Specialist area : Retail & Dining

Some of our featured work

• 

  Keeping Little Tummies Happy!

  Kids menu and food bench-marking in Casual Dining

  A major family-orientated chain was reviewing its Kids Menu offer and needed to understand how several newly developed dishes performed against the current counterparts among the target 5-11 year olds. The Kids menu design also needed a refresh and so we employed a creative two-pronged solution: creative workshops with Mums to understand Kids’ food choices and decisions to feed into the menu design plus interactive quantitative food tasting sessions with the children in-restaurant. Clear winning dishes were taken forward for full-scale development and a new menu design generated to coincide with and complement their launch.

• 

  The heat is on!

  Menu design, navigation & eye-tracking

  We all like it to be easy to find what we want on the menu when eating out. As part of an initiative to make the whole dining experience for its guests more enjoyable, we worked with one of the leading casual dining chains to help them assess a new simplified version of their menu. They wanted to tune the level of spiciness of the dishes on the menu to better fit with customer desires as well as ensure it was easy to navigate and, quite literally, identify the ‘hot spots’. Qualitative design workshops with guests led to a new menu being developed – both in format and in design approach. Eye-tracking follow-up sessions then enabled us to check that guests were able to navigate the new menu and find the right dishes ... and at the right spice!

• 

  Making sense of the pound

  Understanding discount shoppers’ response to changes in price structure

  Getting prices right in any retail setting is critical to its overall commercial success, but in discount retailing is undeniably top of the agenda. We’ve been helping what was one of the biggest single price discounters understand the response from shoppers to a change in its pricing structure; the potential implications on brand perceptions and share of spend. Qual group workshops explored different price tier options across different categories as well as understanding shopper response to alternative merchandising scenarios and potential branding implications. This dovetailed into pre and post store exit interviews to give our client the reassurance they needed to launch the new initiative across the estate.

• 

  Music to the ears

  Assessing the impact of music in the retail environment

  Creating the right environment for both customers and staff in store is undoubtedly a goal for all retailers, but just how much does music contribute to the experience and is it really worth the investment? We gave one of our trade retail clients a real understanding of what both their customers and staff thought of their in-store radio, and whether it genuinely made the shopping experience or sense or the workplace any better, or indeed any worse. A combined qual and quant approach allowed us to take our research to a level that generated clear guidelines for our client around optimising the approach to the radio, the music and the DJ across their store estate – ultimately seeking to improve the experience of all those who find themselves in and around their stores.

• 

  Can’t cook, won’t cook?

  Understanding the motivations and decisions along the takeaway customer journey

  Working out what to have for an evening meal every night of the week is hard at the best of times, not least when you’re pushed for time, and that’s when a takeaway can take the strain out of the weekly meal planning. We helped one of our favourite casual dining brands get a deep understanding of the motivations behind ordering a takeaway as well as the decision-making process at all key points in the customer journey. Using a mixed qualitative and ethnographic approach we were able to pinpoint real opportunities as well as critical areas for focus for managing the takeaway business moving forward, against the backdrop of a thriving restaurant business.

• 

  Getting to the heart & sole

  Understanding the outdoor footwear market

  Those who love the great outdoors need the right shoes to really enjoy it at its best. The outdoor footwear market is an increasingly competitive place to be for some of the more traditional brands. So, the focus of this piece of research was to achieve a clear understanding of who’s buying what when it comes to outdoor shoes, as well as to assess relative performance of the main brands across a spectrum of outdoor activities. An online approach with embedded video response questions enabled customers to ‘talk directly to the client’ while ensuring we captured all the key desired metrics. By layering engaging customer footage and visual mapping with robust data we ensured full engagement from our client’s internal stakeholders. The outputs identified a credible and clear path through what emerged to be a surprisingly cluttered and confused competitor brand landscape.

• 

  Sharing means caring

  The importance of keeping certain items on your menu on customer perceptions of value for money

  Some of us love to share our food and some of us hate it. But either way, when it comes to casual dining in a pizza restaurant, you need to offer your customers the choice of a sharing size, whether they end up choosing it or not. We spoke to our client's casual dining customers in depth, in store and online to understand how valuable the sharing pizza was to them and predict what they would do if faced with a series of different price and availability scenarios when eating out. The outputs enabled our client to move forward with a menu that now offers all the choices and value their customers expect at prices that make sense commercially for the business.

• 

  Putting the 'mmm...' back into the menu

  Making your menu pretty as well as proftable

  Finding the menu design that sells the most profitable dishes and looks good at the same time. In casual dining it’s a difficult balance getting your menu ready for an update that appeals aesthetically, sends the right brand message and sells the dishes that maximise profit margin. One of our casual dining clients found themselves in this very position and so we put their menu through its paces using elements of our staged Menu Optimisation Suite. Combing qual, quant and eye-tracking we identified the optimum menu design for visual appeal, navigability and likely impact on purchasing and commercial KPIs. The winning design route is now helping to satisfy appetites across the full restaurant estate.

• 

  Beauty is in the eye of the shopper

  Will a 'shop within a shop' work for mainstream beauty?

  Shopping for beauty products is a very personal and emotive experience. It's not as simple as 'grab and go' even in the context of 'value proposition' and it is vital that shoppers feel comfortable enough and inspired to try out new products while effectively browsing in-store in this category. Our client, best known for clothing retail, wanted to understand how to enhance its offer in the beauty and cosmetics area in store and whether gains could be made through a move to a 'shop within a shop' design. Our mixed-method approach combining qual and quant research, both in-store and online, proved the concept was well-received by customers and could generate incremental cosmetics spend. We went on to test out five different design concepts among a value-driven but very discerning and carefully segmented target audience. We were able to single out a clear ‘winner’ with realistic and actionable recommendations for design improvement prior to concept launch and full store roll-out.

• 

  Going the extra (royal) mile

  Identifying opportunities in luxury retail

  Our challenge was to find out what opportunities there were to go ‘above and beyond’ customer expectations within the context of a multi-channel luxury retail environment. The focus was on understanding how existing and new initiatives could drive perceptions of ‘excellence’ and ultimately spend. By talking to customers through an online platform and incorporating a mechanism for feeding in customer-led ideation, we were able to highlight the opportunities for this major luxury fashion retailer, leading to smarter investment planning.

• 

  Who's who?

  Profiling shopping centre visitors

  The insight team of some of the leading shopping centres in the country approached us with a problem. Their existing monthly tracking study profiled the nationalities of those visiting their centres, but they had a strong suspicion that the numbers they were getting did not match reality. We began a monthly tracking study designed to cover all of the key details: place of origin, spend, group composition, reason for visit, age and gender etc. with the ability to explore key regions across the globe. Our work confirmed our client’s suspicions – the mix of nationalities was far more varied than previous research had suggested, and the percentage of foreign visitors notably higher. We’ve conducted over 20,000 interviews in the centres and our work is now the primary data source on foreign tourism.