The Challenge
Birds Eye, once the king of the Frozen Vegetables category was declining in share month on month as other brands continuously discounted their products and drove equity out of the category. Birds Eye market share was buoyant in other areas such as chicken and fish but frozen veg needed to be rectified in order for the brand to retain brand leadership.
The Birds Eye marketing team got in touch with SparkQual and explained their issues. Declining value share was clearly a symptom of deeper issues that needed to be resolved. We were tasked with the job of uncovering what these core issues were so the share decline could be reversed.
The Spark
The obvious trap here would have been to talk to consumers about what they feel are the issues, point blank. Our belief was that this could lead to reported behaviour of general issues rather than helping us uncover the nub of the problem. So we adapted a more circuitous route.
Through a combination of ethnographic methodologies we tasked consumers with exploring the market in depth before we actually met in a group situation. Once we met up we opted for a non-traditional research approach involving a larger sample and a much more dynamic group atmosphere in order to crack the topic.
It was different; participants responded differently than they may have done if we played it safe and the results answered the research objectives and then some.
The Happy Ending
By approaching this project in a manner that hadn’t been tried before we helped to re-invigorate the research process as well as the marketing team and moderators! More importantly we delivered on the brand objectives and in the first month of the relaunch post research Birds Eye Frozen vegetables share grew by 25% with turnover and volume share growing each month since.
A very happy ending indeed.
