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02.09.2006

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At Home With The American Consumer

Finding ways to innovate food products, services and experiences is getting harder by the minute. The key to innovation lies in everyday life where food and beverages get consumed, shared and talked about.

"Do I cook the vegetables before I make the pot pie?" Searching for an answer to this seemingly uncomplicated question proves quite the opposite for this consumer in the midst of mealtime preparation. Even though her cupboard is full of cookbooks and shelves loaded with packaged goods, the answer eludes her. How many cookbooks will she sift through? Will she use the Internet? Will a packaged product help solve her problem? Will she find the answer in time for the pot pie to be ready for dinner?This is just an everyday problem encountered by an everyday consumer caught in the routine act of preparing a meal for her family. Why is it so darn hard to find an answer to this simple question when meal preparation is well underway? Our Household Immersion Lab team caught this consumer encounter on tape. View the consumer video below to see if and how our consumer got the answer to her question.

A month from now, if this same person were taken out of the context of her home and placed in the artificial environment of a focus group to discuss the subject of meal preparation, she would most likely not be able to recall all the details of this kitchen quest - or may not be willingly to share them for any number of reasons. Marketers would then miss out on an opportunity to connect with consumers.

As the above scenario testifies, through the Household Immersion Lab we have the ability to enter a collective of households to explore and video-document the dynamics of how consumers interact and make sense of products, brands and services. With our trained researchers "immersed" alongside consumers where they live, shop and use products on an everyday basis, it is the best way to capture the unmet needs that consumers themselves are not even aware of - and could never articulate in focus groups.

This one example from our first Household Immersion Lab raises the question as to who is out in the marketplace working on at-home, in-the-kitchen meal preparation Q&A information solutions. This one question has implications touching a variety of companies in addition to food manufacturers, such as appliance manufacturers, technology & software developers and e-commerce sites on the internet.

Who really drives fragmentation of taste preferences in the household?
Conventional Wisdom: Picky children are the prime agents of fragmentation. Marketing to children has encouraged this phenomenon. Unfortunately, this generally explains the individual rejection of foods intended to be shared, something very different from the prime engine of meal fragmentation: individual taste preferences that are legitimized/honored in the home during the meal planning process.
Emerging Household Immersion Lab Insight: Some moms are at least equally responsible for promoting, if not causing, taste fragmentation. Recipes, grocery products and dinner solutions continue to get marketed to households under the presumption that everyone is eating the same thing at night. As breakfast and lunch have become infrequent, food marketers are clinging to the dinner occasion and remain unwilling to accept the day-to-day complexity involved in getting people fed in the evening, especially in family households.
What aspect of the evening meal is rendered most problematic in the cultural trend toward meal fragmentation?
Conventional Wisdom: Lack of time is the prime difficulty in preparing meals, which would seem to be only more accurate in homes experiencing fragmented meals on a regular basis.
Emerging Household Immersion Lab Insight: Meal planning appears to be the chief culprit in homes experiencing meal fragmentation rather than a persistent "lack of time" to prepare and cook proper meals. The cognitive burden of meal production appears greater in homes in which individual taste preferences are proactively accommodated during meal planning.

Emerging Insights

An outcrop of the pilot Household Immersion Lab is the number of interesting insights with the potential for significant business implications, but which require further research to establish the relevant opportunities for manufacturers, retailers and others. Here are five preliminary insights on staging the evening meal and grocery shopping:

The quest for "something new for dinner" is operating at the weekly level in some households. "New" may simply be something they haven't eaten in over six months.
Taste fragmentation is not simply about "pushy children" demanding what "I want," but is often a preference co-generated by a parent.
"Today's Moms" have redefined mothering as something to embrace, not resist, and who proactively cater to their children's individual food preferences as a sign of "being a good mother" - even if it causes them additional cognitive burden.
In family households exhibiting strong taste fragmentation, we see signs of the grocery store being a crucial site where moms continually re-authorize their children's discriminating food bias by encouraging them, in-store, to pick out their own dinner (e.g., "I want pasta shells, he wants spaghetti").
New product purchasing (far beyond the fatty or sugary indulgence foods stereotypically associated with children's food) may be significantly higher in likelihood when children are present on grocery trips of any nature.

The Payoff

Through this intimate involvement with consumers on their turf over extended periods time (three months or more), rather than a scheduled singular date on a calendar, the real gems of insight emerge. It is this "immersed" passage in time that reveals the most accurate picture of how products, brands and services are integrated in consumers' lives and gives marketers the stimulus for the innovation and creation of tomorrow's products, brands and services.

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