How Endangered Species Chocolate Brought Their Consumers to Life to Inform a Messaging & Activation Strategy

Editor’s Note:  Every year, participants in the GreenBook Research Industry Trends (GRIT) Report survey vote for the most innovative companies in market research. In Insights That Work, these top companies share the real-life challenges and solutions of their biggest clients.

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Challenge

Going into 2018, the Endangered Species Chocolate (ESC) team had the initiative to acquire new customers by way of more targeted marketing strategies and activities. Having recently completed a segmentation analysis, the team wanted to take a deeper dive into three of their five audience segments to better understand nuances and what makes each one unique.

Solution

To achieve their goals, the ESC team leveraged GutCheck Constellation™, which connects survey data with billions of big data points to provide a holistic picture of consumers and how to effectively reach them. This methodology allows teams, like ESC, to further analyze and enrich their consumer segments and understand how to target them based on attributes like media consumption, lifestyles, interests, personality profiles, social listening, and other behavioral and purchase data. For this solution, the GutCheck team leverages proven, rigorous survey methodologies that collect the right primary data from an audience, while intelligently connecting it with validated third-party data, using only what’s distinctly relevant to the specific audience at hand.

This research focused on the following key question: how can the ESC team leverage a deeper understanding of their segments to reach consumers more effectively and guide their business strategy? Objectives were to:

1. Explore habits and practices by occasions across the chocolate category to build a more complete picture of purchase and consumption behaviors
2. Understand media consumption by segment to learn where they spend their time and how they can be reached
3. Identify key personality profiles, lifestyles, interests, and other traits by segment to better understand how to design products and messages that appeal to them

Outcome

Within weeks, the ESC team had unique audience insights for each of their segments, including:

How to position the brand to the masses, as well as to each segment’s individual persona.

Understanding what drives choice and usage for each of the segments forming the foundation for building more relevant and high-impact messaging that could be used for:

1. Flavors and product preferences
2. Creative and positioning
3. Media, reach, and placement