I worked with a product development team of one of the nation's most recognized pet food brands who approached my agency with the task of identifying what digitally influences their consumers when it comes to their path to perception and the path to purchase. Our team pitched the idea of doing primary research i.e. conducting contextual inquiries to identify the digital influencers.

 

I put together a screener and a test plan and worked with the account team and the recruiting agency to find 22 participants that were willing to let us interview them in their natural environment with their pet around and record their activites as they respond to some questions we asked and perform the tasks they were given.

 

I, along with another member of my team, conducted 2 hour long contextual inquiries at the participant locations to gather the required data.

It was then time to analyze and synthesize the massive amount of data obtained from these contextual inquiries. We've found that the consumers belonging to this segment weren't as digitally active.

 

We broke down the data into 5 high level segments and created post its for each segment to figure out if there were any commonailities/trends in participant behavior across these segments.

We listed out the triggers and influencers that led to change in purchasing behavior and those that influenced the perception about a pet food brand to identify commonalities/trends among all participants.

We assigned colors (as shown below) to various triggers for us to visualize the paths better and find trends easily. 

We identified that these consumers naturally fit into one of the four categories shown below and were influenced by various triggers as shown on the left. We've also rated the frequency and magnitude of impact of each of those triggers/influences against each path on a 10 point scale.

Since the paths had no consistency in where they started and ended, we decided to visualize them as perception maps instead of journey maps. Each perception map had branches that showed the magnitude of influence of each of those triggers/influences and the smaller branches that stemmed out of the big branches showed the digital and non digital touch points that were relevant to that particular "influence" for that path. The frequency of occurance of an influence was shown in the form of a bar graph against the average across all paths.

This is how one of the final perception maps looked like:

Note: The branches in blue show the digital touch points for each "influence".

We were also able to succesfully identify the delighters, satisfiers and must-haves in the digital space for these consumers by conducting Kano Analysis. Shown below are the results from the Kano Analysis.