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Tobias Borris
How consumer and commercial research helped a leading beauty company to discover unmet needs, and inspired new sources of revenue.
Summary
A leading beauty company was struggling to maintain dominance against digital competitors. To address this challenge, a 3-week holistic exploration of consumer, category, channel, and company was conducted using diverse research methods. The solution identified distinct opportunity spaces and early-stage concept ideas around a set of strategic principles, grounded in data-led insights, market trends, investment flows, and out-of-category analogs. These findings were presented through an innovative physical game board with 30 cards, which led to a board meeting invitation. Ultimately, the project uncovered new revenue sources and unmet needs, providing fresh growth perspectives for the firm.
Challenge
As born-digital challengers capture an ever-greater share of the global $250 billion beauty market, a large legacy retailer had started to make operational improvements, management changes, and invest in M&A. But looking at their business like a prospective buyer, I was missing the larger growth story that delivers beyond the expected. To not only maintain its leading position but to create competitive differentiation that unlocks sustainable growth, I set out to identify subconscious desires of existing and potential customers that haven’t been fulfilled by the business, yet.
Approach
As the broader wellbeing space continuous to attract new customer segments and companies from within and outside the personal care industry, I followed a holistic exploration of the consumer, category, channel and company that is defined by empathy, commercial acumen and technological literacy.
I investigated the company’s unique strengths and weaknesses, emerging competitors and business models, evolving consumer preferences and behaviours around retail and shopping as well as the economics and requirements between D2C and IRL operating models. A two-fold approach combined explorative with hypothesis-led research: This duality allowed to efficiently build on my expertise in relevant categories and topics (e.g. nutrition, sustainability, Gen Z mindset) while investigating the whitespaces in between for emerging patterns that hint to new ground-breaking ideas.
The resulting insights were then synthesized to five concrete hypotheses that uncover where the biggest opportunities reside – making the case for how the company should choose to see the world and act upon it.
Research methods included primary and secondary research, subject matter interviews, safaris and consumer intercepts.
Outcome
A set of consumer and commercial insights that question existing paradigms, provide excitement about embedded possibilities and create a new perspective on the company’s challenge. Each insight links to a distinct opportunity space that brings focus to where the company can create the greatest value. This includes a rational about the size of the opportunity, consumer and commercial data that prove its potential and an argument why the company can win in this arena. A variety of trends, signals and company examples help to build further confidence into the space and provide a first inspiration how a tangible solution could look like.
The entire body of work was presented in form of a physical game board that invites to playfully interact with the findings and fuel engagement. My work led to an invitation to meet the board of the company and helped to foster follow-up business opportunities – positioning my then employer as a premier strategy partner.
Insight
Although Gen Z are playing with the convention of the everyday beauty routine by counterbalancing authenticity with Instagram-worthy extravaganza, they are limited by a range of beauty products not designed for this new world of blurred boundaries.
Game board with 30 matching playing cards
Key Services
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Consumer Research, incl. persona creation, segmentation, customer journey, insight identification
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Commercial Research, incl. market analysis, financial analysis and modelling, insight identification
Duration
3 weeks
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