Finding The Competitive Edge for a Chewing Gum Brand
The Setting
Chewing gums are not as popular in our pop culture as they were several decades ago. They are many culprits of the following phenomena: Self-checkout, an increase of e-shopping and several other factors result in the fading of the top-of-mind brand awareness of chewing gums.
The Brief
In such an era, our client, one of the major chewing gum manufacturers, has approached us with a very simple question: ‘How can we increase our sales??’
We could have offered them research on teenagers or young adults and try to come up with yet another bad breath commercial or how people get crazy and cool when they chew a piece of gum, but these communication efforts were already obsolete. For our client, we had to make something different, as revitalizing a fading trend is swimming against the current!
Our Approach
To find a competitive edge, we first have to understand things relevant to the consumers. Without that knowledge, we would ask the same questions as all of our predecessors do over and over again and get similar answers.
In a nutshell, our approach was to:
a) Find how chewing gum fits into their lives
b) Find who chews gum and why
c) Find a competitive edge among a niche segment that could be scaled countrywide.
Methodology and Outputs
1.Strategy Sessions and Stakeholder Inputs
First of all, we have conducted strategy sessions with company stakeholders to understand the brand’s core competencies and target audience. We have used our proprietary strategy checklist to holistically capture the competitive landscape.
2.Netnography and Preparation of the Questionnaire
In the meantime to understand the playfield, our cultural anthropologists started to conduct netnography, a low-cost, highly effective methodology to understand the culture, context, and many different aspects of a product, through analyzing the public data on the internet in a systematic way. The difference between netnography and data analysis is, an anthropologist actually analyzes the sentences word by word, looks at other posts of the individuals who have written comments or feedback, and tries to cluster individuals in a systematic way.
Through netnography, we have realized that individuals chew gum on certain occasions such as to concentrate, when they are angry, when they are stressed or when they are commuting, along with having fresher breath.
3.In-Depth Interviews
Understanding these topics, we have recruited 30 individuals, according to the target segments that we had agreed upon. We have conducted in-depth interviews on their lifestyles, the way gum fits in their life, their consumption preferences, along with the topics that revealed during the netnography phase.
4.Metaphor elicitation
During the interviews, we have realized that there is a sub-segment; commuters who constantly consume gum, and decided to deep dive into this customer segment.
Having this lead, we have conducted metaphor elicitation with this target segment, where during the in-depth interviews we stimulated their minds with proprietary images and asked them to explain stories with these images.
The Insight
Through all the 4 steps we have systematically deep dove into the consumer’s mind and in the last step, we came to a competitive insight!
‘Consumers were chewing gum in public transportation because when they chew gum, they think, they cognitively create a shield which protects them from all the unpleasant smells and malodor that stems from their surroundings...’
However, they do this implicitly without knowing their habit.
This insight was golden! And we validated its scale with further focused netnography.
The Results
Most people have a tendency to fit in and be part of a group. Leveraging this core principle of being human, we proposed to our client to work on the fear of being apart from the group. And if ‘you don’t chew gum in public transportation while going to school or work, you would be dirty and feel dirty and that will make you feel like an outsider!’
This is a totally new insight that none of the gum industry professionals had heard in ages and all possible with the right methodology, people, and technology.
The brand created a new advertisement campaign with this insight which increased its revenue by 2% that year in a decreasing market. The ad had higher rates of recollection than any of its competitors and completely shifted the positioning of the brand among a certain audience.
