Background
Lumaten is a leading strategy consultancy trusted by many suppliers in the FMCG sector for its ability to provide accurate sales forecasts and deep insights via its SHOPPER360 research platform.
This platform enables respondents to shop naturally within highly realistic virtual store environments by measuring what shoppers actually do, rather than what they claim they do. In this way, it provides rich insights into shopper behavior at each step of the path to purchase. While one version of its platform, SHOPPER360 Immersive, involves full immersive virtual reality (VR) in a face-to-face setting, the ‘Express’ version is available online for respondents to complete at home on their computers.
The Challenge
Lumaten was tasked with conducting a study for a leading supplier in the biscuit category. Within grocery retail, suppliers are constantly required to assess their ranges, prices and innovations in order to ensure they meet the changing needs of consumers and retailers. In this case, the client wanted to test a range of sales strategies including quantification of the impact of innovation; an assessment of pricing and promotional scenarios; and the impact of changing the range in store.
Lumaten worked with the client to refine 15 scenarios that would enable A/B testing and scientific isolation of key variables.
The collaboration leveraged highly realistic scenarios in a virtual Woolworths store. Respondents shopped down an aisle, as close to normal as possible while remaining by their computers at home. After the shop, respondents were redirected to a survey and asked questions as to why they purchased the products that they did.
The Cint Solution
With a track record of powering market research technology stacks used by some of the world’s largest and fastest-growing insights companies, Cint is uniquely geared to help customers overcome the challenges associated with automating fieldwork and data collection. Its solution helped Lumaten to ensure maximum efficiency and accuracy in an online setting.
Cint’s team ensured that respondents were recruited which exactly matched the shoppers required by the client; with quotas established across demographic attributes, such as age and gender; life stage; and category usage.
The technical teams at both Cint and Lumaten are experienced at working together to ensure that respondents are seamlessly transferred to the SHOPPER360 virtual shopping environment for the task and questionnaire. Shoppers are then transferred back to Cint, which manages the completion rates of quotas and balanced cells, armed with strong protocols to test this process, end-to-end.
Tapping into Cint’s market intelligence and smart automation, as well as its reach, meant that the right respondents were delivered, while Cint’s flexible platform gathered the audiences needed with optimal efficiency- all subject to strict quality control standards.
The Results
The consultants at Lumaten are comprised of senior FMCG sales and marketing executives from large, multinational supplier organizations. Their clients value their ability to extract valuable insights from the data and synthesize into pragmatic and commercial recommendations.
This particular project provided Lumaten with detailed volumetric sales and share forecasts which were valuable for business cases, production forecasts and sales decks. It also resulted in significant new insights into how shoppers navigate the category.
What’s more, by partnering with Cint, Lumaten was able to ensure sample sizes were achieved well within the project plan timeline.
Success Snapshot
Cint gave Lumaten the ability to efficiently and effectively carry out their shopper research project by providing:
- Set up in hours: Cint’s experienced team was able to provide the linkages required to enable a seamless respondent experience.
- Fast fieldwork and delivery: The fieldwork was completed over just seven days, in line with the project plan.
- Large panel size: Cint’s substantial panel size drove the targeting of specific respondent demographics to ensure samples were representative of the segments required.
- 100% delivery of client quota: Cint delivered upon the client’s complex requirements across demographic, lifestage and category usage criteria.
- Cost efficiencies: Cint’s established panels and business model enable highly cost-effective sampling, which allowed Lumaten to test and analyse a broader range of scenarios
“Cint is a trusted and valuable partner for Lumaten for our SHOPPER360 Express studies. The team at Cint provides professional client management which ensures each of our studies are delivered on time, to budget, with respondents aligned to our clients’ quotas and with tested interfaces to ensure a seamless user experience. In this way, our combined technologies once again provided a perfect collaboration, and an efficient, effective and streamlined process.”
– Fiona Maggs, Managing Director, Australia
Lumaten
