Case Studies
AGENCY TREND REPORT
Challenge: Enhance understanding of cool, leverage what’s next
Approach:
- Study entertainment, digital and fashion attitudes and actions
- 1:1, in-person interviews with trendsetters
- Profile tastemakers (youth paid to create culture for their peers) to see how trends develop
- Site visits to key hang outs to understand how environments are supporting choices
- Create memorable Top 10 list to make changes memorable and easy to follow
Results:
- Understand most influential media, notions of what is and what isn’t cool
- Impressions of mobile and online promotions, preferred customer programs
- Evaluate competitive brands and understand differences between perception and purchase
- Provide aspirational fashion, entertainment and lifestyle detail for use in campaigns
- Nominated for WPP Atticus Award
REGIONAL STUDY
Challenge: Understand area-based differences to better segment audiences for beauty brand
Approach:
- 1:1, in-person, in-home interviews with women
- Segment into trendsetters, aspirants and mainstream users
- Study shopping habits and beliefs, brand preferences, influential media and marketing
Results:
- Communicate shopping behaviors and motivators to try new or stick with existing brands
- Understand how in-store experiences (promotions, salespeople, location) determine behavior
- Tap into local favorite online celebrities and other relevant tastemakers
- Uncover differences in brand perceptions and product usage
- Present buying curriculum (online and offline) and map key references
GENERATIONAL DIFFERENCES DOCUMENTARY
Challenge: Help beauty brand understand how older and younger women feel about beauty, their beauty routines and brand perceptions
Approach:
- Profile mother and daughter in a full day, recorded ethnography
- 1:1 interviews, then group video to ensure true responses and witness relationship
- Focus on brand perceptions, product usage, important media, connected behaviors and influences
Results:
- Communicate how different age groups think and act differently and how multi-generational homes influence each other’s decisions
- Develop a curriculum to convey the steps and gateways involved in making a decision
- Understand how old and new beauty methods and ideals are overlapping and creating gaps
- Recognize what packaging they are drawn to, where they prefer to buy and why
- Present different brand impressions, celebrity and preferred media
LOWER-TIER ETHNOGRAPHY
Challenge: Assist FMCG client to understand how 1st tier strategies need to be adapted to lower tiers
Approach:
- Day-long, client accompanied excursion into target consumer homes
- Interview all product stakeholders (in this case young moms, dads and mothers-in-law)
- Observe behaviors, product perceptions and storage, divisions of labor
- Review influential local media and retail markets
Results:
- Helped clients understand market risks and opportunities of expansion
- Determine product development, marketing and distribution strategies
- Understand the practical needs and emotional needs of target consumers
- Evaluate current behaviors, barriers to change and brand loyalties
- Convey stakeholders’ different roles in purchase and use of category
NAME CONSULTING
Challenge: Help brand establish Chinese names; Understand how best to fuse Chinese and English language in communications
Approach:
- Tours of key cities’ hot spots, shopping meccas
- Review of competitive brands’ branding and language use
Results:
- Develop rules for using English and Chinese in communications
- Create tiered naming and brand strategy for target consumer ages and locations
The Bergstrom Group is an insights and trends consultancy helping marketers understand and connect with Chinese consumers. Through thoughtful research, rich narratives and actionable insights, we are helping to tell the story of new China.
