Finding an angle to sell salty snacks to China
The problem
The PepsiCo salty snack team in Shanghai had reached a point where they needed to find compelling propositions to take their brands to the next level within the Chinese mainland market. They asked ?What If! to help the local team dig for consumer understanding and turn what was found into insights. This could then be given to the local communication agencies to drive the brands into the next stage of the growth.
The process
The majority of the project was based in China. A three-person ?What If! team worked together with a Chinese based group of clients from the Marketing and Insight teams plus their local agencies and research partners.
Step one was project definition and developing with the team a way of working to ensure great consumer fieldwork and information gathering with local researchers.
The ?What If! team then spent a week in China downloading everything the team had found and pulling out the big emerging themes that could steer the thinking. From these, several big opportunity areas began to emerge.
Whilst the ?What If! team returned to the UK to design stimulus exercises to help get deeper inside these opportunity areas, the client team worked on getting buy-in from key stakeholders into these areas.
A second visit to China gave the team a chance to dig deeper into each of the emerging spaces and craft the thinking behind the ones that were clearly taking a lead.
The solution
By the end of the project three areas of opportunity had clearly emerged as having potential. All of these could play a role in driving the communication thinking – and by considering the brand portfolio we were able to find a great fit for several of these to become the main message that helped clarify what each brand could stand for.
Alongside this – we also unearthed a variety of additional insights which represented possible opportunities for PepsiCo to follow up on and extend their portfolio in the Chinese marketplace.
The results
The identified proposition is now part of the brief, executions have been developed against this and results are awaited.
"It was helpful to have ?What If! guide the process and design the variety of stimulus and interactions that facilitated quality ideation and culminated in the final proposition. It worked despite language gaps."
Shireesh Joshi, PepsiCo Foods China Co. Ltd.
"This project was a good example of how we can work in tandem with third parties to get the best result for a client. The local research company played a pivotal role in helping gather the consumer clues and helping the client team get closer to their audience firsthand. It worked well because we invested the time upfront to make sure the way this information was being gathered made it possible for us to use these clues as our raw ingredients to get to an answer for the project. Being adept at working with local experts gives us flexibility to work in any market and any language across the world."
Jo Foster, ?What If!
