive it, because they’re also picking up on all of your nonverbal cues.
So that allowed, you know, people who maybe didn’t have that intention behind the product to give it to their pets and report back, you know, what their experience was.
Jon Copeland
And so, just can’t stress how important it is to test your stuff before it goes out there.
Tracy Landau
So, the thing I love about all of this is this is not just data collection and I’m just thinking of, you know, sometimes some of the inquiries we get is, you know, I have IRI data, I have scan data, or I have general industry or consumer research pieces that the data’s interesting and important, but it’s just one narrow view of a situation. Wait, it doesn’t tell you exactly what to do.
Jon Copeland
How do I shape my messaging? How do I position this? What’s my strategic angle here? What’s gonna be my competitive edge can go into the market? Just knowing the market size of something doesn’t tell you that, so that’s really where we come in and we get, really get into what the consumer is aware of. What they’re thinking, what they’re doing. And in that process, we’re able to come back with that actionable insight that gives ’em that edge.
Nicole Hill
Well, and one of the things I love about it too is we’re not just coming in with all of the knowledge, which to be fair, MarketPlace as a collective has quite a bit in the spaces we serve due to the nature of, of the strategy and creative work we do and, and the promotional work we do. We really have deep knowledge in that space, but we also use research to test our own theories and assumptions.
Tracy Landau
That’s right. We don’t know it all. We don’t, and you know, we don’t wanna make our own assumptions that could be a negative as well. We wanna make sure that we’re being objective across the board.
Nicole Hill
And we’ve even used it to inform our packaging design where we’ve developed packaging design for a product that in, you know, one case I can think of, we were, we were building a brand from the ground up and with the intention, they wanted to directly challenge a market leader in their space.
And so, we developed the strategy around the position that would support that. We developed amazing, our team developed the best packaging concepts. They were so compelling and distinct and differentiating and with factors woven in like, this has to perform in pet specialty, but also on Amazon. And how might this all come together?
Well, we tested that packaging concept that the client selected against those category leaders. While it performed well, we felt like it could do better. So, we took that information and what we saw back to our team and said, “Hey, you know, on this quality and this quality, it didn’t quite push over the top of the competitor and the way we’d like. How might we address that?” And our creative team, one of the things that I love about their strategic strengths, you know, they’re not just, they are creating things for the sake of creating beauty, although they do fantastic. They’re beautiful, beautiful designs. Beautiful designs, but they really think about how it connects with folks on a personal level. You know, what emotions does it evoke? What sense does it convey? Is this a very like science forward product? Is it a warm and fuzzy product? What do we want? What emotional connection do we want to make? And so, the team pushed the design further.
And then when we retested again with a new panel of folks. Not only did it outperform the category leader in terms of the key values we wanted to hit on, but it was also performed as the first click people would make when we mocked it up, in an Amazon experience, a store listing, or product listing experience; not only over the category leader, but also over a leading global brand that also plays in that space. So, it gave not only the brand, a lot of confidence in terms of going to market with that packaging design, but then we use a lot of that data to inform retailer pitch presentations. So then when you can filter the data by “Okay, you know, we had a large enough panel that we could filter and still have a really sizable, sample size,” and we were able to use those insights to inform a retailer pitch presentation to make the case for why this product should be added to store shelves when we’re talking about pet specialty retailers around the US.
Tracy Landau
Yeah, this is great. So, we’re talking b2b, business to business, business to consumer, business to everyone, B2E. We’re talking various different industries. All of these different lenses we can wrap around this including digital versus, you know, brick and mortar. And so, that’s the whole full circle viewpoint that marketplace offers.
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Jeremy Higgins
Hello podcast listeners. I’m Jeremy Huggins, director of Naming and Verbal Identity. Over the course of 12 years at Marketplace, I’ve had my share of hits and misses when it comes to predicting trends. For example, a few hits from the early 20 teens: FODMAPs, the sparkling water takeover, personalized cat nutrition, and without apology or shame, a few misses from the same time period.
The rise of Cat Jerky, that’s Jerky for cats. The disappearance of authenticity as a brand driver. The final death of QR codes. Those QR codes got me good. So predictive insight wise, what’s next? As a collective of 25 food, pet, and wellness junkies? What a solid oxymoron, by the way, wellness junkie. We have a lot of ideas, but speaking very personally, I can’t stop thinking about fungus.
I’m about ready to call this decade, the fungal twenties. From functional beverages to the mycelium revolution, to yeast innovation, to psilocybin assisted therapy. Fungus is very much among us, and I am incredibly excited about its potential to dramatically shape the next decade. Cats, QR codes, fungus, fun.
It is fun. But beyond the genuine fun of trend prediction or why do we engage in this or any type of predictive insight? Primarily because it helps our partners imagine and identify product development and market gap opportunities, but there’s another valuable benefit, less tangible, but just as important.
We do it because it requires and fosters collective problem solving, intellectual agility and tactical creativity. It helps ensure that we stay open to new ways of doing things, but perhaps an illustration.
You’re at your favorite grocer. You have your eye on a kombucha, or a juice may be, or even an alcohol-free beer, whatever your mood. You are an educated consumer, so you pick it up and turn it over to check out the ingredients. It’s looking like a winner until you get to two words, some unintelligible phrase you’ve never seen. It genuinely looks like the name of a lesser-known Roman emperor. Or a spell at Hogwarts ax. At best, you are immediately Googling.
At worst, you’re putting that baby right back on the shelf. Ew. This very real scenario. Came to us from the marketing team at a specialty chemicals company in Europe. They had a branded ingredient, this innovative natural microbial control agent, AKA a natural preservative, that prolongs the shelf life of beverages.
Super exciting stuff except for one little roadblock. This ingredient is derived from dinex spa, an edible fungus referred to in the scientific literature by several names, a few of which you would want to run into on the back of a package. I won’t share those names here, but I will let you know that I take great satisfaction in having ensured that the phrase jelly mushroom never sees the back of a bottle can or carton.
Ew. So, what does this have to do with actionable insight? Here is specifically what this company asked us to do, help them come up with a common name for this branded ingredient. In contrast to the brand name, the common name is the generic descriptor meant to ensure consumer understanding that shows up in the ingredients list.
Think brand name, Splenda, common name sucralose. Or if you saw the logo for Bio Perrin on the front of your supplement, you will see it listed as a black pepper fruit extract on the back. As a European company, they wanted a partner in the US who could help assess existing options and come up with new options that would both satisfy regulatory requirements and appeal to consumers in North America.
As you can imagine, there is no template for this. We help our partners with all manner of product launches, naming projects, and consumer market research, but this was so specific as to be unprecedented. We were delighted by the challenge. First, employing a mix of research, collective experience, and hypothesis.
We developed a rigorous, useful way to evaluate a long list of options. Assessing these common name options through the lens of four criteria. Clarity. Is the name at all misleading regarding its source? For example, compatibility linguistically. How well does the word reflect function, features, and benefits, currency? Does the word reflect relevant macro shifts like transparency and clean labeling and connotation? Does the word or any portion of it carry negative connotation? Are there cultural or emotional concerns like the ick factor? Then we use this four-pronged assessment to eliminate some options and recommend others to proceed with.
We added a few options of our own for consideration based in base data set. The next task was to determine how many names to move into the consumer testing phase of the project. Now, having developed countless surveys and other forms of custom research over the years, we knew that timing and budget were going to be the primary consideration for how many names we could test.
So, we were able to bring our experience and some specific parameters to our partner and guide them in making a decision on the final number of options to test. Why spend time telling you that? Because it’s the type of detail that in the larger picture, would be easy to just skip past as sequential logic.
To do this, you must first do that, and in some ways, yeah, it is. But we know that this is one of those steps where projects often get hung up in countless meetings and email back and forth between marketing and C-suite and other decision makers. An important part of what we offer as actionable insight is anticipating such concerns and preemptively offering guidance and something akin to project therapy to help make sure things stay on track. This is a very specialized internal form of actionable insight that ensures that things go well. So after agreeing to a final set of common names to move forward with, we knew that in order to get the quantity of data we needed to ensure the quality of data we needed within the confines of the timeline and budget, we agreed to, we would need to find a new way to test these options, which resulted in our searching and negotiating for the use of a new testing platform. I’m getting excited again, just telling you about all this, but I will spare you the rest of the details. The summary is that we set up a testing method, developed and programmed surveys, analyzed the results, delivered those results in a digestible format, and made our final recommendation to our partner.
They agreed with our recommendation. The relevant regulatory authorities approved our recommendation, and were confident that consumers will accept this recommendation, a win all around, all of it, built on actionable insight. We are really proud of that work. We predict good things for this ingredient, and I raise a glass of naturally preserved juice to it.
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Tracy Landau
So, do we have an example that you’d like to give on, like the different types of actionable insights? I know there’s like lead gen and there’s…
Jon Copeland
Yeah. I can think of some, real great success stories for our clients where we’ve, conducted a, you know, really comprehensive survey and spent a lot of time thinking about the target consumer and gone out and found out what they believe, what are they doing.
And from that we’re able to inform white papers. Which have been excellent tools for lead generation. Having that custom research for the white paper makes it so compelling and so interesting. It’s something that our customer has that no one else has. So, it’s not information that’s already out there, but something new and compelling. We’re able to use that, those data in pitch presentations, in just even internal decision making. Some of those insights from those, from just that one survey can be extremely valuable. So, I think that’s something we’ve done really well is helping our clients derive a ton of value of even just doing one research study.
Tracy Landau
We get an inquiry, and someone wants to talk to us about research. Walk us through that process.
Nicole Hill
I think the first step is always we wanna understand what is the question that they’re wanting to answer or what is the problem or opportunity they’re facing. For us, usually the question that they have usually begets more questions.
So, it’s a very curious endeavor. We bring that to the table and really want to understand the central focus of what we’re hoping to get out of it, and not necessarily the result that we’re expecting, but what are we intending to inform? Is it a new product development, a product line extension, a brand position, a promotional effort?
Is it a retail channel question? You know, are we, should we be looking at club or food, drug and mass or pet specialty or media preference?
Jon Copeland
Should we be handling to be on Instagram?
Tracy Landau
This is different. So, you’re, you manage this much like a brand project, just a brand strategy project that we do for a product that goes to market or a new business.
Nicole Hill
Absolutely. I think for us, research and brand strategy, business strategy all go hand in hand. As much as we can say, “oh, here’s what we think your distinct position is and could be,” and that’s valid, there are nuances that it would be irresponsible for us to just make an assumption based on.
So while we could certainly get to a certain place based on our own knowledge and experience in the category, the nuances that I’m talking about are things like, “okay, if we’re in a food category and this product that’s already on the market is redoing its packaging, and we have to help determine the hierarchy of claims that go on packaging, we wanna know, do people care more about a fiber notation on the pdp, on the principal display panel, or prebiotic. Is it something where just two calories per treat for a dog treat is more important? Or is it that it’s big flavor in a small bite? Or is it both of those things?” And that also helps inform our creative team. When we sit from a strategy lens, we’re able to say, these are the most important things we have to convey on this package.
Cuz it’s not just about the words but also the, the positioning, the design approach and all of those things. And I think, you know, we always try to come from a place of not presuming what the answer is. Yes, of course we’ll have some grounded theories, but we want, we want to be surprised.
We want to find things in the data that are new to us because that means there’s probably, we’re onto something, right?
Tracy Landau
Yeah. A seed of inspiration. Something bigger and bigger. What are some of the assumptions that customers or potential customers have when they ask us about research?
Nicole Hill
I think in addition to the demographic piece that Jon talked about, it’s really the concept of qualitative and quantitative data and what they think it’s used for. So, I think one of the misnomers is that they’re two separate things and yes, while they can be, we can also ask qualitative questions in a survey that’s primarily capturing quantitative data. While it does take quite a bit of coding to go through that, yes, it in some cases is definitely worth it.
One of the ways that we prefer to design research when it’s digging into an area where it’s a totally new frontier is to start with a smaller respondent pool and ask, do qualitative surveys, or not surveys, I’m sorry, and do qualitative interviews to really, again, overcome those biases. Make sure we’re not just looking at it through our own lens and that also is a great place to uncover opportunity. And then based on that design, the long form, broader survey panel in terms of the quantity of people we’re asking the questions to that gets at more of the quantitative insights. And both of those things together really make a rich dataset that informs strategy.
And I think the thing in all of what we’ve talked about, you know, thus far, is really that research is not, it’s not the end all, be all. It is not the one singular answer. It’s information to make a more informed decision. It’s asking questions on the front end to potentially mitigate pain or challenge or hurdles that maybe you could have easily avoided had you just gathered a little bit more information on the front end.
And in many cases, it can save time, it can save money, and it can inform a much stronger position. It can allow brands to go to market with a much stronger position than if they had just gone based on their own assumptions. It shortens the runway essentially.
Jon Copeland
We frequently look into is we want to know like what are the deal breakers for the target consumer?
What are the things that will cause them to categorically exclude consideration of a product? So, we find those things are just as important as what will make them consider the product.
Nicole Hill
That’s a great Lens to apply to, like plant-based, for instance. So, when we look at the decision-making process or someone in the plant-based spaces, you wanna know, are they first looking for a plant-based option or are they looking for a flavor, a format, a recipe, and then when they’re making their decision, cost, nutrition, sustainability packaging, how are those things going into play and in what order of priority? I think that’s also something that’s really important to consider when we look at data. It’s not just “do people care about this” or “is it important?”
But it is what is the relative importance mm-hmm. Of each of those things to the other things that are considering in their decision-making process.
Jon Copeland
That informs everything, it informs your packaging, your messaging, any kind of design execution. It informs everything from a, on a strategic level.
Tracy Landau
Speaking of packaging testing. I was involved in some research for a sandwich brand that was offered for decades at the convenience store or level, and there was an opportunity to be in retail. And so, the company just offered that same product at retail with no packaging evolution of any kind, and it did not do well in retail. Reason being, as Jon, you’ve mentioned earlier, right? You have to know who you’re selling to, who’s your target audience? The target audience at this major retailer? It was not the same target audience as in the convenience store.
Jon Copeland
Different needs, different values.
Tracy Landau
Different needs, different values, different preferences. A convenience, smart packaging. Having a window in the package that showed the food product inside was important. Different experience at retail with bright lights in a store. that window did not show the product very well, but a beautiful photograph on the product, which is what we tested and discovered, made all of the difference in the world.
So, we made beautiful packages with the hero. artwork on it of the sandwich with some suggestions on like, you know, add lettuce and tomato. The lettuce and tomato, the green and the veggies were in the background. Beautiful, made all the difference in the world. And so, they were able to perform better, with those insights and those assumptions that we talked about earlier being kind of dangerous and really crimped sales and really cause them to have more, they could have avoided that if they emergency action. Right. It’s, it’s knowing your customer.
Nicole Hill
Well, on the upside of that too, being not just taking the emergency action to defend their shelf space. But if I recall correctly, I think, didn’t they end up like actually getting more product picked up in the store because not only was their brand revitalized with the awesome packaging work the team did, but they also were able to then bring that, those data points in from that consumer testing to communicate to the retailer “like not only do we go this extra mile to fully redo our product packaging, but we also tested it and here were the results.”
Tracy Landau
So, let’s talk about the work that both of have done on innovation driving research and that is escalating for us excitingly so. We’ve done a lot more of that work recently. So just tell us a little bit about innovation as it relates to research.
Nicole Hill
Well, one of my favorite things about the research we do that informs innovation is the, the research that we do at Marketplace to inform our team ourselves, all of our product products. It really helps MarketPlace build our IP in many cases. But also, just it accelerates the ability at which we can go into a project and also it allows the research that we do in specific product segments, in specific markets, to be started from a place of already having a level of information and insights that is beyond what maybe we would’ve had otherwise had we not been doing this custom research. So most recently we did a pretty significant survey to supplement consumers across the US.
And we used it to inform, some of our speaking engagements on consumer trends as well as, you know, we can apply it to our B2B efforts, our consumer brand efforts. And it’s everything from what ingredients are people driven by? What needs states, but also getting into the nuances of things like language are, is someone more likely to consume a product that’s for general wellness, a multivitamin product, an immunity product, an immunity, and gut health product? What combination of words and the positioning of something because there are many ingredients that could inform a product to any of those purposes. Like how should you position a product to one, capture market opportunity, but two, distinguish yourself in this space. Cause there’s a balance that from an innovation pipeline standpoint, you wanna strike in terms of opportunity size, but also distinction in the market and that’s really exciting. I think formats are always a really exciting place to see what’s growing and changing, because we’re of course familiar with things like gummies, but beverage is a very rich space for functional ingredients and from a formulation perspective, friendlier than a lot of other CPG food products.
So, that’s a space we like to see. Okay. Well, what types of beverages, let’s not just look at beverage, as a whole, but is it functional teas or coffees or sparkling drinks? Is it soda? What might that look like? So, when you see brands like Poppy in the prebiotic soda space, you know, seeing what’s already out there and then seeing what other opportunities might be adjacent to that in the beverage space that a brand like Poppy could extend into. Or that another brand may be wanting to enter the functional beverage space. What might they set their sights on? And really following consumer demand and consumer interest. Following that lead can sometimes really inspire some new and exciting things. So, I think the innovation piece, you know, we’ve done everything from informing a new product development from scratch or helping someone position, maybe they have a product in mind, but they just weren’t quite sure how to position it in the pet space.
We had a client who said, “Hey, we created these tiny treats.” They already had a line of products in the pet space and the pet treat space, but these were different because they were smaller. Therefore, lower calorie and or they said, “we wanna go to market with these as a training treat.” And we thought, okay, training treat, that makes sense.
But that’s a pretty narrow opportunity in terms of the duration of a dog’s life in which they’re being trained. It’s usually not an everyday all day, enduring thing. The occasions are limited. And then also there’s the facet of like, well, why else might someone want to give their dog these tiny treats?
Maybe it’s a small dog. Maybe you’re someone who likes to treat your dog frequently throughout the day, but don’t wanna maybe overindulge them. Yeah. And then there’s also, you know, the palatability piece for dogs who are picky eaters. You can sprinkle them in or on your dog’s food to add a high level of palatability, or to celebrate for special occasions.
So, in this case we said, okay, well when we do this research form positioning standpoint, let’s look at it from the lens of, perhaps it’s a training trait, but we also want to look at it through these other angles. And ultimately, what came out of the research and through the insights we applied to it was, okay, let’s, it actually makes sense to have the same product positioned as a frequent treat, a tiny treat, a training treat and a topper, and that you can have this treat that serves all of these purposes in one bag. And it ended up working really well. And then of course our creative team did their amazing work on the packaging packages packaging, and it got picked up in pet specialty and food drug and Mass, which is a pretty unique dynamic head space doesn’t for, especially for a brand that’s not one of the, you know, the major brands in food already. So that was a really exciting win and something that they saw as really a steppingstone to growing their product line and brand and making sure that each product met the need of the audience, but also avoided cannibalization of other products that were in other sub-brands within their line.
Jon Copeland
Yeah. I mean, it’s really about finding those gaps that are out there. And that’s where applying strategy can really help drive sales, introduce new products into the market, do all kinds of wonderful things.
Tracy Landau
Yeah, so we’ve helped our customers make a lot of decisions by providing that action, actual insights that lead to the intelligence that they use to make determinations about brands, line extensions, innovation, package design, product type. It’s pretty limitless as to the types of questions that we can help our customers answer. And we’re really curious. So, we receive. A project and the project are budget aside, best scope ever, which would be whatever you want it to be. What do you want it to be? What would the most wildest dreams sort of project for research, what would that be like, Jon?
Jon Copeland
So, there are some really cool, cool retail simulation technologies that are out, right out on simulation. They have these big screens where you can recreate a, like a walkthrough experience of like a convenience store or retail shelf space. And you can put literally anything on the shelves, and you can use it for comparison testing, anything you wanna do with your package testing. You could do it right there and have the consumer experience it as close to what, I mean the only way you can make it more realistic would be to actually make a store and stock the shelves.
Tracy Landau
And follow people around, which would be super creepy.
Jon Copeland
I think it’s so cool. It’s something I always knew I would do. Yeah. Yeah. I’m telling you, technology is really, it’s changing the face of, of market research and insights. And so, we’re able to get really, really close now to what that consumer’s experience is with, you know, in the retail environment or maybe with unboxing, with just using the product.
And from there we can tailor our communications and tailor our strategy to really speak to those experiences that we observed in our testing. There’s just so much you can do right now. The qualitative methods game is really changing in an exciting way.
With some qualitative methods, people can do these things on their own time. So, if they, we wanna learn about what they think about maybe via. What’s something they can watch on their own time without having to interact directly with me? They can then record a video response to tell us what they thought about that video.
Give us some really rich qualitative data. Without necessarily me having to prompt them. Now, the advantage of having a moderator would be that I can ask follow up questions in real time, pull information out. Yeah, we can probe. We find something interesting. We can probe on that a little bit more.
So, my thought is that why not do it all? You know, why not have the, an integrated approach?
Tracy Landau
Yeah, absolutely.
Jon Copeland
Because then that way you get a the most complete set of data that you could hope for.
So, at times customers or potential customers approach us and they’re either working with a market research firm or they’re considering us alongside a market research firm.
So, market research firms are great. They have a very specific thing that they do. So, can you share with our audience what is the difference between a market research firm and what they have to offer they have and what MarketPlace has to offer?
So, I think our real sweet spot is understanding the consumer. Helping our clients target the right consumer, and then understanding what that consumer’s aware of, what their attitudes are and what they’re doing, what their behaviors are, and having that approach is something that I think is kind of unique that we do. So, we’re very, very consumer oriented, even in our B2B work. And so, I think that combined with our in-house expertise and our just absolutely amazing design capability, those things all kind of come together in a way that makes our insight offering, I think really, really unique for the categories we serve.
Nicole Hill
I think a lot of it goes to also that “why” that we talked about earlier. So, when we look at market research, a market research firm might share what percentage of supplements launched last year, featured medicinal mushrooms as a primary ingredient. That’s based on sales data scan, data register, and how products are coded. What we’re looking at that would be complimenting what that market research does, so it’s definitely a complimentary effort is we’re looking at, people believe they’re consuming which is not always the same as what they are and how they identify those things. So, in our recent supplement research, we asked how many folks consumed a product that contained a medicinal mushroom ingredient in the past 12 months.
I think it was something like 8%. We then separately asked a question which of the following, have you consumed in a supplement in the past 12 months? And we specified specific medicinal mushrooms. Lions main, reishi, CORs, etc. And collectively the audience, I think it was a significantly greater number than those who noted medicinal mushrooms, right? So, a lot of it also gets into language and what do people associate with things? And even if you see on some of the social media comments on products that contain lion’s mane for instance, people will say, you know, “how can this be vegan if it contains lion’s mane?”
And it’s like, well, it’s not the actual mane of a lion. This is a, you know, a mushroom. But there’s also that gap in awareness and it identified for education, awareness, and promotion. But also, it helps to identify where maybe there’s some growth in a market that might not have pure true scan data to build those insights off of, because some of those things are purchased in different locations than your traditional food drug mass club.
And specialty retailers, they may be purchased in smaller shops or from a chiropractor’s office or things like that, a naturopath’s office that may not have scan data being reported and even from an e-commerce standpoint. A lot of that data, you know, the big firms are looking and actively trying to find ways to capture that information in a way that’s meaningful to their customers.
Because everyone wants to know, yes, I wanna know what’s happening in the pet space at Petco and PetSmart and Pet Supplies Plus, and all of those other, you know, pet specialty players. But I also wanna know what’s happening on Amazon and happening in the direct-to-consumer space. Because while there are, there’s a lot of desire to be able to go direct to consumer, it’s still a very small portion of the overall e-commerce ecosystem. So, we wanna look at things like that and also be able to filter, okay, when we are looking at that direct-to-consumer audience, or when we are looking at that club shopper, what are their values? Because their values as a club shopper who purchases X, Y, and Z products may be very different than someone who is purchasing for Amazon or direct to consumer or from an independent retailer and getting at those nuances that’s part of, I think, the exciting…
Jon Copeland
I mean, these are behavioral sub-segments.
Nicole Hill
Yeah. The exciting insights that research can help uncover. So, whether you’re, you know, when you’re asking someone about their medicinal mushroom consumption versus actually asking them about lions’ mane, we’re going to get different answers and that goes to, you know, what people perceive as not necessarily always their reality, but we also need to meet them where they are and communicate with language.
Jon Copeland
I think what we’re able to Offer that compliment is we can help get really clear on what the consumer’s perception is and from there build out a strategy.
Tracy Landau
Right. So, the market research firm has to offer, and what we have to offer are, again, complimentary side by side. We’re not ” we don’t do what they do, right. And we don’t do what they do do,” but we can work together, right? We’re all about finding the research and insights that you need with this passionate, curious team that asks the best questions ever. So, on that note, thank you Jon, and thank you Nicole for joining today. This was an exciting episode two, lots to know about research and insights. And it’s a very exciting topic that informs pretty much everything that we do and should inform pretty much everything our customers do, right? In a world that’s, I’m picking words that you both said too, ever-changing.
Jon Copeland
Right.
Tracy Landau
Thank you for making it to the end of our second episode of Food Full Circle, a podcast brought to you by MarketPlace. To make sure you don’t miss an episode, follow us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you like the show, please share it, tell a friend, and consider rating and reviewing us. And most importantly, if you’re bettering the lives of people and pets and would like to understand your customer better, we’d love to work with you.
Email us at hello@marketplacebranding.com. We’d be so excited to discuss your next project over a discovery call. Until next time, I’m Tracy Landau.
In Closing
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