The Kraken Occasion Journey
Developing a deeper, more holistic understanding of The Kraken customer occasion journey.
The Challenge
In anticipation of the launch of a new premix, Kraken Rum wanted enhanced strategies to recruit new customers and support future brand growth ahead of the category.
Despite a strong, distinctive brand within the spiced rum category that’s enjoyed solid growth over the last few years, there was an opportunity for Kraken Rum to optimise, innovate and improve on it’s well established marketing activity.
Developing a deeper, more holistic understanding of The Kraken customer and their occasion journey presented opportunities where Kraken could play a highly relevant and active role, for both the premix and spirit products.
Ethnography research
To deliver a truly customer centric view of the way Kraken rum was enjoyed between mates, ethnography research was conducted with key audience segments within their unique social settings. Observing the way Kraken drinkers behaved in their real-life environments, through the collection of detailed observations in their own words, gave deep, holistic insights into their views, actions and experiences.
Informing task templates and monitoring responses.
Providing the spine of an expected customer journey a sequence of questions was inspired for the ethnography task template. Using the Indeemo platform enabled regular review of content and responses in order to ask deeper questions relating to hypothesis or challenge any assumption.
Extracting key information.
With a solid foundation in the required audience and journey outputs, I was able to breakdown and extract key content from the data. This allowed me to organise methods to highlight relevant information via a key and migrate it to a central place.
Making research accessible
Ethnography provides lots of user generated data points. With the ambition to make this information as accessible as possible, a video editor was briefed to create a short film from key pieces of in-the-moment video content. Highlighting key audience information in this accessible way enabled the client to warm to their customers and challenge some of their pre existing perceptions of a ‘hipster’ audience archetype.
Customer profiles
Utilising Strategyzer customer “jobs to be done” profiles as a template for audience definition gave common ways of empathising with audience types. Profiles created in this way synthesised large pre existing strategy documents together with relevant ethnography outputs into two single page customer profiles. Distilling complex audience information simply, while providing light touch art direction of these profiles, drove their adoption with the client as a valuable and accessible asset, enabling more customer centric empathy and understanding.
A combination of ethnography research and existing research synthesised into customer profiles also provided clear, customer led distinctions between the attitudes towards spirit and premix products across all audience types.
CX journey mapping
Mapping the ethnography research as an occasion journey, highlighted the customer’s emotive, functional and social needs, as well as their pains and gains throughout the experience of getting together with their mates into a single artefact that inspired a wealth of relevant insight and opportunities.
Customer journey mapping through the lens of their key audience inspired unique opportunities for Kraken to optimise, innovate and stay ahead of competitors.
Art directing the display of the occasion journey as a visually driven asset enhanced its adoption and use as a tool for innovation and insight.
Opportunity statements
While drinkers have individual choices for liking the Kraken product, the research revealed the consumption occasion and brand appeal are largely social. Key themes, observations and opportunities within this social setting were delivered to influence long term brand strategy, as well as short term initiative opportunities.
To inspire greatest adoption and appeal, all opportunities were presented as ‘How Might We’ statements while aligning to these guiding principles:
- Be motivating to the Kraken customer – not just the liquid on an individual level, but the brand on a social level.
- Unique to the Kraken brand or product – find ways to stand out on a relatively generic path to purchase.
- Utility or entertainment – or ideally both.
Delivering opportunities aligned to journey mapping were so well received, immediate business opportunities in retail and social were prioritised, while a large scale print of the visualised journey was mounted onto the Proximo Spirits office wall for easy access and constant reference.
Credits
Agency: WiTH Collective
Group Account Director: Emily Taylor-Delplanque
Account Director: Lindsay Batstone
Executive Planner Director: Rob Dougan
Planner: Nakia Jones
Head of Digital Experience: Paul Kelly
Designer: Emily Hjortflod & Alexa Burchell
November, 2019