CANDY INNOVATION
A Candy Company is looking to develop new innovations that sit in the ambiguous middle of non-chocolate and chocolate candy, but is this how consumers think about their candies?
DESIGN
To meaningfully innovate in this “in-between” space, our research aims to take a step back to understand how consumers categorize their candy products. We conducted in-home immersions and a large-scale quantitative survey (n=1,860) to map the consumer’s candy categories.
RESEARCH GOALS
Understand how consumers categorize candy products
Identify whitespaces and opportunities for mid-tier premium products along the chocolate and non-chocolate spectrum
Provide guidance for new Candy+ Prototypes to inform development
IN-HOME PANTRY TOURS
Participants to show us where they store their candies at home (on their desk, inside their car, inside pantries, inside their handbags, or inside the knife drawer).
GOAL: Establish a baseline for how participants think about and consume candies.
FINDINGS:
Where people store candies is related to use occasions
Despite to common association with emotional benefits ('mood booster’, ‘make me feel better’), candies play a functional role in people’s lives.
ORGANIC PRODUCT SORT
Participants sort the candies they have at home into smaller groups and on sticky notes, give names to those groups.
GOAL: To reveal existing mental models around how they classify candies.
FINDINGS: We discovered that consumers categorize their candies by use occasions.
Some examples:
Road Trip Candy
Guilty pleasure
Pick-me-up candy
Desk candy
We probed further on the product attributes that they associate with candies they use for a specific use occasions
CANDY UNBOXING
Participants do a candy unboxing and taste test for 20 new candies that may/may not be familiar to them. In the box, we included a mix of novelty candies, DTC/lesser-known brands, international candies, premium candies, some key flagship products from the client’s portfolio as well as its competitor’s products to anchor as baseline.
GOAL: Understand how participants react to new candy products, observe user language on product attributes and how they associate products with use occasions.
We asked the participants to add them into their existing categories or come up with new categories that may emerge.
STRUCTURED PRODUCT SORTS
We asked participants to sort the products on a spectrum of Chocolate to Non-chocolate, Premium to Non-Premium.
GOAL: Understand what product attributes would make a product more or less premium, more or less chocolatey
QUANT RESEARCH
The qualitative research resulted to a set of most popular use occasions, with their corresponding candy product attributes, using conjoint analysis, we created a perceptual map indicating white space opportunity.
RESULTS
Our study provided product attributes and design guidelines for products that address untapped use occasions. This informed the development of a prototype that is currently being tested and will be launched in the market.