Kin + Carta Advisory

Tracking shopping habits for popular cosmetics company

The Challenge

Liveminds recently completed a successful participant recruitment project for Kin + Carta Advisory, a digital strategy and investment diligence consultancy. The agency needed to find people across different life stages to explore their daily beauty habits and to track their experience of shopping for select beauty and personal care brands in-store.

The aim of the project was to learn more than might be achieved in an hour-long focus group. Kin + Carta wanted to understand in detail: a consumer’s daily routine, how they shopped the category and what the products and brands meant to them. And they wanted to evidence this beyond a conversation: they wanted a more interactive response from consumers.

The challenge was to find 45 women, split across three research projects for deodorant, skincare and hair products, who met the following criteria:

  • At different life stages between 18-70 years
  • Mix of users and non-users of the client’s brands
  • Enthusiastic about carrying out online research and completing the in-store tasks required
  • Evenly spread across the UK

The Solution

BEHAVIOURAL RECRUITMENT

The project involved using Behavioural Recruitment to find 45 women from across the UK with a spread of backgrounds encompassing a range of ethnicities, socio-economic statuses and life stages.

Behavioural Recruitment allowed us to hypertarget the right audience based on their daily online activities and genuine interests. We optimised a series of advertising campaigns by A/B testing imagery, copy and targeting. We then invited potential participants to take a full online screener to both validate what the social data had already told us about them and to fill in details specific to this project.

RESEARCH ACTIVITIES

The Liveminds platform was used to host three research projects: deodorant, hair and skincare. Each project ran for four days and involved online group discussions and one hour-long image-based shopping task.

Every day a different theme was discussed. Participants were asked to answer questions, post pictures and share experiences about:

  1. Their deodorant/hair/skincare regime
  2. The beauty products they currently use
  3. Their shopping task
  4. Their thoughts on the client’s brand

The questions were set to private, meaning that participants were only able to see their own responses to the questions and replies from the researcher. The privacy setting allowed participants to give open and honest opinions without feeling inhibited or influenced by other participants.

Participants could answer questions both through the Liveminds mobile app and on the web. Mobile questions enabled participants to give ‘in the moment’ responses rather than recalling them in retrospect. This was particularly useful for the shopping task, where participants were asked to visit a major pharmacy or large supermarket, take photos of product displays in the cosmetics aisle and report back on their shopping experience.

Responses to web questions tend to be longer and more carefully considered as participants are dedicating specific time to answering the questions rather than responding ad hoc on their mobiles. Using a combination of web and mobile app questions enabled participants to experience the strengths of both and provide insightful answers.

The Results

Using Behavioural Recruitment, Liveminds was able to find fresh, fully engaged and enthusiastic participants who truly matched the required criteria.

This project was particularly successful in getting participants to upload photos of their in-store experience. Participants provided a wealth of images, which helped illustrate exactly what they did and didn’t like about their shopping experience, and provided additional depth and colour to their responses.

The platform allowed Kin + Carta Advisory to gain rich insight into the beauty regime, brand affinity and shopping habits of both users and non-users of the client’s brand.

The project also helped Kin + Carta understand how consumers were using the products and brands they were exploring. The structure of the methodology, in terms of checking in with participants with daily tasks, enabled the researchers to follow up and dive into specific questions as they came up. For example, they learned that consumers would wait for certain higher value items to go on sale and then stock up, as they were aware of the consistency of the brand’s promotional calendar (i.e. products regularly go on sale in the shops every couple of months). This provided an opportunity to think about the promotional strategy for one of the brands.

The agency and client were delighted with the participants and the valuable feedback they received about the client’s products.

Tim Roach
Liveminds’ innovative approach to qualitative research gave us what we needed to deliver strong insight on the daily behaviours of beauty and personal care consumers. Behavioural Recruitment gave us a group of highly relevant and engaging consumers. Daily interactions with participants helped us understand the nuances of consumer regimes, usage habits and shopping behaviours in a level of detail that we may not have achieved through a focus group alone. We look forward to working with Liveminds again on similar projects. Tim Roach
Director, Kin + Carta Advisory​

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