Challenge
‘Fluidity’ is one of the trends affecting many categories, including beauty. Our client wanted to deep dive into what Fluid Scenting was compared to Natural Scenting.
The goal was to inform the creative development of brands, products, and marketing assets to fit with changing consumer habits and tastes.
We looked into goals and manifestations, consumer expressions (e.g. layering, blending) and implications for the brand.
Approach
We built a universe of scenting and adjacent conversation, and a taxonomy to include occasions, motivations, ingredients, behaviours, environment, and of course, scent.
We applied the taxonomy to segment the data into understandable mesa and meta topics.
We analysed the most important and interesting, to distil down the freshest insights.
We asked: What are consumers’ goals? How are they being manifested? What does it mean for the innovation pipeline?
Insight
A new scenting framework was built to understand the consumer from the inside out; the new trends, paradigms, behaviours driving scenting in order to spot growth opportunities and new unknowns.
This guided the client in the creative development of their new approach to scenting products and marketing assets.
We triangulated based on needs, occasions, and outward expressions, the real drivers of their forward-looking needs. Insights around scent stories, subscription models, a spa atmosphere at home, and relaxation were discovered for the brand to tap into.
Impact
A new strategy was created for understanding the scenting portfolio of the client. They got a consumer-focused framework to re-order their consumer and product landscape in order to prioritise innovation, product development and marketing decisions.
We used the insights discovered by STAN as an input to Quantitative research.