For people looking for that perfect gift, shopping in the holiday season can be a fraught experience.
Retailers who provide their customers with genuine inspiration, or, at the very least, make it easier for people to get what they need, naturally give themselves a competitive advantage. But being truly successful requires a deeper understanding of the diverse and ever-changing range of human needs that ultimately inform gift selection and purchase.
Walgreens wanted to do just this; seeking to look beyond their traditional offering, they aimed to expand into new, potentially novel routes for their customers, while remaining authentic to their core brand values.
To support this ambition, we started by spreading the net wide to better understand the full gifting landscape.
A decoding of social media presentations of holiday gifting – deploying AI to make sense of close to 10,000 gifting images – uncovered themes of meaning, each representing different elements of the world of gifting. This included new clusters that could form the basis of interesting routes in for Walgreens.
Through human semiotics we unpacked the clusters to understand their cultural meaning, creating mood boards of supporting imagery and descriptions for individual gifting moments, to provide Walgreens with a rich source of inspiration to draw from.
Subsequent primary research outputs validated the opportunity areas, with a behavioural change model deployed to outline the direct interventions that influence behaviour change in-store.
The result? New opportunities for the brand to become a bigger player beyond its established boundaries.
And a significantly less stressful holiday season for its customers.