by Objective
Our client came to us with a desire to inspire people to swim. They had some clear business objectives around being a brand leader – they wanted to identify digital opportunities for the brand, specifically looking at supporting swimmers and attracting non-swimmers. Their research objectives were to understand how people currently use digital within fitness and explore 3 key potential areas for their digital work in
- Coaching
- Connecting people through communities
- Delivering a top e-commerce offer.
With the expanding scope for brands in digital, they wanted a stronger understanding of what people expect and how digital could help grow the swimming category, build the brand and improve consumers’ swimming experience.
This research was to inform their digital strategy from present day to 2020. As a global brand and with digital reaching across geographical boundaries it was imperative that our insights drew together how a digital offer may differ across 4 markets including the UK, France, Germany and China.
Method
At the heart of our design was the idea that to understand how people use digital we need to engage with them digitally and give them the opportunity to show us what they do not just tell us. Taking into consideration the depth and breadth of the research and cultural considerations we broke our approach down into three stages:
- We conducted consumer trends desk research to understand digital fitness trends and innovations – how people are using digital and how brands are innovating to meet consumer needs.
- We set up online qualitative video tasks asking people about how they currently use digital when it comes to their fitness and explore what it takes to be a brand leader in this space.
- We built on our findings from the first two stages and ran co-creation workshops with the clients in China and the UK to fully immerse the teams in the consumer world, share and build on findings and shape ideas for a digital offer.
Result
Using digital qual technologies we could talk to people all over the world on behalf of our client. Participants could record video content any time, any place, so we became integrated into their lives. Using Voxpopme we created short video tasks that users could complete at any time. For some, this was one by one as they were set, for others it involved saving them to be uploaded at a more suitable time. The flexibility of this approach meant we could get closer to when people were actually using digital for fitness – people often spoke to us pre or post workout or when they had just been using a digital source in relation to their fitness.
In order to be truly collaborative we had regular sessions with our client throughout to share insights as they came through and help build on and inform analysis. From the final outputs we created a framework for delivering on digital in fitness. To bring this to life, we worked through case studies of brands using these principles, incorporating videos of people talking to this and we then explored what this would look like for our client and swimming generally within the key areas of focus; coaching, community and e-commerce! Our client are now moving ahead with their digital strategy for 2020.
Editor’s note: Find out more about this case study at Qual360 APAC on Oct 11-12 in Singapore. Karen Schofield from Join the Dots along with major clients Lego, Twitter, Kellogg’s, Intel, Mondelez, P&G, BBC, Ericsson, L’Oreal, IFF, Citi, Pizza Hut, Givaudan, Facebook will be attending this exciting event.
