Underperforming in produce, Waitrose wanted to fully understand their consumers needs in order to re-invent the category and improve perceptions of Waitrose.
Our approach consisted of 3 phases to get a full holistic view of the category, combining traditional qualitative and quantitative methods with an additional semiotics module.
Qual – Accompanied shops were undertaken to deep-dive into online and instore shopping experiences, observing their navigation and understanding their likes/dislikes to give real world examples as well as ideas to feed into phase 2.
Quant – A robust survey with customers to quantify shopping behaviours, identify both strengths and barriers as well as identifying future opportunities. A MaxDiff was also used as a foundation for the results, to give clear priorities of next steps.
Semiotics – This helped to rethink the category, exploring a variety of retail environments and parallel spaces to understand the underlying needs of the category and how these were being communicated, with the aim of gaining valuable insights into future-facing strategies.
The outcome: A clear priority of customer needs from getting the fundamentals right to optimising the range. This informed both short- and long-term recommendations to improve these needs. As well as practical examples from throughout the category and semiotic category codes with examples and recommendations.