Finding out why a familiar brand had stopped being bought
A producer whose distribution had not changed was losing volume anyway. We fielded a usage and habits study across the country to find out where in the day the brand was being dropped.
- Governorates in the sample
- 18
- Face to face interviews
- 2,400
- Weeks from brief to report
- 9
- Focus groups, two cities
- 6
What we were asked
The client had a decades-old brand, unchanged distribution and a slow, steady loss of volume that nobody could explain. Internally there were three theories: price, a competitor's packaging, and a general sense that "young people do not drink it any more". None of the three had been tested.
How we approached it
We refused to run a brand-tracking survey. A tracker would have told them what people think about the brand, which they already half knew; the question was when the product does and does not get chosen, and that is a behaviour question, not an opinion one.
So we ran a usage and habits study built around the day rather than around the brand. Respondents walked us through what they drank, when, where and with whom, and the brand came up only when they raised it.
The design
- A quantitative sample across all eighteen governorates, weighted to reflect the population rather than the client's strongest markets.
- Face to face interviewing, because response rates and honesty on consumption questions are meaningfully better in person here than by telephone.
- Six focus groups in Baghdad and Basra, run after the quantitative fieldwork so the discussion could probe what the numbers had already flagged.
- Mystery shopping across a spread of outlet types, to see what a buyer actually encounters at the shelf.
What we found
None of the three internal theories survived contact with the fieldwork. The brand had not lost its place in the category. It had lost one specific occasion, and it had lost it to a format rather than to a competitor.
The mystery shopping explained the rest: in a large share of the outlets visited, the product was present but positioned where it was not seen at the moment the decision was being made.
What happened next
The report ended with a recommendation rather than a summary, and the recommendation was not a campaign. It was a change to pack format and to the trade agreement covering placement, with the communication work sequenced to follow once the shelf had changed, because advertising a product a buyer cannot find is money spent on frustration.
Our strategy team built the plan from the same evidence, and the client's own team ran it.
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