Food & Beverage Industry

Background: Pasta is a highly penetrated category and market growth had been stagnated for years. There was a need to develop a thorough usage and attitudes (U&A) study in order to examine category dynamics to define new pockets of growth, identify the triggers and barriers for the category and its segments, understand how consumers interact with the category, explore the buying process of shoppers and determine usage and shopping patterns.

Our approach: The research consisted of initial ethnographic interviews, where the research team met with consumers at their homes and accompanied them while shopping, followed by a large scale online quantitative survey covering thousands of Australian consumers who were responsible for purchasing groceries and pasta in their household.

Outcomes: The outcomes of this research gave our client the evidence-based findings needed to inform a wide range of strategic business decisions, guiding creative messaging, buyer behaviour and future product development.

Background: A leading Australian brand sought to grow market share and ignite stronger volume growth in the bakery market across both the fresh sweets and fresh savouries categories. It was essential to develop a strong market understanding coupled with investigation of the brand identity and current brand positioning in consumers’ minds.

Our approach: To address our client’s needs, newfocus developed a modular approach with combined qualitative exploration and quantitative survey methods to uncover consumers’ needs, identify the key consumption habits, measure the strength of brand elements and evaluate perceptions that consumers had of the brand as well as other leading brands in the categories.

Outcomes: The findings from our research helped the client develop a palette of their signature branding elements and determine the potential gaps in the market to input into their new product development pipelines, leading to the recent launch of a range of new product flavours that brought initial success to the brand in the marketplace.

Background: Our client, a premium dairy producer, planned to introduce a new product with the intention to target the growing snacking market. The new product was also introduced to expand the brand’s perceptions from its core competence as offering ingredients used in cooked meals to offering products that can be used as ingredients in fresh meals or as snacks in their own right. By introducing a new, snack option, the client planned to grow sales of its base product range

Our approach: Snacking category research poses a number of research challenges as consumers are often not aware (or don’t want to tell!) of how much they snack during the day and what they snack on. Our method therefore included ethnographic diaries to document snacking habits of research participants, group discussions to explore those habits and attitudes to offerings available on the market as well as product sensory testing clinics to gather reactions to new product samples.  Gaps in reported behaviour in the diaries resulted in some interesting and informing insights.

Outcomes: The outcome of this research guided the decisions on which products should be further developed to achieve business objectives, and how they should be positioned, packaged and marketed.

Background: Based on the findings of previously conducted research, newfocus informed our client there was a lack of appeal for the packaging of an important range of their products, which negatively impacted consumer perceptions about the product quality and purchase intent for the brand. As a result, our client decided to revamp their packs through new packaging design; therefore there arose the need for a pack evaluation study to assess several new design concepts to determine the winning pack option.

Our approach: An online quantitative survey was conducted with hundreds of decision makers and buyers in Australia to measure the ability to capture attention, communicate key messages and to embody the brand distinctiveness of new pack designs, the current packaging and competitors’ packaging.

Outcomes: The outcome of this research gave our client the fact based insights required to successfully revamp the packaging of their product, drive business results and increase sales.

Background: To drive business growth, our client, a leading Australian food brand, has been activating various media activities for long-term brand building and brand engagement with Australian consumers. Hence, it is important that brand health research is conducted to assess ongoing brand health against competition and measure the effectiveness of advertising campaigns to optimise their contribution to building the brand.

Our approach: newfocus was commissioned to undertake Brand Health Tracking research and we have crafted a flexible research design to meet the needs of tracking brand health and evaluating various advertising material throughout the year. The project consists of monthly online quantitative data collection with general population samples across Australia. A monthly dashboard has been provided to help our client monitor key brand metrics on a frequent basis and quarterly deep-dive analysis and reports have been generated to provide insights into campaign effectiveness and measure the progress of brand health and brand positioning.

Outcomes: The insights and fact-based findings from our research results has informed our client of necessary tweaks to their campaigns and given direction for future communication development.