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Can purchase decision-making change overnight?
Personal hygiene brand
Challenge
Does human behaviour ever change quickly and unexpectedly?
During the COVID-19 pandemic, Mindlab helped a leading personal hygiene brand identify how decision making about FMCG products had altered almost overnight. The research was carried out in Germany and the UK across numerous categories including toothpaste, shower gel and anti-bacterial soap. It highlighted how the brand needed to pivot its model to adapt.
Research
Using our proprietary implicit research methodology, which helps understand shopper purchase decision hierarchies, we carried out an online study of hundreds of shoppers.
Participants were each shown randomly selected pairs of shopping attributes–across pricing, features, and benefits–and asked to choose as quickly as possible which attribute was more important to them.
The speed of their response was as important as their response itself: a faster response time indicates strong intuitive engagement with an attribute, whereas slower responses point to lower emotional engagement and lower importance in the purchase journey.
As we had carried out the same test three years previously, we were able to compare, map, analyse and identify shifts.
Findings
A clear shift had taken place since the tests had been carried out pre-pandemic.
Shoppers were now less reliant on gut feeling. In the categories we studied, decision-making has become less intuitive, with a significant slow-down in reaction times compared to pre-pandemic, perhaps a consequence of the recent focus on effective personal care, such as hand-washing.
Consumers cared more about cleanliness. Attitudes to “anti-bacterial” as an attribute had transformed, becoming very strongly intuitive and the leading driver of the decision hierarch. Shoppers also placed a greater priority on attributes such as “ease of use” and “natural ingredients”–conceivably due to the repetitive nature of effective hand washing.
Brands were the big winners. This deliberate decision-making was making people more likely to buy well-known brands as their claims and promises could be trusted. Price was a more secondary concern, although shoppers were as keen as ever to feel they were getting good value for money.
Size and single-use views move. There was an upswing of interest in large and refillable packaging, perhaps as shoppers had found these convenient during the pandemic and wanted to continue making green choices.
These insights enabled the brand to realign its category management, adapt range design, product design, messaging on the product and pack, and communication strategies.
