Qualitative Consumer Brand Research

Background

As part of a USC graduate consulting team, I worked with a Fortune 500 consumer packaged goods company to help them better understand how shoppers navigate in-store, with the goal of informing new methods the company could use to expand its future brand research.

Methods

• 25 in-store intercept interviews, meeting shoppers in the moment of decision-making rather than relying on recall-based surveys.
• Ten hours of mystery shopping to covertly observe shopping behavior.
• A thematic analysis of the data, synthesizing individual observations into team-wide behavioral patterns.

So What?

The research provided real, in-the-moment shopper behavior they hadn't captured through existing methods, and our recommendations laid out new research approaches to strengthen future brand studies.

Details limited due to a signed NDA