Project: Fragrance Retail Strategy & Product Innovation
Location: Continental U.S.
My Role: Innovation Consultant at Fahrenheit 212
Duration: 5 months (for research, strategy and product concepts)
Scope:
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Discovery & User Research
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CX/Retail Experience Strategy & Design
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Product Design & Innovation
The Challenge
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In response to declining sales due to new brands/formats, e-commerce price competition and a lackluster purchasing experience, a beauty industry giant sought to reimagine how their fragrance portfolio could be sold—and sought-after—in 4 major FDM (food, drug, mass) retailers, including CVS and Target. Nothing—packaging, distribution model, merchandising approach—was off-limits.
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Our research questions emerged:
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What is the role of fragrance in a user's life?
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How do users engage with fragrance on a daily basis? How is this changing?
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What drives fragrance purchases?
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What micro-decisions are users facing when selecting and purchasing a fragrance?
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The Research
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Working with the firm's Research Director, our team (leading an Associate, Analyst and Intern) launched a multi-pronged research scope to explore both the path to purchase and the product itself. This included:
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Service safari, exploring sensorial display and product interaction, plus retail best practices
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Expert interviews
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Mobile "over the shoulder" ethnography, exploring the path to purchase
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Online diary study
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Beauty Blogger fireside Q&A with fans // Co-Creation exercise
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Product format exploration
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In our research synthesis, we distilled learnings into 10 key insights around scent usage and the barriers to both fragrance selection and the physical transaction in our stores.
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We learned that with product locked behind glass doors (to prevent theft), consumers felt like thieves. We also learned that without a shared language around fragrance between the industry and consumer, users feel insecure in interpreting scent and making an informed purchase.
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We also identified our main user personas, balancing their needs as we approached design:
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A Millennial aspirational buyer, with a purchasing behaviors not supported by our retail experiences, and
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A Legacy user, who is brand-loyal, sometimes over decades, and less interested in new or novel products or experiences.
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We then further explored the communication breakdown that occurs and how our design solutions might solve for it.
The Design
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Focused on an in-store experience that inspires curiosity, guides understanding and motivates engagement with product, we designed twelve concepts. Higher-fidelity prototypes, including the concept below focused on our communication-breakdown insight (above), were created by the internal design team.
The Outcomes
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Four solution concepts, including the above, were tested with consumers and retail partners in a qualitative evaluation exercise to explore relevance, uniqueness and appeal. Market testing of two concepts, entering 10% and 2% of retail doors respectively, is underway.