How One Major Beauty Brand Avoided a Packaging Misstep Using Agile Market Research

We’ve all heard the old saying, “beauty is only skin deep.” Well, the same goes for packaging: while an aesthetically appealing package may catch a consumer’s eye, it also needs to prove that the product will work for them. And for a beauty product, that means demonstrating its effectiveness to a diverse market of individuals, each with deeply personal feelings about what beauty means to them.

So how do you package cosmetics in a way that makes people feel confident about what they’re buying and about themselves? That’s the question one insights manager for a major beauty brand asked us to help her answer. In order to stay innovative in a cluttered aisle by evoking the emotions and fulfilling the promises that drive consumers to their product, her team needed a combination of quantitative and qualitative research to find winning concepts.

And for this insights team, a two-pronged agile solution proved invaluable. In addition to quickly providing the data needed to influence retail space and meet individual consumer needs, our qualitative feedback uncovered a significant packaging shortcoming that may have gone unnoticed. Here is the full story of how one beauty brand leveraged agile research throughout their development process to prioritize concepts and discover actionable consumer feedback.