How do you become a leading brand in a category?

This is a challenge facing many organizations, including Lamb Weston. It is working on a new vision to put potato-based "finger food" on the map.

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Challenge

Lamb Weston's goal is to become a leading brand in this still relatively young and undefined finger food category. A strong positioning and a relevant and distinctive product range are essential to this end.

Vision

Understanding the needs and behavior of the target audience is the basis for sustainable success. Lamb Weston understands this. As a foundation for its future growth, Lamb Weston wanted insight into:

how consumers define the category
Which products are consumed by whom in which situations
in which needs can be (even better) fulfilled

From this broad base, Lamb Weston can arrive at a strong positioning. And can identify opportunities for product innovations.

Solution

Market research as the basis for the winning category plan

Working closely with Lamb Weston, we gained the necessary insight into the finger food category in several countries. Both in-home and out-of-home. Among other things, we deployed a combination of community and quantitative research.

Community research in our Consumer Insights Community gave Lamb Weston deep insight into the who, what, where, how questions. This phase provided a definition of the category and a grouping of products within it. The community also provided inspiring storytelling from which to truly understand the consumer.

The insights from community research were then validated through quantitative research. In doing so, we used implicit measurement methods such as the Implicit Association Test (IAT) and the KANO.

This phase demonstrated the importance of the several outcomes with numerical support. In doing so, the quantitative research provided clarity on how insights are connected. For example, how needs can be explanatory of behavior.

Result

Concrete tools for a strong and winning category plan for 'finger food'

The category research provided tools for follow-up steps to enable Lamb Weston to gain a prominent position in the 'finger food' category. Following in-depth analysis together with Lamb Weston, Blauw made recommendations for, among other things:

the most important emotional and functional needs to fulfill
the consumption moments that are most relevant to focus on
the product directions that most strongly appeal to consumers

Meanwhile, Lamb Weston has developed a category vision that incorporates consumer insights, long-term trends and developments for the category. This category vision is translated into channel and country specific visions that are the basis for portfolio innovation, activation and renovation.