Best International Research Award 2005
L’Oreal is one of the world’s leading beauty products manufacturers with sales of €14bn, providing products for professionals and consumers alike across hair, body and cosmetics.
Their most recent creative campaign, which translates easily across languages and cultures, encourages women to raise their self-worth by a quotidian use of this company’s products. Quite simply, they are one of the best known companies in the world.
For any company, a successful new product launch is dependent on first assessing its fit into the current and emerging market place.
For our client company, launching their intended new brand was not simply a case of assessing brand fit; their intention was to redefine the target market place by providing a range of products to an audience they were not sure would buy the products in the first place - professional hair styling products for teenage boys & girls.
Creating a range for teenagers … Problem:
- Do teenagers make their own product purchase decisions or do parents?
- Who holds the money in the hand?
- Do teens buy professional products? If so, at salons or at high street outlets?
- What brand choices do they make in their lives?
- What brand story & presentation would they buy into in this area?
- Is this range viable? With this suggested packaging: name, bottles, designs…? At what price point?
Solution:
- Youth ethnography with teenage girls and young women
- In-salon filmed immersion sessions, with stylist and manager depth interviews
- Product and brand mapping sessions & story-boarding
- Mother & daughter paired depth interviews with younger teens; friendship pairs and triads with older teens, plus focus groups with young women.
- Presentation to client through password-protected interactive web-sites, bringing to life the world of today’s girl-women at key ages, 12-24yrs old
This helped our client to effectively evaluate their proposed range of professional hair styling products to the 12-15 year old age group. Using Fizz, the business has constant access to the in-depth insights (film, concepts, diaries etc), ensuring an increase in the client team’s overall on-going understanding of this notoriously hard to reach target market.
