The challenge
Our client, a sizable, domestic agent in raw material production, considered expanding their business to the American dog food market. To do this, they needed to gain knowledge about the customers in said market. What were their needs and preferences? What did they care about when deciding what to feed their four-legged family member?
Our job became mapping out the positioning of the product. How would this dog food brand differentiate itself from other products out there?
Our approach
Being completely new to the dog food market ourselves, we first needed to understand how this market has developed in the past, how it is developing now and how it will look in the future. What are the new players doing differently from the established brands?
Next, we started drawing up different mock products for testing, to find out what was most important for the consumers when choosing a new type of dog food brand. Did the dog food need to be healthy? Should we focus on the dog as a member of the family?
With dog food being a strongly regulated product, we had to work closely with our client’s research and product development teams when creating different value propositions and possible directions.
After the initial test phase, we landed on 7-8 categories, on which we took the testing one step further. We now wanted to get hard data on what kind of dog food consumers would actually click home, when given the chance.
To get this data, we created fictive brands placed in ads on social media, which led the consumers to different landing pages. These landing pages were set up like actual web stores, where the consumers could choose their desired commodity all the way to the check-out stage. This gave us valuable insight on what worked in all the different stages. What was important in the initial ad, what was important on the landing page, and what was important before the final purchase?
The result
Because of the sheer size of the US market, we were able to test and iterate in hyper-speed.
During the six-week sprint, we received input from 2 million Americans and got 30.000 visitors to our testing pages.
This helped us map out the market for our client,as well as assisting them in deciding their go-to-market-strategy, making it safer and easier for them to expand their business to the American dog food segment.
