Demand Space
How can your brand more effectively address consumers’ underlying needs?
Foundational understanding
Consumers choose categories, brands, and products because they fulfill underlying physical, social and psychological needs. For example, I might choose a food because it helps me to connect with others or choose a financial services product because it helps me feel in control of my money.
Understanding the demand spaces that drive consumption creates a foundation for powerful positioning innovation, product innovation, or communications innovation.Â
Contextualized consumption
While context differs by category, it will include things like what the consumer is doing while using your category, where the consumer is, and who the consumer is with.
Knowing the context in which consumption occurs highlights additional opportunities for positioning, product, and communications innovation.Â
Marketable segments
Demand space work becomes more relevant when we overlay consumer segments. This allows you to target segments with products or messages that are highly relevant to them and to why and how they use your brand and category.Â
Demand space done right
Explore
With a clear understanding of project objectives, we uncover the breadth of consumer needs and occasions with in-the-moment qualitative research. Consumers share consumption occasions through a mobile diary to reveal: What, When, Where, Who, How, Why (and Why Not!).
Determine
With an exhaustive list of needs and occasions, we then use mobile diaries to capture data on thousands of consumption occasions. Modeling techniques allow us to consolidate and prioritize these needs and occasions to create a demand space matrix that defines areas of opportunity.
Size
We size the demand spaces and identify gaps where consumer needs are not fully met and determine where the biggest opportunities are to optimize current offerings, innovate new offerings – or both!
Activate
Finally, we help you drive action from insights by identifying where you should focus efforts and investments and how to integrate a demand space framework into your business.
Explore
With a clear understanding of project objectives, we uncover the breadth of consumer needs and occasions with in-the-moment qualitative research. Consumers share consumption occasions through a mobile diary to reveal: What, When, Where, Who, How, Why (and Why Not!).
Determine
With an exhaustive list of needs and occasions, we then use mobile diaries to capture data on thousands of consumption occasions. Modeling techniques allow us to consolidate and prioritize these needs and occasions to create a demand space matrix that defines areas of opportunity.
Size
We size the demand spaces and identify gaps where consumer needs are not fully met and determine where the biggest opportunities are to optimize current offerings, innovate new offerings – or both!
Activate
Finally, we help you drive action from insights by identifying where you should focus efforts and investments and how to integrate a demand space framework into your business.
We had the opportunity to partner on global menu research that supported a unified, global perspective on our chicken portfolio of products. They were critical partners in helping us craft a compelling story, grounded in data and human truths, to support our recommendations to our Senior Leaders.
CASE STUDY
How a food company developed a global demand space framework with local relevancy
We worked with our client to leverage a mobile-first consumption diary and a quantitative survey to create a demand space framework based on need states.
Want more info?