Spotlight: Personas with a Punch

By Kathy Justice

With most research projects W5 consultants’ creative energy is dedicated to developing compelling approaches to encourage consumer engagement. We want to make marketing research interesting, compelling, and fun so we can maximize the time participants spend with us and capture pertinent details of their lives to learn how, when, and why they engage with brands, products, or services.

Over the past few years, clients have been flipping the script. They’re now asking: ‘Can you design a research study that encourages our internal stakeholders and partners to collaborate and contribute to the final output?’ Our response? ‘Why yes, yes we can!’  

Here’s an example of how W5 approached the research request and involved seven (yes, seven) stakeholder teams in a collaborative research engagement from ‘soup to nuts’. Teams included two internal research & design teams and five external agencies, including the agency of record, public relations team, and social agency.

Case Study: Personas with a Punch

Approach

Our research began with a series of independent kickoff calls with each stakeholder team to capture their diverse needs for targeting the consumer―whether the right tone to strike in an advertising campaign or which social media personalities the consumer follows most. From there, we built a custom discussion and activity guide, incorporating each team’s voiced needs featuring a series of questions, mobile activities, and diary exercises to uncover key learnings.

With the research plan in place, we fielded an online discussion with mobile shopping exercises and virtual follow-up interviews with consumers of the client’s convenience food product. A chief goal was to capture consumers’ daily lifestyles, ‘in-the-moment’ cravings, and meal routines to determine where heat-and-eat sides were an optimal solution.

Stakeholders were invited to participate and provide feedback throughout the discussion in a virtual backroom where they could post probes and communicate with W5 moderators. During fielding W5 hosted daily ‘huddles,’ virtual teleconferences with all seven stakeholder teams, to discuss ‘ahas!’ from the research, collect additional probes, and identify areas to dig deeper.

To wrap the research, we hosted an on-site workshop with the client and their external partners. Here we presented a high-level overview of findings and shared memorable video clips, images, and quotes from the research. After a hosted lunch, we invited attendees to split into small groups and put together a series of creative ‘thought starters’ (i.e., ‘If this Persona were a celebrity who would they be?,’ ‘What does this Persona do for fun on his/her weekends?,’ etc.) to help brainstorm key Persona details.

 Results

Our research connected the client and its partners before, during, and after fielding to ensure their needs were expressed and essential and strategic consumer feedback was captured. Armed with this knowledge, W5 developed Personas and a series of dynamic deliverables including a playbook, fact sheets, and highlight reels that brought the consumer to life with lasting inspiration for product innovation, campaign development, and targeted communications.

Interested in learning more about how W5 can support collaborative efforts between your internal teams and agency partners? Reach out!