Helping Freudenberg Household Products (FHP) Obtain A Market Leadership Position by Understanding its Customers Path-to-Purchase

The Challenge

Freudenberg Household Products (FHP), a leader in floor cleaning, was looking to take a leadership role with their customers and optimize their go to market strategy by leveraging insights of the consumer’s “path to purchase” when it comes to the floor cleaning (mops & brooms) category. FHP wished to gain a thorough understanding on the key steps in the shopping journey/path to purchase for brooms and mops, identifying the key decision points, inflection points and purchase drivers across the shopper journey and create a vision for optimizing the journey from end-to-end as a guide for product and market strategy decisions.

The Solution

Gold Research devised an effort that leveraged Gold Journey Mapping^TM – our proprietary journey mapping and path-to-purchase solution to:

• Conduct on-site workshops with FHP executives to identify breaks in available research and shopper understanding.
• Study multiple shopper segments across key retailer channels including Big Box/DIY stores (Wal-Mart, etc.), Grocery/Drugstore channel (Safeway, etc.), and Online (Amazon.com, etc.)
• Gather real-time “in-the-moment” reactions from shoppers regarding:
  • Pre-store awareness, brand consideration and product selection
  • Channel selection for products
  • In-store shopping experiences
  • Online shopping experiences
  • Brand switching prevalence and rationale
  • In-home product usage experiences
  • Re-purchase and referral experiences
• Deliverables included:
  • End-to-end shopper journey insights and inflection points for retail, online and multi-channel journeys.
  • In-store qualitative and quantitative analytics that provided both the insights and quantification necessary for a game-changing delivery approach.
  • Customized journey maps by shopper segment and channel/retailer linking end-to-end actions to manufacturer and retailer results.

The Results

By leveraging Gold Journey Mapping^TM, FHP was able to establish their category leadership position by successfully developing and executing programs and strategies involving:

• Targeted product and on-pack communication
• In store tactical priorities
• Product innovation/whitespace
• At shelf product, communication and executional factors
• Online shopping design and UX
• Key points of brand and consumer contact
• Messaging for advertising, social media/online and merchandising development
• Influencing key retailers (like Wal-Mart, Target, Kroger, etc.) in terms of marketing and merchandising the floor cleaning category.

Testimonial:

“At Freudenberg Household Products, we needed to conduct research in order to understand our customers’ complete buying journey from start to finish, so that we may take a leadership role with them and optimize our go to market strategy. Our challenge was to find a vendor who is a thought leader in journey mapping, who could move fast with nationwide coverage and deliver quality data on a tight timeline. Above all, we wanted somebody who could provide us with the deep, rich insights that were also projectable to our national shopper base.

We selected Gold Research and they hit the ground running by implementing their Gold Journey Mapping™ solution. From conducting a thorough review of our existing research to avoid duplication, to conducting intense on-site workshops that forced our leadership teams to think long and hard about the research and business issues that were most critical, to deploying their innovative in-store mobile research methodologies – Gold Research really took care of everything.

As an experienced shopper insights and category management professional, I was very impressed by their team. Honestly, I’m not easily impressed since I’ve been in the industry for a long time and feel like I’ve seen it all. However, Gold Research’s execution was exceptional. Nitin, Greg and their entire team understand what it takes to conduct a successful customer journey mapping study. They also exceeded industry norms by integrating qualitative and quantitative research processes to ensure that we received deep, actionable insights into how our customers think about, and buy our products. And during our on-site workshops and briefing calls, they continued to impress me with their open communication and commitment to our project.

Gold Research successfully executed the project on time and within budget. They also represented us well in front of our retail partners and shoppers. I would definitely recommend Gold Research to anybody wishing to conduct journey mapping and path-to-purchase research, and obtain a leadership position in their industry.”

– Alec Lenenfeld, Director, Shopper Insights & Category Management, Freudenberg Household Products