Answering Questions through Consumer Research
Strategy & Positioning, Messaging, Brand Personas, Quantitative Research, Qualitative Research
The Challenge
Designs For Health is the leading innovator and fastest growing international brand of high-quality nutritional supplements in the healthcare practitioner channel. The Designs For Health line is a professional brand offered exclusively to healthcare professionals and their patients through referrals, practitioner e-stores, and Amazon.
With many stakeholders involved in the buying process, from healthcare practitioners to patients, the Designs For Health marketing team wanted to reassess their existing customer profiles and better understand the characteristics of stakeholders who interact with practitioners and patients. In order to augment the company’s current customer and prospect data, Designs For Health realized they needed to take a more holistic approach to understand and leverage the interplay of demographics, psychographics, behaviors, and attitudes.
As a consumer research agency, Bigeye was well prepared to tackle this challenge of uncovering actionable insights and provide Designs For Health with the tools they would need to create effective brand experiences for their audiences. We devised a six-step study process to explore the different types of people that interact with Designs For Health products, ultimately delivering them as Personas.
Our Approach
During our discovery session, we identified five different groups of people to include in our research study: Doctors (MDs), Chiropractors (DCs), Naturopaths (NDs/Nutritionists), Students (the next generation of practitioners), and Patients. In addition to one-on-one interviews with functional leaders within the organization, Bigeye’s insights team performed in-depth interviews through an MROC to explore how each group purchases supplements, what they look for in a supplement brand, and more to get a complete picture of how people interact with the Designs For Health brand at every stage of purchase.
As part of the qualitative portion of the study, we explored how Doctors, Chiropractors, and Naturopaths display supplements in their offices by asking them to share photos of their offices and inventory shelves. This provides vital information about how Designs For Health supplements are displayed in actual environments and how they stand out amongst other competitors. We also explored how patients and students store their own supply of supplements.
The six-step process uncovered new insights including what matters most to supplement buyers and suppliers, what motivates them to purchase specific products, and what advertising is most effective. Using this data, we built Personas that will guide Design For Health’s future marketing and product development.
Results
After concluding the qualitative and quantitative research study, our team synthesized and analyzed this wealth of data to package it into actionable insights that Designs For Health can refer to during every point of the creative process.
By leveraging a mixture of first-party CRM and transaction data supplied by the Designs For Health team, third-party market intelligence, and results drawn from our primary qualitative and quantitative research studies, we built detailed buyer profiles. These Personas describe who their audiences are, what motivates them, what their priorities are in life, and what daily challenges they face.
Satisfied with their new collection of first party data, Designs For Health can now safely say that they understand their customers and their needs with the help of an experienced consumer research agency.
Research Study Process
