An overview of popular UX research methods

Qualitative research can provide unique and powerful insights to help brands and organisations shape anything from new product development, improve service delivery, expand markets or improve their targeting to their audience if they’re looking to improve diversity or expand.

But as you’d expect, there’s not one approach to qualitative research that fits all needs. Having an understanding of what type of research approach is going to provide the best results is as important as recruiting the right type of people to use in your cohort, the structure and moderation of the sessions and then the analysis that happens after the research data has been collected.

For the purposes of this post we’re going to focus on the research methods associated with user experience (UX) research for digital service delivery or brand engagement, be that mobile or web based interaction.

A review of UX research methods commonly

We pulled together a summary of the main types of user experience research that are conducted by research organisations, such as ourselves. This list isn’t exhaustive, but it covers the types most frequently used and should give you somewhere to start if you’re thinking of conducting a research project and need overview of the benefits of each.

A good research project often has a combination of methods deployed to gain a richer data set to analyse and draw any conclusions from. Equally, whilst most research is often conducted at the start of projects, deploying research at later stages of development of a project can provide equally important data and insight, and continues to provide a sense of user involvement in a project that they might be heavily invested in.

User interviews (In-depth interviews)

User interviews are a rich way to discover information that might otherwise be hard to find. In summary, a user interview is a one to one conversation between researcher and user (or potential user) that has an objective and is usual has some form of structure to it.

They can be structured interviews (i.e. a script you follow) or semi-structured (a rough subject plan, that is followed loosely).

They are usually conducted to be generative, to find information that you currently don’t know from the people who are going to be using whatever you’re creating. They are usually used at the early stages of projects. When using as a generative source of data it’s best that they are structured, so that you’re asking the same things from different people. Generating a wider perspective on the things you’re trying to discover, but in a structured format that allows you to compare the data more easily.

You can use interviews in a contextual format too. Best conducted in the usual use environment of the users, to provide the contextual element that can affect behaviour and thinking. For example, you could interview users whilst they complete a series of tasks on a legacy system to discover what aspects they might look to improve or issues they encounter.

Finally, interviews can be conducted on a continuous basis. More than anything this can give users a sense of agency in any development process, and emphases how important user input into the design process is to all stakeholders. But it can also help identify and collect data on anomalies that might occur only on an irregular basis. This approach can produce data of a similar nature to a Diary Study, that is detailed below.

Card sorting

This technique can be great for information categorisation, most importantly, from the contextual point of your users.. 

When we think of “this subject” or “function”, what else is similar and by what name do we associate it with? 

Too often assumptions can be made around this type of behaviour that don’t represent the norm for a specific cohort. With this considered, strategic and representative recruitment (as with all qualitative research) is essential.

This can be particularly helpful when working on Information Architecture planning or navigation design. 

• What word would you associate with this type of activity or service?

• Where would you expect to find this service offer?

Card sorting can also be a good break in other types of qualitative research, if you’re running a Focus Group or have just completed an interview. It can be moderated in an engaging manner, and involve movement and debate.

Field study

This is form of qualitative research is conducted with users in their usual use environment. 

Where many UX research methods might happen in mutually convenient spaces for researcher and cohort, or even in the cohort's own space but somewhere other than their desk or usual work space, Field Research happens in a user's default use environment, to ensure variables are as aligned to typical use as possible. 

Outside of a UX use, we might use the method of deploying Secret Shoppers to provide a similar type of insight, putting users into the physical space that they typically engage with a brand or organisation and observing or interviewing them about their experience in that environment or space, whilst giving them a task often completed in that space.

Field study work can bring memories of past experiences to the fore, or environmental variables into play that are absent from other forms of qualitative research.

The challenge with Field Study research is that it can be time consuming and also, it can feel more intrusive than other forms of research, so you’ll need buy-in from the cohort. The flip side of this is that “buy-in” also brings a sense of agency and involvement that might not be achieved from other forms of research.

Diary Study

A Diary Study is a documented account from a user of their use of a digital process, platform or task. When a user records their experience of this task, interface or process in a format that can be collated and analysed at a later date.

These provide longitudinal insights that might not be apparent in an in-depth interview or field study, where you’re either asking a user to recount a situation that happened in the past or illustrate how they complete a specific task in the moment. Somethings only become apparent through continued use, over time.

As these are unsupervised, thinking about a framework to simplify completion can help users. Perhaps a script for them to consider on a regular interval or completing a common task. Equally, providing them with simple tools for recording or documenting the study, so that the data gathering isn’t a chore in any way.

Diary Studies either require a degree of foresight to implement ahead of a project commencement, or a project of enough complexity or scale that it’s going to take sometime to implement - i.e. they need a larger time frame to bring real value.

Focus Groups 

A rich source of qualitative data, with ability to test ideas and concepts in front of a recruited cohort of representative users (or potential future users). However, they need to be used with caution, as they can lead to creating a data set that is not representative of the actions people may take when operating in isolation. They also need to be moderated well.

Focus groups are good at unearthing ideas or concepts that might not see the light of day when talking to people one on one. Ideas that might seem obvious, or for that matter, obscure, might not be raised by an individual, that might be raised in a group conversation where individuals feel more comfortable in a supportive social dynamic.

They can provide a wider sense of feelings about a concept or idea, that can help create data that might not come from other forms of qualitative activities.

Good moderation of Focus Groups is essential. A good moderator will present concepts and ideas and encourage discussion or exploration, without creating bias. They can encourage participants to explore an idea in greater detail, but should not suggest or indicate that by exploring a particular subject or concept in detail, is in any sense their advocation of a particular idea.

Equally a good moderator will be able to manage more dominant members in a group and ensure that all members of the group are able to participate and express their views, without being dimissed. If a group has been recruited well, all members of the group should have valuable data to share with the moderator. 

Groups need to be recruited well to ensure they represent the audience or user groups that you should have identified whilst establishing your research plan, these can be current users or future (prospective) users. This is too often an area of research work that is rushed. Without good planning here, the data gathered can bias the whole outcome and value of the work.

Equally, having a well structured plan and introduction to your Focus Group is an essential piece of good moderation. Tell your group what the objective of the day is, how long it’s likely to take, what you’ll be doing and how you might be recording the session. Ensure that everyone is happy with being recorded, it might be that some are happy to have an audio recording, but might be unhappy with video or photographs being taken. Respect your cohort's wishes and you’ll have a more productive session.

UX research methods in summary 

These are just some of the things to consider when contemplating conducting user research, and just some of the things that we can help you to consider and develop in a strategic manner to ensure you get the most out of any investment in user research.

As with all research, the value of insight that can be gained can be integral to the direction a well conducted project can take. We have conducted many research projects when a client has gone into the work with a particular view, only to come out the other side with a completely new direction or view to take under consideration.

Tools such as software can help with the implementation, recording and analysis of research data, but nothing that will be more valuable than a clear research objective, plan and good moderation.

Need some help to do this?

We’re always happy to help people to get started with this type of work. Whether you’re startup finding your feet or a growing brand wanting to define your audience with greater clarity.

We’ve got a number of ways to help, check out the below to see just some of the ways we can.

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Or, reach out and get in touch to see how we can help….

Audience Segmentation and how to start the process

Image by Anna Sullivan on Unsplash

What is segmentation?

Audience/customer segmentation (for the  purpose of this article we’re going to use the term audience, but it could be interchanged with customer at most points) and market segmentation is the process of splitting audiences or markets into different groups based on various criteria.

Audience segmentation is the segmentation of those people that you are already able to communicate to and are actively engaged with you already, whereas market segmentation is the segmenting of the entire market available to you.

By splitting our audience or markets into these segments we’re able to tailor and develop products, service and communications to specific people with the hope that we’re more effective at providing people with what they want.

Types of segmentation

There are typically 5 types of segmentation used in marketing and product or service development. These are:

Demographic - segmenting your audience by factors such as age, gender, education, occupation.  By dividing your audience by these factors you can reach people in specific life stages or of a particular economic profile.

Psychographic - this type of segmentation relates to things such personality traits, opinions, lifestyle choices or other interests. This can help with distinguishing between two markets that might look demographically similar, but behave differently based on one of factors listed above.

Behavioural - our typical behaviour might make us quite different from another customer in marketing or purchasing. For example, one might like to spend 6 months researching an item online before purchasing in a physical store, someone else might be more impulsive in their purchasing behaviour or someone else like to order on a regular, repetitive basis.

Geographic - Segmentation based on the location of the audience. Might be used for products or services that are designed specifically for a particular climate or culture, or proximity to a particular location you offer services from.

Firmographic - Predominantly used in the B2B market as it relates to the characteristics associated with organisations. It can include factors such as industrial sector, legal status (plc, ltd. etc in the UK), years in business, size (number of employees usually), geographical location. 

As you can see, there are a range of ways of segmenting your market and audience, all of which will have more relevance to different types of product or service.

Starting up and having no audience

When you start a new business in all likelihood you’ll have very little audience and need to start afresh, building and developing a community of people that over time will become your customers.

Unsurprisingly, this means that you’ll have no audience segmentation of any real value to start with. However, this doesn’t mean that you don’t need to think about what audience segmentation you might use in the future and what method of segmentation might be most appropriate.

What you should be able to do is get a sense of your market segmentation. Part of your product and service development should have included establishing who you believe your customers are and what their attributes should be, to help you reach them better by fulfilling their needs. Persona development is a great way to record this and start the process of collecting information that can help with segmentation later.

Persona development

Persona development is an essential part of developing and better understanding your audience. It allows you to record various segmentation factors in one place, ensuring that when you create your products or service, or marketing communications, you’re doing it in an informed manner and targeted at an audience or market profile that you’ve already identified. 

It also helps you to emphasise and in some part understand the needs of your target audience, to help speak their language of needs and meet them in the places they turned to for help or advice.

We wrote another article that is focussed on how and why to develop personas and we’ve also created a basic template for you to download and use to help you get started.

Read our article on persona development and download our persona template.

How to choose what to segment by

Choosing what to segment by is most likely to be driven by the type of product or service you are developing and promoting. In all likelihood, you may find yourself segmenting by a number of different segmentation types. For example, in a B2C market, you could easily find yourself segmenting by both demographic and geographic factors. Imagine a new gym chain developing its targeting around the new branch it has opened.

Again, this is where Persona Development can really help. It can allow you to walk through purchasing journeys with a specific persona in mind. 

What you probably don’t want to do is to segment too much, initially. Each segment requires new communication considerations and development and individual marketing streams on paid or email communications. This takes time and effort, not just to write in the first place, but to maintain and analyse the effectiveness.

With time, you’ll be able to allocate larger budgets to this type of activity, allowing you to utilise more resources to manage and employ greater automation tools to help you streamline both the deployment of the additional segmentation, but also to analysis.

Evolving segments with time

As with all things in developing a new business or organisation, it doesn’t stand still, and you can’t stand still either. As an organisation or business grows its audience, so should your understanding of that audience.

But bigger isn’t always better.

With time and experience, you’ll gain a greater understanding of what works for your organisation with product or service development. There might be other factors at play that shape the trajectory of your business, for example production development or restraints might push you down a particular avenue.

You’ll also start to get a feel for your customers within the market, as your brand develops you’ll get a better understanding of who your people are and why they choose you as a provider of the service or product you offer. 

This will allow you to fine tune your segmentation and personas to better meet the shape of your various customer profiles. Don’t be afraid to revisit already developed persona profiles and adjust them as you learn, all organisational or business growth is a matter of testing and learning, no one knows all the answers from the start and in all likelihood you never will. But you will grow in your understanding of your audience as you grow as an organisation, if you’re listening.

How you can help to gather segment details

We recently wrote a short piece on the wellbeing and wellness sector and what you can do to get a better understanding of your audience needs, including what you can put in place to gain this knowledge. Whilst this article was focussed on the wellbeing sector, the same principles apply, whatever sector you’re operating in.

A richer understanding of your market or audience can come from qualitative research work, but there are things that you can and should do to start this process from day 1. All of these activities will inform how you can approach market and customer segmentation at a later stage. 

These are just a few ideas you could implement.

Feedback from clients

We shape our own workflows and processes as a start-up or early stages business as they are needed, but often what is done in the early years is the foundations that future work is built upon. Building a feedback loop into your service and product delivery can help you normalise a process that can be insightful and rich in detail that can help with shaping segmentation later.

There are various points in the journey that you can implement this types of feedback loop, these are just a few you might what to consider for appropriateness:

On-boarding - when you bring a new customer or audience member on-board you have the opportunity to ask them a series of questions about how they found you, a little bit more about their background, or how they found the on-boarding process. Depending on what service or product you’re providing the depth of this will need to be measured appropriately.

Post project - this is for those delivering service based solutions, rather than product based, but equally it could be used at product delivery. A quick review of what worked, what didn’t, possibly other demographic details can be completed here if you don’t know them already. Some behavioural insight too, frequency of future implementation (of a service) or interest in subscription based services etc.

Fixed reviews - 6 monthly or annual reviews. Follow a similar format to the post project, but allow you to put a date in the calendar to provide a feedback loop from your audience members to you about how they’ve found working with you, what they like etc.

Email

Email and further integration into eCRM platforms are often the frameworks for storing a lot of segmentation data, but also often the place where segmentation of market and audience members is most tangible, visible and frequently used.

Automated email flows, triggered by web behaviour or engagement with other online tools are usually an easy way for you to identify specific behaviour about your audience. An obvious psychographic insight to gain is activity around different types of content type, going back to the article we wrote on wellbeing and performance at work, what types of content are they engaging with that is answering the needs they have in their role at work? Are they seeking to build better interpersonal skills within their team for example, or are they more interested in measurement of productivity and seeing ROI on projects, these factors can help you to decide which comms segment they might need to go into in the future or what product is showing the potential for future development and resource investment.

Web analytics

Web analytics are a great baseline for building segmentation information. There’s geographical data that is relatively easy to collate and segment, although you do need to move it from an anonymous state to an identifiable state using downloads or other exchanges of value on your web platforms. 

But even at an anonymous state it can provide you with helpful insights. What keywords are more popular in what region? What regions are interested in exploring what you have to offer in more detail, and therefore potentially a warmer market for you to explore.

Google Analytics 4 has a lot more granular information available off the shelf now, but you need to configure your tracking correctly in order to gain this insight. As a side note from an ethical point of view, you also need to let those that are visiting your website know that you’re gathering this information about them with the aim of providing them with more appropriate services or products in the future. You should always provide the option to opt out of this type of data collection.

Need some help to do this?

We’re always happy to help people to get started with this type of work. Whether you’re startup finding your feet or a growing brand wanting to define your audience with greater clarity.

We’ve got a number of ways to help, check out the below to see just some of the ways we can.

Or just get in touch…

What role does wellbeing have in performance at work?

Image by Geraldine Lewa on Unsplash

It’s a bit of a leading title, we know, but it’s not always as easy to unpick and analyse the what the answers mean when trying to promote a wellbeing or wellness product into the market.

We undoubtedly have a fast growing wellness market, but is there an equally growing understanding of who buys wellness or wellbeing, particularly in the B2B market?

Wellbeing or wellness of individuals, organisations and even whole nations has become a fast growing sector. McKinsey estimated the global wellness market at $1.5 trillion in 2012 with an annual growth rate of between 5-10%.

With a growing desire for all of us to get more from our personal lives as well as our working lives, this market is unlikely to slow down in the near future. It’s a market with high demand for answers and a slowly growing pool of recognised solution providers. 

The majority of the widely recognised providers are those with a direct to consumer product such as mindfulness and meditation apps, such as Calm and Headspace and now a few broader services offer solutions, such as BetterUp.

However, having worked in the market for various clients and having conducted our own desk research, there remains a need for a greater understanding of who the customer is, their needs and how they are seeking help.

Some market background - The blurred line of organisational vs individual responsibility for wellness

If we focus on the business to business market briefly, and by association the B2B2C market. The world of work has changed irrevocably since the start of the Covid pandemic in 2020, but the writing was on the wall before the pandemic started. With more of us working in hybrid conditions, our work life balance has never before been so unbalanced or hard to establish where one finishes and the other starts.

With this evolution, the line between individual responsibility to ensure personal wellness and the role the organisations that we work for play in this pursuit of wellness, gets more blurred by the day.

Organisational investment in wellness is increasing, as the awareness of the financial impact of reduced wellbeing of employees on performance, grows.

But, as with any market in a rapid growth phase, there is a lot of uncertainty from both solution providers and solution seekers on needs and service delivery. Various questions could be asked from “how do I reduce my stress levels” or “how do help my team communicate better”, through to the more obscure “what role does nature have in my performance at work”. All of these questions are slowly being answered by new or existing providers within the growing sector.

We are going to focus on exploring the sector from the perspective of solution providing organisations and delve a little deeper into what answers they might be seeking as they try to establish themselves in the market. 

Framing the market

To start this ball rolling we wanted to take a step back and think about the need state again. Just how do organisations seek improvements in wellbeing/wellness and what is motivating that, is it a shared sense of moral obligation, or do they in fact seek improvements in organisational performance (and potential financial performance) and wellness is the current favoured route to that?

What is wellness or wellbeing?

Let’s start with some opening clarity, before we get to the more complex matters. Wellness is a broad subject to say the least, it encompasses several areas, some of which still have negative connotations associated with them and are harder to assess, such as the equally broader area of our mental health. These harder to measure areas also include factors such as our levels of stress or anxiety, the quality of our relational skills etc. All of these factors are associated with each other and interrelated. Others factors that can have an impact are easier to measure and assess, such as physical health.

Some organisations have developed holistic frameworks to pull all of these elements together, using terms such as mental fitness, to allow them to encompass a broad service offer and provided measurement capability to allow organisations to report on performance improvements. The primary solution providers in this space offer personal or team coaching solutions.

Other solution or service providers focus on specific areas such as nutritional supplements, meditation, sleep apps or personal training apps. These are much more targeted in their objectives, but as their own markets grow and they look to expand their markets, they start to face the same challenges of the wider holistic providers.

Who buys wellness or wellbeing, or for that matter performance solutions at organisations?

With the growth of understanding and recognition of the importance of wellbeing or wellness at organisations in building resilience, retaining people, building shared values and culture, and ultimately ensuring that they remain profitable and are able to illustrate any return of investment in people programmes, the roles associated with these responsibilities have grown. 

A broad range of titles and responsibilities are now present in many organisations, depending on scale, from more traditional roles such Chief People Officer (or Human Resources Director), Head of Learning and Development, through to roles such as Head of Wellbeing or Head of EDI (Equality, Diversity and Inclusion).

These roles above are ultimately the stakeholders or budget holders that are likely to have budgetary responsibility for investment in programmes to improve the wellbeing or performance of people within an organisation, but they are not necessarily always driving the purchasing need or intent of wellbeing or wellness products. This need or intent also includes middle management, team leaders, department heads, the people who are often identifying the need before seeking a solution, then contacting the budget holders. This is without considering the individual market of those employees looking to improve their own personal performance and wellbeing at work (or in life generally) that may fall as a B2B or B2C market, depending on their own access to services with an employer, desire to make it happen or level of need.

Preventative or Reactive - which is driving the corporate wellbeing market?

We’d love to say that the majority of products and services in this sector are preventative. Alas, it’s still always easier to find the budget to fix a problem that is apparent, than it is to prevent a problem that is yet to happen. Despite the evidence to support preventative action. 

However, the data to support the benefits of addressing issues that can occur in a workforce without support in place to improve wellbeing are hard to ignore and growing. The total number of working days lost due to work-related stress, depression or anxiety in 2021/22 was 17 million days in the UK*. This equated to an average of 18.6 days lost per case. 

The data detail on what sectors this impact of  stress is most prevalent is clear, with the professional sectors clearly at the front.

Estimated prevalence rates for self-reported stress, depression or anxiety in Great Britain, for people working in the last 12 months by occupation, 2017/18-2019/20. Source Labour Force Survey UK. 95% confidence levels illustrated on diagram.

In terms of how much of this stress we can effect through proactive programmes, the evidence seems clear also. With factors such as interpersonal relationships, managing change and personal development making up over 40% of causes*.

Percentage of work-related mental ill health case reported to THOR-GP according to the main precipitating event, three year aggregate total - 2013-2015. THOR-GP is a surveillance scheme in which general practitioners (GPs)in the UK  are asked to report new cases of work-related ill health.

This presents a real opportunity for employers to address proactively and gain some space from their competitors in their market. Those days off with stress add up for any organisation to cover, a proactive programme to address these issues could soon show good ROI.

However, the challenge still remains for providers of these services to communicate the benefit of proactive and preventative solutions to their customers in a clear and tangible manner, to allow the buyers to present their case to budget holders and gain the investment they need. It’s complex ask, often with justifiable need for measurement solutions to allow organisations to benchmark performance against investment to evidence benefits.

How do people buy solutions to these wellbeing issues in the workplace?

Here lies the big question that people like ourselves are looking to answer and it feels the only way to find out, is to ask.

Are those in roles that hold a responsibility to maintain workforces looking for solutions that improve performance or are they looking for solutions that improve wellbeing, and that in turn improves performance?

We can hazard guesses with some data from the likes of Google Trends (that allows us to look at search volume on search terms), but none of it is clearer enough to form a strategy around and founded on a broad reaching search audience, rather than that niche audience that we believe we might be targeting. With the right search terms we should narrow the audience, but that’s still a little finger in the air, in terms of definitive insight.

The above search analysis is over the last 12 months, with the UK as its focus. For reference, the terms searched for are:

• Workforce performance

• Corporate wellness

• Corporate wellbeing

• Wellness coach

• Work performance coach

In terms of volume, “wellness coach” comes out clearly in the lead, but corporate wellbeing and corporate wellness are doing okay. We’d expect a term that can be searched as an individual solution to come out on top in terms of volume (there are more individuals out there searching than there are organisations). Other than that, it’s interesting to see “wellbeing” holding its own against a similar search phrase that replaces “wellbeing” for “wellness”., but we’ll come back to this. 

If we tweak the above search to remove the zero volume term “work performance coach” and replace it with “wellbeing coach” the result is significant.

In the UK, “wellbeing coach” has almost twice the volume of “wellness coach”. A search trend that we’ll find isn’t global. But we’re unable to identify how many of these searches are performed by individuals over searches provided by department heads or people managers.

If we switch the market to a US market audience, it changes.

Here, “wellness” far outstrips “wellbeing” as a search term both with “coach”, a similar pattern with “corporate” replacing “coach”.

 If we switch audiences again from the US, this time to a global audience…

We can see that “wellness” remains clearly in the lead in terms of volume over “wellbeing”, but “wellbeing” undoubtedly has volume on a global scale of great significance in the US.

The Google Trend charts provide some very high level insight into the market of wellness, nothing I’d pin our strategic advice on, other than perhaps using “wellness” over “wellbeing” in the US market, but even this would want to be qualified further. 

We could tweak the above terms all day and gain some marginal gain in insight, but it’s only skimming the surface of knowledge in this area.

Other online tools (Ahrefs in particular we’ve found helpful with content strategy) can help us to get a clearer view of intention, buying trends and needs of potential prospects in the wellbeing/wellness and performance markets in the workplace.

But we genuinely feel the only way to truly unpick this market and buying intentions would be through in-depth interviews and qualitative focus groups with some carefully recruited cohorts. Particularly when informed and directed by the work that online tools can initially provide to help shape the strategy of the research.

Insight is invaluable when developing services and products in a competitive, fast growing market

Gaining insight into matters such as the above through good research can be invaluable and is essential when trying to grow in a competitive market. 

This particularly the case when the market growth is powered by an increasing sociological change around workforce culture and is currently under supplied by services designed to meet that demand, as it feels in the case of employee wellness.

So what’s the barrier to more start-ups doing more research? Some of it might be down to lack of knowledge of how to approach the research market, the other is likely to be available funds, with other work streams taking priority on budget demands. But there’s somethings that any of us can do to start gaining insights to help shape their customer profiles and needs..

Simple steps to take in gain insight in the wellness and wellbeing market place

Simple steps can be taken by anyone operating in the space to gradually grow insight from what they have to hand. 

Starting with your existing clients. Whilst no one wants to rock a new client onboarding, clients will also want to see that you’re strategic enough to be able to make the right steps to ensure your service design is continually evolving to meet their evolving needs. Consider introducing processes such as:

Client onboarding survey -  a quick survey with any new client that establishes how they found you, what they were looking for, why they choose you and what the onboarding process was like. This could be part of the sign-up process if you’re an online or app based solution.

6 month client review survey - how are they finding the service they are getting from you, what improvements they have seen, what new challenges are they facing you might be able to help with.

Post project/programme survey - what worked, what didn't, what improvements have been seen in participants. Create a project wrap-up template for all project managers to use to provide some extra value to both your customer and to yourself for future product/service development.

Then for a broader audience and prospects view, create value exchanges to build your community and illustrate thought leadership through a series of tasks that are likely to be driven by your marketing team.

Content strategy - try creating content pillars around keyword areas such as wellbeing vs wellness and track their performance against each other in your intended audiences. Using tools such Ahrefs can really help here. Create core content themes that then dive deeper into more granular aspects of your pillar content, that allows you to find sweets spots for engagement and service changes.

Social feedback - use your social channels to explore your audience preferences, run polls to gather insights around purchasing behaviour. Make sure you’re able to access all the audience profiling tools for your social channels so you can analyse performance of content properly.

Live debates - run live discussion where you can invite an existing client in a buying position to discuss the challenges the sector faces with colleagues in similar positions at other organisations. Ensure the discussions are beneficial for all as a strong value exchange for your existing client. Don’t be afraid to ask the questions they all want to know the answers to, everyone will appreciate frankness when trying to find the answer to complex issues.

These are just some of the ways you can gain valuable insight without investing in more formal research. 

Gain richer, deeper, more effective insight through qualitative research 

At the end of the day, the above techniques can all add to your growing knowledge of your audience and their buying behaviour and sector trends, but nothing can beat the rich insights gained through qualitative research. 

Whether it’s in-depth interviews with incentivised recruitment of carefully selected participants or focus groups with clear props and good moderation to ensure actionable insights are collected, analysed and interpreted to provide clear direction on service or product development, or for that matter, brand strategy.

We’ve never run an insight session with a client when the outcome and response hasn’t been “wow, that has been so helpful for me to understand what my customers need and want”.

Speak to us today to see how we might help you grow your understanding of your wellness audience

Whether you’re a niche operator in the wellness and wellbeing market, or a broad reaching provider of mental fitness services and coaching, we can help. We’ve a good range of insight and strategically focussed products to help you identify and reach your customers better.

We also understand that as start-ups find their feet, having these skills within the core team, isn’t always a given. We can help fill that gap in an integrated manner whilst you grow, until you can justify bringing these skills in-house. Below are a selection of research products that can help, but we can also help put in place measurement and tracking tools, to ensure you gather the information you need to help deliver a better product or service.

Insight Ignition

Kick start your insight process with some desk research. If you’re startup finding your feet, or a few years into your development or looking to start some NPD use our insight ignition pack to fire that process up with some initial insights to build from > Insight ignition pack 

Strategic Content Development

Content plays a big role in any market growth, it shapes the view that your audience have of you, it should answer the questions that your customers have when they search for solutions that you offer. Whatever you publish, it should have a strategy at its heart. We can help you get this rolling > Strategic content development

Focus Groups

We believe Focus Groups to be one of the most powerful insight tools for truly understanding customer needs, behaviour and intent. We can help you find your feet with these powerful insights and get you the insight that will take your service and products to the next level > Focus groups

Persona Workshops

Knowing who your customers are and what their needs are, needs documenting. Properly created persona profiles can help you to shape content with a clear view of who you hope is going to be reading it and what they’re looking for. We can start you off with persona development workshops or help improve what you already have > Persona workshops

We’re on your side

These are just some of the ways that we can help. We believe that most in the wellness market are fighting the good fight for the right reason, we’re here to help. We offer affordable solutions for people we identify as making a change for good, helping others to do better, be happier and achieve shared goals.

Simply get in touch with us today and see if we can help you. We’re always up for a chat.

References:

Is hybrid working here to stay - ONS - https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwork/employmentandemployeetypes/articles/ishybridworkingheretostay/2022-05-23

Feeling good. The future of the 1.5 trillion wellness market - McKinsey https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/consumer-packaged-goods/our-insights/feeling-good-the-future-of-the-1-5-trillion-wellness-market 

*Health and Safety Executive UK, Stress Data to March 2022 https://www.hse.gov.uk/statistics/causdis/stress.pdf 

Is being a flexitarian still a thing?

A few years’ back we conducted some research for the UK’s leading tofu brand Tofoo to help them develop their next round of NPDs.

When this was conducted it seemed to be at the height of the growth in flexitarianism, a phrase coined by those in food marketing that defined those that were reducing their meat consumption in their diet, but weren’t willing to go all the way to become pescatarian or vegetarian. It was a quickly growing segment of the market.

Established brands like Quorn had and continued to create meat-free alternatives to everyday meat products, from mince and nuggets to bacon alternatives. New brands were appearing on the supermarket shelves at a rate that seemed weekly.

Now several years later, where do we find this segment of consumers? 

Are they still regarded as flexitarians or have we all become flexitarians now? 

How big is the meat free sector? 

Do we still find these items in the “healthy living aisle”?

What are the triggers that make a type of customer choose one product over another?

We were interested to find out where the sector feels it is and thought we’d share what we found.

The meat free sector continues to grow, how big can it get?

There’s no doubt that it’s still a growing sector and doesn’t look like it’s slowing down.

“The global meat substitute market size was valued at USD 9.9 billion in 2021 and is expected to expand at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 42.1% from 2022 to 2030.”

Meat Market Size Report and Forecast 2022-2030 - Grand View Research 

Meat Market Size Report and Forecast 2022-2030 - Grand View Research

But it’s a nuanced market and there's a lot to unpick. A lot of the market remains meat alternatives and less developed product areas remain the domain of a much smaller number of consumers. Products such as fish substitutes are still a very minor part of the overall sector and are yet to be developed into a range that is widely adopted.

What meat-free sub-categories are growing the fastest?

The largest sub-sector of the meat free market is the plant-based protein, items such as burger and sausage products remain the bulk of the market

“The plant-based protein segment held the largest revenue share of 34.8% in 2021 and is expected to maintain dominance over the forecast period.”

Meat Market Size Report and Forecast 2022-2030 - Grand View Research 

However the mycoprotein segment is projected to grow at the fastest rate, with an expected growth rate of 43.2% from 2022 to 2023. This is expected due to the higher fibre and generally higher nutrient value of mycoprotein when compared to their plant protein alternatives. With a market that is predominantly driven by health concerns around eating too much meat, the nutritional and health benefits of alternatives are naturally going to play a significant role in product selection by consumers.

Innovation and collaboration continues to enable growth

With trends continuing to support growth in the sector, investment in new product development and development of geographical markets continues throughout the world. 

“Investors have poured $16 billion into US plant based and cell based meat companies in the past 10 years. Including $13 billion alone in 2016-2017.” 

Nielsen: Growing Demand for Plan-Based Proteins - Analysis Report Sept 2021

The cell based meat sector still has regulatory hurdles to overcome for acceptance around the world, with only a few countries making cultured meat available to consumers at this time. But it’s attracting plenty of investment, so we’re expecting to see some progress on the regulatory front over the coming years.

Part of the global growth is being achieved through partnerships between different organisations that can offer one geographical access to a market in an exchange for access to different innovation capabilities.

Tokyo based meat free food innovator, Next Meats, has teamed up with Indian based Vegan Meats to collaborate on food innovation and develop greater access to the largest global consumer food market, India. They’re hoping that by working together they can achieve rapid innovation in a growing sector and reach markets that they’d not have access to working independently.

“As India is the biggest consumer market in the world. Our products are high in protein, low in saturated fats with no added flavors and cholesterol. These items are just apt for people suffering from diabetes and blood pressure. We are excited to cater to our Indian consumers,”

Ryo Shirai - Founder, Next Meats - Indian Retailer

What’s driving consumer interest in meat free alternatives?

So what are the main reasons that people are selecting to buy meat free products now? Are they the same reason that we found several years back when researching for Tofoo? As with market growth, it’s a nuanced set of reasons we find consumers turning to meat free alternatives. 

So what are these driving factors? Is it environmental issues? Health issues? Animal welfare? Or are meat free alternatives cheaper than their meat counterparts? As you might expect, it’s not straightforward.

Impact of meat on health

It seems the primary reason remains personal health. By having less meat in our diets we’re seen as living healthy lives. However, as with nearly all of this area of food behaviour, it's complex to say the least with conflicting messages coming from producers and conflicting peer influences on both sides.

Lots of concerns remain, particularly with those that eat a predominantly meat based diet the majority of the time with the number of ingredients required to create the same levels of proteins in non meat alternatives versus the simplicity of animal based meat in its simplest form. Equally there remain lots of concerns about flavour and texture leading to less enjoyable eating experiences.

The desire for less meat in a diet is a self care driven motivation around an understanding that less meat can lead to a healthier you. But in similar self focussed motivation, the balance of achieving this better health is against a fear of less enjoyment in eating alternatives and in negative peer group feedback.

You can read more about this in The Food Standards Agency’s Food Psychologies Report on Public views around meat and dairy consumption. There’s some interesting conflicting dialogues going on here still that makes it hard as a food producer to target your customer.

Animal welfare

Unsurprisingly, animal welfare is one of the primary reasons for justification of food choices for those that had become vegan or strict vegetarians, but was less of an influencing factor for those that were regular meat eaters. 

Developing products that were focussed on animal welfare messaging seemed to resonate well with those that had already made a shift in eating behaviour, but were not so good at capturing the attention of those that were at the beginning of making a consideration shift.

There seems to be another complex issue with consumers here. Most consumers do not wish ill of animals and would wish to see greater animal welfare. But some are more willing to accept the moral consequences of eating animals with the belief of better taste, texture and also a greater sense of eating something natural, rather than something that is manufactured. Which could be seen as an opportunity for some brands to take on with their product development and marketing.

Environmental impact

Whilst the consumer understanding of the environmental impact of large scale meat production is becoming a more commonplace topic of newspapers, it’s still a minority issue for the majority of consumers in the market for reduced meat or meat free products.

As expected, predominantly meat eaters see societal issues such as the impact of mass animal production on the environment as a lower priority when selecting what food choices to make. Vegans and vegetarians see this as another area to rationalise and justify their food choices.

As environmental concerns grow, and in particular those focussed on the impact of meat production, this may start to sway the behaviour of those that are not solely plant based food eaters.

Peer and ideological influence

The adages of “a balanced diet is important” and “eating meat and dairy makes you stronger” remain strong influencing ideas, without necessarily the supporting knowledge in consumers minds about how to achieve these goals or the why.

The impact of peer opinion also remains very strong on both sides of carnivores and vegan/vegetarians. With meat eaters fearing a backlash from their peer group around reducing meat and those that had opted to be vegan or vegetarian receiving equally negative peer group feedback on their eating habit choices. There are differences in this behaviour in social economic profiles and also geographically, with urban inhabitants receiving more positive support for reducing meat in their peer groups.

What does this look like on the shelves at supermarkets?

We’ve always got our eyes peeled for new brands entering the market and changes in those brands that are already present, from NPD to packaging changes. We thought we’d review a few of the products that are on our shelves today and reflect on the insight that we’d gathered above and what this might mean for these brands and their target audiences.

We’ve used the product packaging to highlight the triggers each brand has focussed on, to help them reach their target audience, but we’d expect these messaging focusses to remain consistent in all of their marketing channels and comms.

We’ve picked some supermarket own brands, some of the consistent producers and then some of the new products entering the market for comparison.

Supermarket Own Brands

Aldi - Plant Menu

Looks like Aldi have stuck to the “plant-based” route, although they seem to be mixing it up with meat substitution, with the “No” products in their Plant Menu range. They’ve included a “Vegan Friendly” mark, and the official Vegan Society mark, which from research could put some consumers off. 

Product shots are very much in the traditional dinner replacement vein, with a clear play to simply switching this product out for your meat product. Overall and interesting mix of signals adopted by Aldi in their plant-based range.

Waitrose - PlantLiving (formerly PlantLife)

In a very similar fashion, Waitrose’s own range Plant Living is clearly plant based again. Some clearer good health attributes than the Aldi range using the nutrition traffic labelling system, indicating a healthier option, called out further by the inclusion of the “Good Health” in-store graphic. The products aren’t as traditional meat replacement, with some looking at the more fringe markets of fish replacement and then the traditional vegetarian products such as the Nut Loaf.

Waitrose we’re forced to change the name of the range, formerly PlantLife, to Plant Living after a trademark dispute, which in itself is an indicator of the market being highly competitive and growing battle for space for those in the plant based food category.

Sainsbury’s - Plant Pioneers

All of our supermarket own brands have clearly labeled or named their product ranges as “plant-based”, with Sainsbury’s calling their range Plant Pioneers. Most of the product packages have a “High in Protein” label to ensure they’re considered a suitable replacement to a meat alternative. Tesco’s take a similar line with their Plant Chef range, although their premium range is called Wicked Kitchen, but this could be regarded as targeting a more mature plant free audience.

Sainsbury’s seem to place themselves somewhere in the middle of the market, unsurprisingly. Looking to tap into the ingredient market with existing non-store brands such as Quorn, with their mince and chicken pieces replacements. But then mixing it up with prepared dinners such as Aloo Gobi Bakes and presenting a family vibe about their products.

Independent meat-free brands

Quorn

Quorn continues to occupy more space in the fridge and freezer sections in all supermarkets throughout the UK. But this doesn’t stop them from continuing to explore new product developments. 

They have however seemingly developed a well targeted product packaging template. Using Meat Free, High Protein symbols and other health related icons. Cost saving triggers with economy packs etc. Allowing their products to comfortably occupy freezer space next to oven chips, fish fingers and frozen meat pies with no sense of moral requirements to select them as a product to go into any families supermarket trolley on a weekly basis.

Gardein

Gardein (Gardein being Garden + Protein) are a US based brand that are part of the Conagra portfolio, producing a range of meat free alternatives to regular ingredients products, such as mince, through to ready to eat products like chicken nuggets or battered fish fillets.

Using a proprietary labelling approach to key product details they called out the Protein per serving, calories and cooking time. We noticed that they also make a point of advertising the fact that their products are Non GMO. There’s a clean or somewhat sterile feeling to their packaging design that doesn't feel as “earthy” as many meat-free products, feeling more in the supplement market. If Sainsbury’s own range felt they had a family feel to them, these have more of a young professional feel to them, somehow?

Cauldron & THIS

We’ve brought these two together as they were snuggly placed next to each other in the fridge section. It’s also quite helpful to see them sitting next to each as a brand positioning comparison.

Cauldron have been a stalwart of the stricter vegetarian market for decades in the UK. They’re much more focussed on being “vegetarian” than necessarily claiming to be meat free. Interestingly they’ve got a very clear Carbon Neutral message on their packaging, which would align with one of the triggers for the clear vegetarian market or vegan market.

THIS, relatively new to the market in comparison to Cauldron . No direct messages about the environment here, other than calling out the 100% plant based, but priority given to Low Fat, High Protein and Source of Fibre, which would align with those choosing traditional meat replacement products for health reasons. THIS packaging feels very similar to how you’d see animal based meat displayed, with clear packaging. There seems to be no reference to the product being suitable to vegans on the front.

Heura

The relatively new kids on the block in the UK, Heura with meat like substitutes, although they like to call themselves “successors to meat”. Barcelona based startup with co-founders Bernat Ananos Martinez and Marc Coloma seem big, friendly advocates of plant based food, which always helps when you’re trying to grow a brand. No mention of vegetarian or vegan in the packaging, instead 100% Plant Based. Clear protein content and also calling out fibre, iron and added vitamin B12 to appeal to those looking after their health and looking for an easy protein replacement for meat.

We also noticed that Huera have noted that their product uses Extra Virgin olive oil, giving a premium feel, but also tapping into the “good taste” area of customer triggers. It’s bright, fun and looks like it should make you smile.

Pieminister

We were interested to include Pieminister in this review as they’re not a vegetarian producer by default, instead a pie producer that’s using their credentials as a valued brand to expand their market and potentially attract some of their existing customer base that are looking for a meat free alternative.

With this considered, you can see that the two things that are present on their packaging that we’ve discussed are “Plant Based” and “Great Taste”, there’s no mention of protein content, health benefits or nutritional values.

It’s indicative of the opportunity that all brands that operate in similar spaces see as available in the meat free category.

Beyond Meat

Spotted Beyond Meat in the supermarket I visited the other day for the first time. Whilst they started up in California a while back, with their first products hitting the shelves in 2012, it’s only in the last year that they’ve been making inroads in the UK supermarkets. A very simple packaging, but really clear and functional. Plant-based, meat replacement. The second largest font on the label is reserved for the protein amount per serving, in a similar fashion to what you’d expect to see on a supplement package.

Beyond Meat has raised over $122 million in startup funding so far, there’s plenty out there that see producers such as themselves as the future of the plant based market. However, it hasn’t all been smooth sailing for brands such as Beyond Meat. They wrote off nearly $6 million ($5.8 million) in costs last year after stopping production of a NPD for Beef Jerky, so they’re still finding their market and customer needs.

La Vie

La Vie is a French brand, that I’ve not encountered before, that’s filling a niche market - meat free bacon and lardons. Bright and cheerful packaging with a Great Taste Award to reassure consumers of taste focus in the product development. They’ll be going up against the longer established THIS for market share of the bacon replacement (Quorn also have a bacon product).

In comparing the two against each other (THIS and La Vie), both call out the 100% Plant Based, High in Protein, but La Vie leans more into the strict vegan/vegetarian customer profile with the “Vegan” suitability and the “Better for the Planet, with THIS leaning more the other way and going for a meat like approach to visual appearance.

Other than that, with a clearer focus on existing stricter vegetarian customers, there seems to be fun feel to the brand, celebrating the role the customer makes in living “the life” of a meat free eater.

So what does this all mean to meat free producers and brands? And, is flexitarianism still relevant?

We’ve reviewed just some of the insights that are available in the market for meat free brands and organisations, but there’s many more areas that can be explored and further insight developed.

It seems that there remains a demand for reducing meat in our diets but it’s a complex equation of needs. For us, flexitarianism and first coining came at a time when there was a shift in consumer behaviour to reduce meat in all of our diets, mostly for health reasons. Whilst this need still exists and still shapes consumer behaviour, flexitarianism has become the new norm. There are less 7 days a week meat and 2 veggers in our society now, many of us now have a meat free main meal in our weekly diet.

However, what useful things can we conclude from what we’ve discussed here?

Know your target audience

Given the complexity of the influencing factors on consumers in this market, more so than some other markets, it’s essential to know who your target audience is and how you're targeting them.

Are they meat eaters looking to reduce their meat intake or are they vegetarians looking to find an easier meal to cook?

Are they more looking to improve their health but don’t understand how plant proteins are developed as ingredients?

What are their triggers for selecting brands and products?

Focus on the things that have the greatest impact when developing NPDs

Once you know who you are targeting, bring focus to the things that are going to make your customers choose your product over a competitor's product.

Are you going to win them over if you call your product “plant based” of “meat free”? 

Is it better to include a “Vegan Friendly” logo or not?

How important are the nutritional traffic light symbols to your product's popularity?

Tell your brand story

Are you a fun loving brand, or is it all about function over form?

Engage your potential customers in a way that wins them over, but also delivers all of the attributes that’s going to lead to a customer choosing you over a competitor.

Make sure you’re consistent. What are you looking like and talking about on social and web right now?

How we can help you…

Persona Workshops

Desk Research Insights

Focus Group

References:

Food Standards Agency: A rapid review of the evidence on the factors underpinning the consumption of meat and dairy among the general public: https://www.food.gov.uk/research/behaviour-and-perception/a-rapid-review-of-the-evidence-on-the-factors-underpinning-the-consumption-of-meat-and-dairy-among-the-general-public 

Food Standards Agency: Psychologies of Food Choice: Public views and experiences around meat and dairy consumption: https://www.food.gov.uk/research/behaviour-and-perception/psychologies-of-food-choice-public-views-and-experiences-around-meat-and-dairy-consumption 

NIH: Mycoprotein: The Future of Nutritious Nonmeat Protein, a Symposium Review: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6554455/ 

Statista: Market revenue of plant-based meat worldwide from 2016 to 2027 - Dec 2022: https://www.statista.com/forecasts/877369/global-meat-substitutes-market-value

Grand View Research - Meat Substitute Market Size and Growth Trend Analysis 2022 - 2030: https://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/meat-substitutes-market

Nielsen: Growing Demand for Plan-Based Proteins - Analysis Report Sept 2021: https://nielseniq.com/global/en/insights/analysis/2021/examining-shopper-trends-in-plant-based-proteins-accelerating-growth-across-mainstream-channels/

The Grover: Battle of the burgers: plant-based category report 2020: https://www.thegrocer.co.uk/category-reports/battle-of-the-burgers-plant-based-category-report-2020/647607.article

Food Institute :Investment in Lab-Grown Meat Intensifying - July 2022: https://foodinstitute.com/focus/investment-in-lab-grown-meat-intensifying/ 

Indian Retailer:  Plant-Based Company Next Meats Forays into Indian Market, Launches Meat-Free Alternatives: https://www.indianretailer.com/news/plant-based-company-next-meats-forays-in-indian-market-launches-meat-free-alternatives.n12449 

It's not unusual to know little about your audience…

Many organisations, especially startups, know little more about their audience/customers, than a very rough gut instinct. This isn’t something to be ashamed of, just a reality.

But the sooner you get to know more about them, the sooner you can make your product development and marketing more effective, turning your market development from a guessing game, to insight led strategic business development.

The best way to learn more about your audience or customers is through a mixture of qualitative and quantitative research, but for many smaller businesses this at scale is out of the reach of most budgets.

So what can you do in the interim?

Startup audience profiling

We’ve all got to start somewhere and whether you’re a startup or an established small business, gut instinct is what we usually rely on. When in product development, we usually imagine our customers to some degree. All we suggest is that you create a profile of these imagined customers to help you to frame your thinking - over time these can be developed as you learn more about your actual customers or audience.

To start this ball rolling, we suggest you include some of the following details in a profile or persona:

Imagined name - it always helps to be able to reference a persona in discussion

Role - what does this person do at their workplace? If we can understand their work position more, we might be able to have a greater understanding of their needs and then how we can help them.

Interests - we need to reach this person, so that we can tell them about our great product, service or organisation. Finding them in their natural habit or talking their language can help us become part of their trusted network.

Needs - what needs might this individual have from us? If we can frame our thinking to reflect their thinking, we can shape our communications or even product development to meet these needs. 

What they might already know of us or our product/service area -  getting an idea of whether they’ve heard of us or even heard of the product or service area that we’re working in can really help. Do we need to explain what we do so they can see how we help? What do they understand of our product already?

Why choose us over competition - always good to reflect on this question to help shape strategy and deifine USP’s. But even better to do it through the eyes of a specific persona.

There’s more that we can add to a profile over time, but the above should give you a solid foundation to use. Now you just need to remember to use them when designing your comms, does a communication resonate with our profiles?

Continue to test and learn

Accept the fact that we don’t truly know our audience or customers and have an always on approach to testing and learning across all of our comms platforms, refining over time as we go. Below are some ideas on how we can do this on different channels:

Email -  inevitably we might find ourselves using some cold data to grow our customer base initially, this isn’t something to be ashamed of, just a reality when you’re new to the market. Try creating multiple email funnels with content that can either address different needs or approach those needs framed in different ways. Try changing your recipient audience, perhaps the person you have been targeting is too senior, move down the management line and see if that works better, or vice versa. Likewise, as you grow your own email data, test what content works well with your audience by analysing open rates and click throughs.

Paid digital ads - don’t put all your eggs in one basket. Run small campaigns targeted around either one content or need theme, or audience. Next time run a campaign targeted using something different. Compare the two, which one gave you better returns. Numbers are usually small when you’re starting out with paid media, so keep your campaigns in clear silos so that you can analyse and compare data against each other more effectively.

Social - brands need communities to grow, they need advocates and ambassadors, people who believe in what you’re doing. Social platforms are a great place to form these communities, from here you can encourage them to join you in other channels, such as email, for greater conversion possibilities. But as with other channels, you need to learn about your customers to begin with. Try testing different types of content, see which is most appreciated. Play with your tone of voice a little to see which resonates best. Feedback on other similar organisations social feeds, so that you can capture a little of their reach. Find time to play and learn.

Web - Web is mostly likely to be your shop window for many brands in the market today. But the primary website is just one use of web based content that we have available to us. Landing pages can be a great way to communicate a specific message to a specific audience. You can tailor-make the experience, increasing the chance of attracting a new customer. Play with your tone of voice on your main website too. We might believe that our customers are revisiting our website daily to see what’s new, but the reality is, they’re unlikely to be. So test some new copy on key pages to see if you can better craft what you’re trying to convey about a product or service, especially if you’ve recently learnt something new about your market and prospects.

Talk to existing customers

So many brands are scared to ask their existing customers about why they choose you over competition, but done correctly this can be a mutually beneficial situation. Why not run a small workshop around the experience they are having to date with the service or product that they have with you. Or, if workshops aren’t possible, use a questionnaire. Working to improve the service or products you deliver to existing clients can help you to better understand your market as well as improving relationships with existing customers.

Look at your competitors customers

We’ve all done it. Unless it’s a completely innovative product we’re trying to create a market for, there’s usually someone that’s gone before us. It’s always helpful to understand who your competitors are in your market, but this type of work can be more valuable in understand who their customers are. 

Social is a great place to do this. Most brands' followers are public, take some time to have a browser through and get a better understanding of their potential customer base. Platforms such as Twitter have the function to target ads that are “Look-like” customers of specific brands to help you get your brand in front of competitors customers as an alternative to what they already have.

Tools such as Ahrefs can allow you to see the performance of specific areas of content marketing. Support what you think might be a good area for you to develop content around, with insight on how your competitors might be performing in specific areas.

It’s just a start, but one worth doing

We all have to start somewhere, so it is best to do that “somewhere” with at least some form of strategy and tactics in play. Over time we need to revisit all of these areas and refine them until we become more and more assured that this is our market and these are our customers.

Ideally, with time, you can recruit potential customers for qualitative research to get a deeper understanding about your market, to help you to shape new product development or fine tune comms, we can help with this, you can read more about that here.

But in the first instance we can really help shape our thinking in a more informed manner by simply completing the tasks above. If you need help doing these, we run half day and full day “understanding your audience” workshops where we work with you to pull all of this together into a plan that you can then use to help you grow.

You can download a starter template that we’ve created for developing personas here:

Need some help to do this?

We’re always happy to help people to get started with this type of work. Whether you’re startup finding your feet or a growing brand wanting to define your audience with greater clarity.

We’ve got a number of ways to help, check out the below to see just some of the ways we can.

Or just get in touch…

Shaping up beautifully

Wow. Times they are a changing… rapidly.

The world has ground to a halt for a number of months as Covid-19 has tragically spread rapidly, closing countries borders, taking airplanes from the skies and cars from the roads, teaching us all what “social distancing” means and that’s before we get to the economic or sociological effects of this pandemic and our response to it.

Pause. Stop. Breathe.

Is now the time for a reboot?

The pandemic, that we’re still in the midst of, was just one of many signals that change is needed in our approach to life as a species. Prior to the Covid-19 pandemic we were in the thick of a global environmental crisis dealing with the growing carbon impact of our growth and evolution as a species, to many seen as an indicator of success. We’re still in the thick of the environmental crisis. Our evolution can’t continue on its current trajectory, we need to evolve our thinking as a species to make a new mainstream mindset.

Brands, organisations and their products, services or events and we, as individuals, need to take a collective responsibility to enable this change, or evolution to happen. We all need to take a look at our objectives and rationales for conducting the business we do and establish what we can do to evolve our behaviour for the better. This isn’t a finger pointing exercise, it’s a mature, adult conversation, based on pragmatic and practical goals that we can aim for, that will yield better results for everyone.

Over the last few years we’ve been evolving our rationale for selecting the projects we want to work on, to invest our energy into, to reflect our belief that we all need to evolve our approach to work. This seem somewhat idealistic to many, but if we don’t attempt to weave this into our way of working now, how can we claim to offer future thinking strategic consulting services.

To support and evolve those that strive for successful businesses, but a success built on the right values and ethics, not profit at any cost – we need to create a more sustainable approach to how we do business. The Covid-19 pandemic wasn’t necessarily the tipping point to indicate that we need a reboot now, that has been coming for a while, and to be fair we were all slowly starting to listen. But it’s certainly a big line in the sand.

• We need to think about how we work collaboratively, showing greater respect for each other and working together to achieve shared goals that we can all benefit from.

• We need to think about the resources we’re working with, are they sustainable and what’s the output of any manufacturing, transport or operating process that we might need to achieve our products or services?

• We need to think about our audiences or customers more carefully than ever, as we move to a more enlightened, liberated (in some ways) and vocal feedback loop. Who are they and are they getting what they need from our products or services and are we making them accessible to the people we’re aiming them at? Do we need to evolve products and services to make more accessible versions to reach more people?

• We need to think clearly, in an informed manner, about our objectives and strategies. Are they aligned to our values and beliefs, are they for the greater good, value focussed or are they focussed on purely personal ambitions to the detriment of others? Do we need to evolve our values to address the new challenges that face us?

• We need to think about how we market these products and services. We need to move society away from the current disposable economy, where only this year’s model or colour will do, to a world where we think beyond that tribal approach to consumerism.

We want to play a role in this evolution of organisational and strategic change, in an effective, positive way that brings real value to you and the services and products you deliver. We want to use the experiences that we’ve built up over the decades of working for organisations that both see this change coming and are evolving and adapting for the good, and those that didn’t or choose not to see it as it might diminish their own personal gains.

Our cultural desires and values as a species are evolving, organisations and brands need to evolve to meet these desires and needs, or fall by the wayside.

To be clear, this isn’t about halting business growth (wellness sector grew by 6.4% in 2018 from 2016/2017), this is about intelligent design, built on insight and clear strategic planning, understanding and sustainable objectives, rather than an opportunity to exploit a growth sector.

Image credit – Luca Bravo – https://unsplash.com/photos/-grKZ-GzWyU

The power of insights for a plant based living brand

Recently I met with Paul Brown, founder of BOL Foods, to talk to him about how customer and sector insight help BOL to deliver better product and service experiences.

BOL are an amazingly dynamic food brand, that hold their values against everything they do. When a brand has such strong values, it’s great to hear how insight is used to ensure they do what they say.

Tell us about yourself and your role within BOL

I’m the Founder & Managing Director of BOL Foods and have been since we started on 29th April 2015. Prior to that I’d worked at Innocent for 14 years. I manage the company and its product range on a day to day basis.

Tell us about BOL and its products and services.

We make tasty, healthy, beautiful plant-based foods for busy people on the go. We started-up back in 2015, when we also had products that included meat in our range. However, in 2017 we decided that we were going to be a vegan company moving forward due to the overwhelming evidence of its benefits for health and the environment; overnight we halved our product range removing all meat from the range. This Summer (2018) we finished the transition, removing the last diary ingredients from our range. We now champion the vegan sector and its merits for all.

How do you find out what your customers think about your products and services?

We’re very engaged with our customers, mostly though social media channels. It’s a full-time role managing all of the feedback from our customers via social channels.

As well as social, we also do sampling sections in-store and attend as many events as possible, where we talk with customers face to face.

Getting to hear what our customers think is of upmost importance to us.

How are customer insights used by your product or service delivery teams?

All the time. We’ve adapted numerous products over the years off the back of customer feedback. We often approach our customer base via social channels or via our #PlantLife blog to ask for help about recipe decisions for our product range, to see what they say.

Do you have an example of successful product or service development that was driven by customer insights more than usual?

We have a number of examples of this.

When we moved to a vegan only range, the last of our products were altered in the Summer, dropping diary entirely from the ingredients. One of the ingredients that went during this process was feta cheese. In the lead up to feta’s removal from our products we asked our customers what they’d like to see go in its place – customers suggestions included ancient grains and lentils, amongst many other suggestions. This source of feedback was an integral part of this successful migration.

Another example, our Super Soup range pot size was directly designed through customer feedback. New Covent Garden Soups had revolutionised the soup market when they launched, bringing fresh ingredients via their carton packaging. However, the feedback we got from our customers was that the 600ml carton they’d chosen, then rapidly adopted by many other producers, was a little too large for one person and not quite enough for two. We decided to buck the market and create a purpose-built container at 500mls, that was a lot more suitable for a single serve of soup. This has been widely praised by our customers.

With the growth of customer feedback channels and global communication over the last decade, how has this affected your product and/or service delivery?

As we’re not that old, these feedback channels have always been part of our product and service delivery. We’ve always been engaged in social channels with our customers and they’ve influenced our product and service delivery from day 1.

What’s your understanding of “product truth” and how important is this as a concept to you and your organisation?

Product truth is very important to us. Our products deliver our values and customers’ needs at all times. We need them all to taste good and do you good. Tasty, delicious, plant-based food. Our packaging is the same – no compromise on values through product delivery at any step, we’re always looking to innovative to further prove this. No product would be in our range, if we didn’t believe it truthfully represented what BOL stands for.

If you had a mantra for product success, what would it be?

Make it beautiful… as a species we’re attracted to beautiful things. We always wanted to make genuinely healthy products and nutritious products for our customers, but making them look beautiful at the same time makes them so much more attractive and is also why all of our packaging is transparent – we want you to see what’s inside.

AFTER THOUGHTS

It was great to meet with Paul and the team at BOL. Having such strong positive values can be rewarding and provide you with a clear direction, but it requires commitment to ensure you’re able to stand up to constant integration about your decisions and actions.

But being this committed and transparent, allows BOL to ride on a wave of positive sentiment in the sector, but also to be championed as thought-leaders, that can be delivered via their comms channels which includes their active #PlantLife blog.

If you’re interested in taking part in our Thoughts from the Frontline series and play a role in an organisation or a brand’s product or service delivery, get in touch via our contact page and we can speak further.

Or, if you want to learn about how we might help you to gain further insights into your product sector and customer base to change the product or service experience or perception you deliver to market at the moment, drop us a line. We like to talk.

The power of Insights in Product and Service Development

We’re going to be starting a series of interviews with leading lights in sectors we love about the importance of insight in the process of product and service delivery and development.

Using our adage of “Do more, say less”, we want to find out what makes the brands and organisations tick that are striving to deliver what their customers or market wants through true innovation or development in both product and service delivery and experience.

In the first of this series, we’ve had a chat with Michael Price – Product and Marketing Director from inov-8. inov-8 are a brand that we’ve been familiar with/had a love for, for a while now. The global running shoe market was estimated at $64.30 billion* (£49.37 billion) in 2017 and not showing many signs of slowing down. inov-8 forged ahead into this market in 2001 with innovative approach, at first in the off-road and then later road, cross fit and weight training shoes.

Recent product development has seen them use emerging materials such as Graphene in their product development, indicating that they’re not going to shy away from innovation going forward.

The interview

Q: Michael, tell us a little about yourself and your role at inov-8?

A: Michael Price: I’m inov-8’s Product and Marketing Director. I’ve been with the brand for 2 years, having previously worked at several other running companies, including Asics and Reebok. I am passionate about marketing and helping runners of all abilities achieve their goals with the help of outstanding product. A runner myself, I love getting to grips with new sporting experiences, and most recently this has included pushing my limits over trails and fells.

Q: Tell us a little about your organisation and its products and services?

A: We’re a UK based sports business, exporting to 68 countries. Our focus is on running and fitness, producing the best gripping shoes and award-winning apparel for these markets.

Q: How do you find out what your customers think about your products and services?

A: Through the sales team, sponsored events, the inov-8 website and social media channels. Effectively everybody within the company is a salesperson.

Q: How are customer insights used by your product or service delivery teams?

A: All the time – customer service feedback from social media/website all feed into product development in one way or another.

Q: Do you have an example of successful product or service development that was driven by customer insights more than usual?

A: Innovation is about leading. inov-8 have produced a world first in innovation using Graphene in a new range of shoes called G-SERIES. This has significantly enhanced the grip and durability of our sports shoes and is a major innovation on the world stage.

Additionally, the successful launch of the X-TALON 230, created to supply the customer need for a running shoe to tackle soft and muddy ground, has improved grip and reduced water retention.

Currently, the product team are redesigning the ALL TERRAIN PRO VEST in response to customer insights – it has been requested that packs are simplified and more ergonomic for long races.

These products were developed directly off the back of customer feedback and insights.

Q: With the growth of customer feedback channels and global communication over the last decade, how has this affected your product and/or service delivery?

A: The company is closer to the wholesale customer, gaining lots of feedback during this process, meaning inov-8 can filter common themes and gain an insight into product improvements which can be made. This traditionally would have been a more distant relationship.

Q: What’s your understanding of “product truth” and how important is this as a concept to you and your organisation?

A: What can be delivered within the context of human attitudes & behaviour. This aligns with inov-8’s mantra to constantly innovate – challenging the perception that consumers do not expect to find two certain attributes co-existing within the same product. The product truth is thus the culmination of these ‘contradictions’.

Q: If you had a mantra for product success, what would it be?

A: inov-8’s mantra for product success is constant innovation.

After Thoughts

It’s interesting to see Michael’s observation that the change in the relationship between producer/brand and wholesale customers we’d imagine mostly during the evolution of e-commerce and greater direct sales, has led to greater insight into customer needs at any one time.

With a mantra of constant innovation the brand can actively encourage product development around customer needs and feedback, the challenge in many respects will be deciding on which aspects of the product to maintain as other elements evolve around them.

If you’re interested in taking part in our Thoughts from the Frontline series and play a role in a organisation or a brand’s product or service delivery, get in touch via our contact page and we can speak further.

Or, if you want to learn about how we might help you to gain further insights into your product sector and customer base to change the product or service experience or perception you deliver to market at the moment, drop us a line. We like to talk.

*taken from Grand View Research – Athletic Footwear Market Size, Share & Trends Analysis Report – 2018 – 2025

Plant based futures

A few weeks ago we travelled down to Plant Based Live, a vegan food show, held at the Excel Centre in London. We like to get along to trade exhibitions and shows every once in a while, they’re always great places to get a view on a sector and develop insights, with new startups often present alongside more established brands. But it also gives you a sense of the pulse of a sector, what trends are emerging, who the customers are and what they’re looking for. It’s a great space to walk around and catch up with brand owners, talk about the challenges the market is facing and product or service developments in the sector.

We thought we’d share a few thoughts that we took away from the trip down and what we saw as key themes.

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Red Red

Red Red had what could fairly be described as the most intriguing or extravagant stall at the show. A relatively new player in the market, Red Red Super Stews are a Unilever funded startup that is vibrantly and vigorously entering the market with a big push. In their words “A Lunch Less Ordinary – Mixing up the energy of Africa with vegan vibes and fast-paced London lifestyles, Red Red is an all-singing all-dancing mouthwatering meal pot that cooks up the kind of kicks you wouldn’t have thought possible in just seven minutes.”. With their brightly strewn Instagram channel and event activity, it’s clear that Unilever see a large market in the Gluten Free and Vegan sector and want to ensure they have their share. Whilst it’s not unexpected to see large global brands making their footprint in a growing market, it’s both a reassuring sign that the sector is growing and profitable, but equally that it’s no longer just the domain of small to medium sized businesses.

https://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/markets/article-5341485/Unilever-bets-Korean-make-Ghanaian-stew-pots.html

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mages courtesy of VeganNightsLdn

Social is where it’s at, still…

Along with a the vibrant stores and exciting new product appearances were the smiling, healthy looking faces of the young, socially motivated ambassadors and advocates of the rising vegan community. Bloggers, Instagramers, YouTubers, Snapchatters were in full attendance. From the speakers on the various stages, to interviews and live streaming that was going on during the event, this is a vibrant and in-touch community that is social by its nature. Whilst the vegan market might have been the domain of a different consumer profile a decade ago, all of that has changed now and the new faces of the vegan world are very much talking about it. We all need to embrace the energy and enthusiasm of this audience and ensure we get the right partners and ambassadors that correctly match our target audience and reflect our brand vision and values. Take some time to review some of the Instagram accounts of the new vegan generation, it’s bright, colourful, sporty and young.

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Product packaging and the plastic problem

It was talked about several times over the weekend, from casual conversations, to Paul Brown talking about BOL‘s attempts to reduce packaging and plastics from their product range. It’s a big conversation that’s going to take some serious action from the main supermarket buyers in the market, but it’s a conversation that’s not going to be going away any time soon. In a recent survey by ThoughtWorks, 57% of respondents put reducing packaging and plastic use ahead of price – https://www.thoughtworks.com/news/groceryretail2030 . If you’re not addressing this concern already, you’d be advised at least to start talking about what you’re doing to do to address this and other environmental issues that many brands face and share this as an insight to your customers.

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Vegan Products vs Vegan Producer

The event was predominantly attended by vegan producers as you’d expect, however one of the busiest stalls at the event was that of HECK Foods. Despite the fact that HECK sell many products that contain meat, let alone are not vegan, the HECK stall did a roaring trade by giving away products all weekend in return for a social “like”. This might be down to lack of consumer knowledge about their other products or it could be down to the simple fact that no one turns down a freebie – but HECK weren’t hiding the fact that they also produce meat based products, although obviously they didn’t have any on display that day. But one thing was clear, a producer could have success in the vegan market without necessarily being a vegan only brand. The sector seems no longer the domain of pure vegans. Flexitarian is a term that was coined not so longer ago in the vegetarian food sector, those looking to actively reduce their meat consumption, but still eat the odd meal containing meat. Who are the consumers in the vegan food sector, are we seeing a similar reflection of the flexitarians that are now common in the vegetarian sector and what are their buying concerns?

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Protein is king

We all know it already, but the conversation about the importance of protein in our diets continues to dominate consumer questions about products. The outcome of this is that consumers are becoming for more educated in the types of protein sources available and the best methods of hitting their protein daily goals. From growing families to those looking to carry a bit more muscle weight, protein is going to continue to be of interest to those taking care in what they eat; who are growing in number by the day. Being aware of the protein values in products and how you might better highlight those on your packaging or improve the quality of the protein in your products, is going to continue to grow in importance.

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Plant Based Live

It was the first run of Plant Based Live and overall it felt like the event was in the right spirit, but perhaps felt quieter than might have been hoped for such a vibrant, energising sector. Whilst there were numerous live talks, cooking sessions etc. it felt like it missed something more dynamic and perhaps engaging in terms of format, aesthetic and use of the space. We don’t have any fast suggestions on how to achieve this, but it may be related to reflecting the wider community space and lifestyle choices that many who are opting to be vegan are also adopting.  We’d been to the Balance Festival earlier in the year and this did feel like it fulfilled the “festival” title it had given itself. Tying into more of the lifestyle aspects of the new generation of health seeking, food conscious, active individuals seeking a “better self” through choices such as a vegan lifestyle. Whilst it would be daft for Plant Based Live to replicate the Balance Festival, they do need to find create their own space, it felt like some of the broader sense of the vegan sector could have somehow been further integrated into Plant Based Live. We saw the team at Plant Based Live actively engaging with both exhibitors and consumers over the weekend, so hoping that next year’s exhibition will build on this year’s good experience to make it even better.

If you need help further insights into your customers or developing market trends, get in touch to see how we might be able to help you and your organisations get the insight it needs.

Evolving audiences in the arts through experience design

A few weeks ago I listened to a radio programme that explored a wonderful example of experience design in action in the arts and its role in helping to develop their audience.

The programme was BBC Radio 4’s Behind the Scenes, focussing on the amazing work of Marin Alsop and the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra. Whilst the programme covered a range of issues, from the challenges of a male dominant industry to the social challenges of inner city Baltimore, the parts that really resonated with what we do here at Beautiful Everything was the work Marin has done to change the experience the orchestra delivers to its audience.

In a world where the relevance of orchestral music experiences have been lost in a flurry of social media, Apple music and the latest meme, Marin works to redefine perceptions about the orchestra’s role within Baltimore’s ever changing urban and social landscape.

Working with the local Peabody conservatory, where Marin spends her time helping the next generation of conductors, and the BSO to create a series of orchestral outreach programmes such as pop-ups in public spaces such as the train station, Marin and the orchestra are working hard to change these perceptions and bring orchestral experiences to a new audience.

This hard work and passion is driven by Marin’s belief in the importance of music in people’s lives and the role that the BSO can play in the local urban environment. When Marin joined the BSO, it was running up debts, its audience was growing older and was suffering from ever shrinking attendance figures. Now, bucking a nationwide trend, the BSO audience is growing and attracting a younger and a more social diverse demographic, reinventing itself and the role of orchestral music.

The talk of “citizen artists” takes an ownership of the role the musicians have beyond that of playing chamber or conservatory music. The musicians have been empowered as passionate advocates and tasked with going out into the community to find and activate the audience.

They discuss the challenges and tensions of broad access and still achieving artistic excellence, but Marin talks about being the best that you can be in front of a more democratic audience – “playing to people that respond to you, that’s what musicians strive for really”.

“I don’t think creating an atmosphere of accessibility and inclusion takes away, at all, from one’s artistic excellence, in fact I believe it adds to it. I believe that diversity in every form and collaboration creates depth of experience and richness of experience, and this is the change.”

In terms of objectives and targets Marin states “Occasionally, we will put human experience and human interaction at the top of that list”. Creating human social interactions, rather than always striving for artistic excellence.

Implementing change.

One of the initiated programmes, The Rusty Musicians, encouraged musicians from the community that might have previously played an instrument to become part of a playing group with the professional musicians of the BSO. Empowering and creating a new experience for these music lovers that turned them from past musicians to enthusiastic and keen BSO fans.

A series of young people’s programmes such as Orchkids and other barrier breaking ideas are evolving the role played by the BSO in Baltimore. The BSO isn’t sitting on its laurels, it isn’t dying quietly, it’s addressing its problems head on and it feels like it’s creating a platform for the city as a whole to do the same. Take a look at their website to get a feel for what else they’re doing, it looks great, I want to go.

Whilst it’s a completely different type of experience in the music sector, it takes me back to the sluggish response from the likes of HMV to the rise of online music and their arrogance that online music represented no threat to their position in the market.

Audiences and customers evolve, your product and services need to evolve to with them. Identifying your audiences’ needs and your current service or product capabilities can help you match them to those audience needs. This not only applies to what you might see as your core audience now, but also what your audience might need to evolve to be in the future, in order to survive.

Listen the BBC Radio 4 programme and be inspired about change, take a moment to think about your audience and the role your organisation has in delivering its service to your existing audience. But also how that audience might need to change and evolve in the future to ensure it and your organisation survives. There’s a moment at the end of the programme that should grab anyone running an organisation as an inspirational and transformative moment to be proud of, whether in the arts or not. These moments only come if you reflect on where you are, embrace change when needed and be bold in your actions.

Behind the Scenes – BBC Radio 4 – January 31st 2018 

Do more, say less.

When we started Beautiful Everything just over 3 years ago, we found ourselves adopting the phrase “Do more and say less” frequently.

It’s simple phrase that neatly delivers what we believe in. Through the careful consideration and focus on customer, audience or user needs, your organisation should be able to make greater differentiation and value by analysing and potentially adapting a product or service delivery, than it could ever do by purely shouting about it.

We’ve spoken before about Jim Carroll’s views on this and the importance of product truth and how any communication should be rooted in this truth.

But it’s easier said than done. That’s why a marketing department at any organisation often spends more time focussing on the “saying” rather than the “doing”. It’s not just the marketing department’s fault either, let’s be clear about that. Organisational change or flexibility can be essential to allow a change in direction around a product or service and that’s not always seen as the marketing departments remit. However, if this product or service development is not the responsibility of the marketing team, that shouldn’t stop them from raising a concern or pushing for change from whoever is responsible from within their organisation.

So why isn’t it easy? Well, any change can be seen as a daunting prospect – why rock the boat when it’s still afloat? And once you’ve started rocking, what’s the next step? How do you suggest where to focus your energy on?

The power of insight

Well we’d start with insight. If there’s a belief or concern that there’s an issue around a particular product or service, it’s going to be best to try and establish more details and move that belief into an insight powered objective view – these are much harder for anyone to ignore.

Insights can be gained by many methods – user experience testing, face to face interviews, secret shopping to name but a few. With a number of research and insight activities a better and clearer picture starts to take shape. A picture that should hopefully allow you to change a product or service for the good of the user.

Investing time and money into projects such as these is the start of moving your organisation into one that does more and says less, creating a greater value for your users/customers/audience and differentiating you from your competitors.

I’ve been reviewing the latest work to come from the world-renowned agency Wieden & Kennedy’s London office this week on the F1 brand redevelopment, some really lovely creative work has come from it. But what really stood out was the clear role that research had played in this brand development work, conducted by Flamingo. The hope here is that the research is now not only informing the brand identity of F1, but is also playing a role in shaping the way F1 delivers its products and services to its customer/fan base.

Be brave and face real change, rather than rolling out the same plan as last year. But when you do, do it properly with an informed strategic plan based on genuine insights.

A strategic approach to transformation

I’ve just finished reading the MIT/Deloitte research paper on the importance of strategy in the hunt for digital transformation. There’s some really telling data in the report about the state of play in many business today with regards to approaching technology and its implementation.

We strongly believe that businesses will only really succeed if they approach their future development from a holistic standpoint. Digital strategy (or its younger brother, IT strategy) needs to be aligned to an overall business/brand strategy, which might in turn inform marketing strategy, customer acquisition/retention strategy, recruitment strategy and many more internal strategies that a business should be considering.

I’ve spoken in the past about the misguided approach of technology led decision making and this report highlights further the need for strategic planning first that can lead to the implementation of technology in a considered way after. As opposed to implementing technology in a rash attempt to modernise a business without any real thought into how best to do it and where it could have the most positive impact.

In the report it mentions the Harvard Business Review article called “IT Doesn’t Matter” from 2003 , where Nicholas Carr argues that the trap to avoid is focusing on technology as an end in itself. Instead, technology should be a means to strategically potent ends.

It seems, given the data in the report, that the challenge still for many businesses is that they don’t know where to start with writing a digital strategy due to a lack of digital skills within the senior levels of their management team. Instead, many businesses find themselves either doing nothing, or even worse investing significant amounts of funds into projects that are led by technology rather than strategy in an attempt to transform their business.

Here at Beautiful Everything we use Experience Design to help us look at the bigger picture of how customers or users (as often called when talking about technology) interact with brands, products and services. This helps us identify where we can improve customer experiences most effectively, which in turn is the foundation for developing a strategic approach to addressing business objectives in a customer focussed way. This can, by design, lead to the implementation of technology and potentially digital transformation for businesses in a strategically defined way.

Let’s hope that if/when this report is published again in 5 years time that we’ve seen a significant improvement in the strategic implementation of technology and a knock-on effect in improved customer experiences with brands and services in line with this.

The challenges of innovation and experimentation

’ve just finished listening to a great podcast from the guys at prehype. I found it whilst browsing Soundcloud, an app that I’m using more and more recently. I like it when apps that have been around for a while find their feet and grow at a later stage after surviving for a while, it makes me think that they were based on a real need. Anyway, I digress.

The podcast was an interview with Beth Comstock, CMO at GE on innovation. We like Beth, she seems to have a really good sense of how to improve things and what it takes to be truly innovative, but also an ability to communicate clearly.

It’s going to be a short post to encourage any readers to simply take the time and listen to the interview themselves. But there were a few gems of quotes from Beth that I thought worth pulling out, but you should find them yourselves to digest the context as well.

Listening to a CMO of a large organisation like GE talk about what it takes to be innovative with what seems like a real understanding of the challenges you can face is reassuring from a small business perspective of an organisation such as ourselves. We truly believe that the approach we want to take with clients and the development of our own products is one that is based on identified needs and experienced based. But it’s not always easy, it requires a true belief on behalf of ourselves that we genuinely are approaching the work in the right way, but also a trust and belief from our clients that what they’ll get at the end is a far better result than it might have been had they not put the extra energy into exploring the customer/user experience in such detail.

Beth also talks about failure. It’s a common subject amongst the start-up groundswell that’s dominating the tech industries, “fail fast, fail often” is a mantra that many live by. We’ve had several experiences since starting up that live up to this, but you’ve got to pick yourself up and get on with it, learning and changing as you go.

Finally, and in part this relates to both of the previous paragraphs subject matters, Beth talks about the importance of understanding and how it’s such an important part of getting it right. Getting a true understanding of problems, issues, failures, needs and overall the experience undeniably put you in a stronger position to act with positive results.

So if you’re interested in innovation and improving experiences then take the time to listen to what Beth’s got to say, but also explore, experiment, test, fail and fail fast in what you do. The end result will nearly always be better.

Some nice quotes from Beth in the podcast:

“you’re not really trying to sell to someone, you’re understanding a need”

“understanding innovation requires sitting with start-ups to see how they operate”

“we’re about big experiments, but there’s no guarantee that any of these are going to work, but hopefully enough good will come from them”

“tension is essential for creativity, we create tension between technical innovation and market innovation. Sometimes technology creates opportunities that you never thought possible, sometimes you take existing technology and create new benefits just from combinations and business models”

“this isn’t about financial success for GE, it’s about improving culture, speed and strategically developing the company”

“instead of getting executives to mentor start-ups, get the start-ups to mentor executives”

I’ve tried to take the quotes word for word, but in some cases there’s a little bit of interpretation that’s gone on. Listen to the podcast to get the full insight.

In praise of the storytelling engineer

We founded Beautiful Everything to allow us to focus on the sort of work we love doing. One thing we love doing is finding ways to communicate complex products by creating stories and experiences. Finding ways to tell the product’s story in a way that engages people’s interest and communicate its relevance and benefits. This can be a challenging process. Complex products are exactly that. Complex. Everyone in the company sort of knows that they’re selling something amazing. But sometimes the whys and wherefores get a bit lost in the complexity of what it is. Or the uniqueness of the product starts to blur into all the other similar products. It’s just another plane. Or engine. Or printing machine. Or investment fund. Or chainset.

In my experience the answer usually lies hidden away within the organisation. I’ve found lots of the best stories when we go exploring to find the people closest to creating the product. Engineers, developers, technicians, product developers. They’re often the back room people, hidden away in the lab or dev suite using their skills to bring the product to life.

They’re not always the first people to come to mind when we ask about storytellers. And they don’t always get to the heart of the story straight away. I often find that the breakthrough moment comes a little way into the conversation with them. Initially they repeat the story everyone else tells about the product. Then they start to realise I’m interested in what they really think. Then they start to roam around the story trying to get to the heart of the matter. Often they’ll then stand up and start drawing fascinating diagrams on a whiteboard and talking passionately about what’s really great about the product. Quite often that’s the moment we’ll go back and capture to put at the heart of the story.

So yes, we’re big believers in finding the expertise within the organization and helping those experts to tell their stories. It’s a technique Apple understand. Who better to explain a new piece of tech than the man behind the design. Jonny Ives is the perfect example of the quiet, non showman sort of design engineer who can explain just what it is about a new piece of tech that will make it an amazing part of our lives

We’ll leave the final words to Beth Comstock, Head of Marketing and Innovation at GE. She’s a passionate advocate of using storytelling as a means to inspire people about technology and help people connect with the benefits to their lives. And has helped produce some amazing stories about the amazing innovations GE bring to the world.

“You can’t sell something until you’ve entered someone’s mind. We talk about market share but its really about getting mind share, getting inside people’s minds and creating a story for what’s possible. If you begin with the premise that your company can be a storyteller you find storytellers everywhere. I find some of the best story tellers are engineers. For us it was a big awakening to say, you know, we’re geeky, we love it, the kind of things we make are badass, they’re big, they’re amazing works of mankind. “

Engineers telling stories about their badass inventions. We love it.

Photo credit from Flickr – Nick Cross

UK Parcel Delivery – How experience design can help

In my spare time I help organise a large running event in The Peak District to raise money for our local school. It’s an off-road event over 21 miles, so we use electronic equipment to record the participants times and also to ensure that everyone runs the course as designed. The rented equipment to manage this usually arrives only a few days before the event itself, we then quickly configure it (it’s mostly pre-configured by the equipment owners) and get it out on the course and setup at the registration venue for the race day.

This year that equipment was part lost (1 of 2 parcels) by the parcel delivery service used to get it to us under those tight time restrictions. By coincidence at the same time another parcel delivery service was also unable to deliver a far less important parcel to my home (a bottle of whisky) and had returned the item to their delivery depot. It’s at times like this when your experience of a brand and the service that they offer comes under intense scrutiny.

Initially I was unaware that one of the parcels was missing, there was no notification that the parcel had not been delivered. It wasn’t until we unpacked the other parcel that evening that we realised we were missing another parcel. This prompted me to visit the service providers website, where I established that we’d had a part delivery. On the website there was no other details available that might have given me further insight into what had happened. I notified the sender that this had occurred to ensure that the other parcel had been collected okay from them, they started their own investigation. A journey of frustration started.

I call my local delivery depot for the service provider first thing in the morning. They are helpful, confirming that they can see that we’ve had a part delivery and that the last time the parcel had been seen was at the depot in Carlisle. They call me back with other pieces of information, which gradually concludes that the parcel has seemingly been lost. I try finding a number online for the depot in Carlisle, but all of the information I find online is for telephone numbers no longer in service, with no further contact details I reach a dead end. I then speak to the sender to see if they’ve managed to establish any further information, the sender has a good relationship with the service provider and has a direct contact at the Carlisle depot, he speaks to the driver who confirms he remembers dropping it at the depot, but then is unable to establish any further information. He also provides a description of the parcel to the depot and they perform a search but to no avail.

If you haven’t guessed by now, this is going to be a long story. If you’ve got the gist and you just want to jump to the conclusion, then go ahead jump.

I decide to call the national helpline number for the service provider. I eventually get through after waiting for a while on hold, the operator quickly confirms what we already know, the parcel was last seen at Carlisle and is seemingly lost. The conversation literally finishes with the operator say “It looks like the parcel is lost”, there was no sense of responsibility, or really an apology, nor some sort of solution or move towards a sense of compensation or next steps. I left the call realising this avenue of enquiry was now effectively closed.

I call the sender, taking him through what I’d learnt, we decide between ourselves that we’re going to need an alternative box of equipment delivered using our own transportation, we agree a time and place to meet halfway between our two locations.

At this point I returned to my other delivery. I go online to see if I can rearrange for the parcel to be delivered on another day and to my work address rather than home. There’s an easy to use “track your parcel” tool on the website home page, I enter the postcode and tracking code, it takes me to the next page. I can’t see where I can change the address, but I can change the delivery date. I can also choose to collect the parcel from one of their depots, but not until a day later, I’m starting to think I might pick this parcel up when I set off to get the other parcel. I try to enter a message in the comment field to ask if I can get it delivered elsewhere (my workplace), but then find that the comment field only has space for about 100 characters. That’s about enough space to fit this sentence in, not much use really. Frustration builds further.

I ring their national helpline number and establish that I’ll only be able to change the delivery address if I contact the sender, I’d ordered via Amazon, so as most know finding contact details for a reseller on Amazon is often challenging.

I turn to social media. I drop both providers a tweet to see what the response is like. Both follow the same tactic (which I’m fine with), which is to ask me to follow them and then move to private messages.

The firm I use for the whisky delivery tells that I won’t be able to change delivery address without contacting the sender, but they offer to contact the local depot and see I can collect the parcel today. They come back and confirm that I can collect from the depot, good news. I visit their website to get the depot address, no address, present. I find it via Google maps, but without a postcode for navigation. I drop a note back to someone on Twitter private messages and they come back with the postcode. I find the depot on my way to collect the other parcel and get my hands on the whisky parcel without much issue. I then receive what seems like a personal message from the advisor on social asking me to help “impress their boss” by tweeting a thanks if I found them useful, which I thought was a nice touch until I received exactly the same message on the Monday morning after the weekend, making me realise that it was effectively an auto-response.

I’m now in the car driving to a destination that I’ve agreed with the sender of the other parcel that’s halfway between our two locations, it’s about a 2-3hr drive, not ideal with all I have on over the next few days. Prior to setting off I’d dropped them a note on a private message on Twitter to see if I can get any further resolution. There seems to be no Customer Management System that lets the staff who are dealing with customers on Twitter see what previous conversations might have been had on other channels. I briefly explain the predicament, I confirm some details for information security, I also tell them that whilst I arranged the delivery I’ve asked for it to be delivered to our village school for convenience (we’re out usually during the day at home). This causes some confusion, but we resolve it, but the tone of the messages is very dry and no sense of apology in the offing. I then get a message back telling me that the goods have been delivered . . . really? I drop them a note back telling them it was a partial delivery and one parcel is missing still. I get one last note back asking for a description and they will arrange a depot search. Still no apology. I’m back to where I was with other lines of enquiry, I leave social.

I’ve now collected the parcel from the sender, we have a brief chat about how infuriated we both are and then set off on our merry ways back to our destinations. 

How can Experience Design help?

This is a relatively long story and you might ask what it has to do with what we do here at Beautiful Everything, well it has everything to do with experience. I left the day feeling slightly jaded about one delivery service/brand and unquestionably never using another service/brand again.

There were several easy fixes that would have improved my experience of working with these brands that could be identified by simply mapping out the customer experience as they engage with the service. This is where we like to start, we use a hybrid experience map that we’ve adapted for our needs to help us map what a customer might experience with a particular service.

We’ve mapped out my experience below using a cut down version of our template. Normally we map the customer experience in full to identify not just issues, but also opportunities to really improve a service/experience with a brand.

Photo credit from Flickr – Lydia

Parcel Delivery Firm 1 Experience Improvements

Simple fix to web form to allow more characters in the comment field

• Have an option to speak to an operator on the automated telephone service

• Have a find a depot tool on the site

• Allow you to change delivery address online

• Quality control over automated social feedback response or even better keep it personal

Photo credit from Flickr – Lydia

Parcel Delivery Firm 2 Experience Improvements

• Track my parcel tool to actually display where the parcel is rather than “on route”

• Customer contact to have access to all communication channels to ensure they are informed about previous conversations

• Customer contact to be able to see status of parcel to ensure misinformation isn’t passed on

All of these points are from a customer view perspective, but their b2b tools might also include a better inventory/parcel management to ensure parcels “can’t” get lost at depots.

I’ve used DPD recently and their parcel tracking is second to none and my impression of them as a service as a result is very positive. Their “track my parcel” app is a wonder of experience design, offering features such as:

• Changing delivery address whilst the parcel is in motion

• Text and e-mail notification of when your parcel is expected to be with you at the beginning of the delivery day to the minute

• Updates through the day to inform you of any issues

• Live tracking to show where your parcel is at the moment and when it’s expected to be with you

But then if I’m fair you don’t have to use their website for too long before you find some UX issues there too.

However with all three, it’s not until you try to view the experience of either brand/service as a whole do you identify the issues that a customer could have with the experience when they engage it. Using experience design to look at a business can identify opportunities to improve the experience tactically rather than defaulting to the usual channels, i.e. we need a new website, we should use Twitter etc without working out how they work in combination and how a user might move through the service as they experience your brand. One of the issues above is a likely a 5 minute code update to the brand’s website, but might never be discovered unless someone takes themselves through the full experience (to be fair it should have been picked up in user testing on the site).

Using experience design at Beautiful Everything we aim to help businesses/brands to discover existing experience issues that they may be unaware of themselves and/or opportunities that they may not have considered previously to improve their current service/experience delivery using technology. We aim to run experience mapping workshops with key stakeholders from across the business to ensure we get the full service delivery view, rather than the narrower view you get if you work only with specific teams.

Interested in how experience design could improve your customers experience of your brand and service then get in touch.

Nurturing and Activation of Urban Innovation

I attended the Business and Innovation Network session on Innovation and Urban Manufacturing a few weeks ago and I’ve been meaning to write a post on the experience since.

Excluding the fact that I stumbled upon the session simply by the fact it was hosted in the building in which we now work (but I otherwise wouldn’t have known about it) and that it was poorly attended (two are likely directly related . . .), I really enjoyed the session.

The session revealed many of the challenges that urban communities have in protecting existing manufacturing and innovation, but also in nurturing new innovation, specifically in the UK but I suspect the same challenges apply across the globe.

It was attended by a number of local advocates and activists from both areas (innovation and manufacturing) who all had slightly differing perspectives on the issues that are faced in trying to activate and sustain positive innovation and manufacturing within a urban environment.

Speakers included representatives from The Portland Works  (in their words – a community owned home for traditional crafts and creative arts in a unique settings), Access Space  (UK’s longest running free, open access digital media lab), Chop Shop  (a CNC fabrication and design facility for creatives, start-ups and social enterprises), Roco Creative Co-op  (a creative co-op in development in Sheffield, with lab and shop facilities) Manchester FabLab (an open access lab offering the latest in digital fabrication equipment) , MakLab  (Scotland’s first open access digital fabrication studio), IDEIA.M  (a Porto based innovation lab based in UPTEC  funded by Porto University).

The overwhelming sense I got from the day was that of independence or self-reliance (not unexpected) and small networks of like-minded people, driven by self-motivated individuals. It was interesting to hear the varying models that were applied/required to allow these entities to exist, some of which had a greater dependence on funding (in some respects challenging their true independence) others based more on a co-op/membership model.

It felt a number of these operations had been ignited or born partly from the ashes of central government funding at the start of the period austerity, but also potentially in defiance of the organisations that fuelled the recession in the first instance, the large and growingly faceless commercial organisations that are moving themselves further from their social responsibilities within the economy in a bid (on the whole) to appease shareholder demands.

This independence and self-determination had driven them to make/find their own way into existence, learning along the way the pitfalls, but all seemingly fighting for a sense of a shared/communal common good.

The success of these enterprises at driving innovation and attracting interest from everyone from individual maker/hackers through to SME’s and the education sector has raised their profile to a point now where more established organisations are turning to them for inspiration, but also with a sense of wanting a piece of the action. The event on the day was organised by The University of Sheffield, who showed a keen interest in the various operations and revealed on the day plans of something similar in the offing driven from within the University.

However, whilst it was great to see these organisations get the recognition that they deserved, it felt the very spirit of this independent and naturally forming network was an inherent part of the strength and success of these operations and that the interest now being shown by larger, more formally structured organisations could easily be a threat to the organic environment within which they currently thrive.

On the day I light-heartedly likened the situation to that of the British brewing industry. A once proud and globally recognised industry, brought to its knees by the greed of large brewing corporations through the destruction of the pub business across the country and the homogenisation of their products into an unpalatable, but efficient, smaller selection. From that destruction has risen the micro brewery and craft ale sector, driven by individuals that wanted better and is now recognised once again as global leader.

In a similar tale, from a sector I’m very familiar with, larger agency players in the media/creative/advertising sector have been trying to replicate the success of smaller agency businesses at creating incubator/lab programmes within their existing business to try and change the way they operate to varying degrees of success. Often finding that their nature (size, scale, existing processes, philosophies etc.) gets in the way of real success (they need to let go of the reigns more than some are comfortable with), but also some struggle to find the right type of thinking to make it a success.

This challenge of how we bring real innovation into our society/economy without it being affected by the problems of scale and bureaucracy (that can be the very death knell of the process that we’re trying to grow) is something that drives us in our work here.

In order for this type of innovation to happen in larger organisations it’s going to take some very open thinking and collaboration to crack the real challenges that key decision makers face – something that some are going to find really uncomfortable or even too hard to accept.

Whatever happens with larger organisations and their drive to adopt new methodologies to improve their own innovation process, let’s hope it’s never at the expense of the smaller networks that have done it off their own backs through hard work, self determination and belief.

Here’s to innovation.

How google works…

I’ve been a fan of Slideshare for a while now. It’s a great resource for sharing ideas across a range of disciplines. A great example that I came across last week was from Google ex-CEO Eric Schmidt. It’s worth reading for anyone interested in creating products and companies that attract great talent.

The presentation gives a taste of the content in the new book written with Jonathan Rosenberg. They describe how most companies are ‘slow by design’ and how to capitalise in a world where change is accelerating.

While much of the advice looks to be geared towards companies that are still planning their culture and strategic foundation, it still provides useful advice for more established organisations that are looking at change through better internal communication and decision-making.

The book is on order so we’ll wait to pass judgement for now. In the meantime there are some additional insights on the accompanying website.

How Google Works from Eric Schmidt

Tech for tech’s sake

I’ve just listened to a short radio programme (Hidden Histories of the Information Age) on the momentous occasion of the first live international satellite television production, the broadcasting of the Our World television programme.

Broadcast on 25th June 1967, featuring a number creative luminaries such as Pablo Picasso, Maria Callas and the first public airing of The Beatles – All you need is love, it was a ground breaking and technologically innovative moment in media history.

It was easy for me to take a leap forward in time to our current day and draw analogies between this event and some of the recent groundbreaking moments that have happened with technology, the potential from the likes of Google Glass spring to mind.

However it was apparent that following the broadcast of the Our World programme that not all the feedback was glowingly positive. Whilst there was no doubt that this was a technology first, had it brought the sense of global harmony that had been hoped for? It seemed the answer was no.

It’s the expectation or reliance on the powerful aura of doing a technology first that has been the pitfall of too many marketing led events and product launches over the last few decades. The fact that you’re doing something first (or even just trying to jump on the early adopter bandwagon) isn’t necessarily a reason for success.

Instead the focus should be on solving tangible issues or providing something people actually want through the innovative use of technology. I’m sure that when Aubery Singer devised the programme concept his aim was to deliver this sense of one world and one race, a global message of potential harmony. To be fair to Singer the majority of the reviews following the programme’s broadcast gave the sense that he achieved this to some end, however other feedback focussed on a disappointment in the overall content quality. It felt there was an underlying sense of a reliance on the wonder of a global live broadcast rather than ensuring that the content and programme’s reason for being achieved goals that were befitting of the overall project’s objectives.

In our current fast moving and democratised technology sector new apps and platforms come and go by the week, these are adopted and dropped by brands and individuals alike in a never ending circle of trying to be the first to do something and expecting that to be newsworthy in itself. Instead we all need to stop, think and work out why and what value does the new technology add? Take the time to be thoughtful in it’s use, inventive. Don’t use new technology for the sake of it being fresh, you’d be far better off using older technology in new and more productive and innovative ways.

I’ll leave you with a recording of the Beatles broadcast of “All you need is love” on that day June day in 1967.

Sources:

Wayback Machine copy of Air Space Mag article by Tom Huntington

Success through product and service obsession

In 2009 Jeff Bezos famously told Amazon’s shareholders that “advertising is the price you pay for having an unremarkable product or service.” In 2014 Amazon produced its own TV ad for the Fire phone so maybe Jeff didn’t intend for it to be taken too literally, or enough had changed in the following 5 years that it didn’t count anymore.

Regardless, the idea that an organisation can build brand value with its users through product or service led communication alone isn’t completely without merit. A number of once unknown technology brands have built much of their reputation in this way.

As Jim Carroll puts it:

Tech brands spend the vast majority of their time and energy in the pursuit of innovation; creating astounding products is their main obsession. There is always something new to say, whether it’s a big breakthrough or a modest upgrade. Which is why their communications are so firmly rooted in product truth.

Obviously working with a brand which wants to broaden its audience and already has a genuinely innovative and useful product or service is helpful. However there is something incredibly rewarding about working with a client to create, or improve something, that in-itself delivers a brand experience. Certainly it’s better to create a product or service with marketing baked in from the start.

It requires trust to make effective changes within a client business, with wider departmental involvement than marketing. For a business to deliver on what it promises it can require real change in areas such as customer services and product delivery.

The established premise that marketing should work back from consumer needs requires clients, and in turn their partner agencies, to consider what they can do to meet or even surpass customer needs.

As Helen Edwards described it:

What consumers need is better products, improved service, easier lives, a cleaner world, and more health and happiness. The proper job of marketers is to identify, or better still, anticipate, these needs, and imagine ways to fulfil them that might lead to sustainable returns.

Being an organisation that invests in product innovation and improved services should be central to delivering a brand ambition and in turn market success.

Sources
Jim Carroll, ‘Talk like a tech brand’
Helen Edwards, ‘Too many marketers ignore their primary task’

The Future is Unwritten Originally uploaded by William Hartz

The subtle influence of passive technology

I wouldn’t lay claim to be the first to say this (as people have been saying it since time began) but the world is changing. What is different is the rate at which it’s changing, technology development in particular is accelerating at a rate that has never been seen before.

There’s a term or movement called technological singularity, which has a global following. The Wikipedia definition of this is “a hypothetical moment in time when artificial intelligence, human biological enhancement, or brain-computer interfaces will have progressed to the point of a greater-than-human intelligence, radically changing civilisation, and perhaps human nature”.

Now while I believe we’re sometime off this actually happening, we are entering a phase of both technological advancement and human evolution whereby we’re becoming more comfortable with technology taking care of “things” in our lives passively in the background. Examples of this could include automated Google Alerts for things that may interest us, fitness applications that monitor our progress and prompt activity and more recently the advent of smart objects in the “Real World Web” that are intelligently working to optimise their performance for our benefit.

This technological advancement is no where more visible than in the proliferation of mobile smart devices. This combined with the hand in hand development of global network infrastructure (Wifi and mobile data) has taken the world to its most connected state that our race has ever seen. This trend will only continue until we have faster and faster, more seamless data connectivity.

In turn what we’ve seen this connectivity drive is the ability for the global brands of the world to pursue us more and more accurately, in a way that some would deem intrusive, with their targeted advertising. We’re now able to target advertising on demographic (defined by postcode and now IP allocation), purchase behaviour, geo-location, social associations and this will continue to become progressively “smarter”. We’re able to serve interactive media, contextual media, and personalised media.

At the same time as all this progress is being made, we’re also recovering from a globally disabling recession which, if we’re honest, has predominantly been driven by global greed. Service levels had been forgotten about and the world’s economy was predominantly being motivated by shareholder desires for ever greater dividends, cut the bottom line and push profits. Was this progress?

The opportunity this presents us all with is a convergence of a human desire for a simplification of their complex every day lives to allow them to focus on the more important matters that require greater thought and then technology developments to allow this to occur. Whilst some might fear that this reduced requirement to make decisions for ourselves might result in a decline in human endeavour and output (e.g. we’ll all just get lazier), the last time a convergence like this happened it was quickly followed by one of the most dramatic artistic and intelligence booms in the Western World – otherwise know as the Renaissance.

It’s this opportunity that I believe we should grasp. We need to now use the technology at our disposal to create applications and experiences that assist us all in our human development. Help us to cope and understand the world around us in simplified and tuned in ways that feel complimentary and beneficial in our day to day lives, not intrusive and indicative of the era that has gone before.

It’s not the start of the technological singularity yet, but it can be the start of an era of positive technological application.

Sunset