Cambridge
Design Partnership’s (CDP) collaboration with the cosmetics company
Avon on its ANEW Reversalist Infinite Effects Night Treatment Cream,
which encourages consumers to turn it at weekly intervals to boost its
efficacy, demonstrates the potential of smart packaging to enhance the
research and development process. CDP fitted Avon’s packaging with its
diialog sensors during a consumer trial to determine how the Night Cream
was used, with the ultimate goal of de-risking the launch of a
cosmetics product that required consumers to use it in a novel way.
We
spoke with James Harmer, planning and innovation strategy lead at CDP,
and Amy King, innovation consultant at CDP, about what the partnership
with Avon tells us about early applications for smart packaging and how
it can be used to demystify consumer behaviour.
The truth on trial
According
to a survey by Avon, 78% of consumers believed that their skincare
products stopped working over time. The cosmetic brand sought to address
this with ANEW Reversalist Infinite Effects Night Treatment Cream, a
product that utilises so-called rotational therapies – two different
creams at either end of a tube-shaped pack, which the consumer switches
between weekly to prevent the resistance of skin to antiaging
properties.
CDP’s
brief from Avon was to “provide data about exactly how the product was
being used, and to alleviate their concerns that the product might not
be used correctly, in order to de-risk a multi-million dollar launch,”
Harmer explains. The group’s smart packaging solution, diialog, which
allows small sensors to be fitted discreetly within the packaging,
formed the basis of the trial.
As
King points out, the use of diialog aims to establish “truth data” that
might not be readily available from ethnography, another method for
gauging consumer behaviour that involves observations and surveys. When
conducting ethnographic research, King notes that consumers might give
the answer they think the researcher wants to hear – for example,
indicating that they used the product exactly as advised – or may rely
on memory to build a picture of usage, which is not always accurate.
This is known as the Hawthorne Effect, where behaviour can unnaturally
change when being studied.
Therefore,
the purpose of incorporating diialog smart sensors into packaging is to
fade into the background; with the consumer not feeling as closely
observed or judged as they might during ethnography, they are more
likely to relax into using the product as they would ‘in real life’.
“We’ve
basically tried to make it as unobtrusive as possible because we don’t
want to bias the consumers,” King says. “We give them the technology in
the product, and we say, use this product as you usually would. The
whole point of diialog is to act naturally and to get a source of
truth.”
Notably,
the diialog technology offers an opportunity to understand how products
are used where ethnography might be considered too invasive. “For
example, anything you use in the shower, it’s just a bit more sensitive
than where, in normal ethnography, you might observe someone using
detergent in a washing machine,” King says. The diialog sensors measure
movement, so it essentially cannot see or hear the consumer. This means
for products like shampoo – but also face creams, the focus of CDP’s
research, which are often applied in consumers’ bedrooms or bathrooms –
the use of smart packaging during initial trials can get
environment-specific results without encroaching on privacy.
Of
course, attitudes to sensors that covertly collect behavioural data are
likely to be different within a controlled consumer trial than a larger
scale public rollout. “There is all this paranoia about future
technology, which we’re going to have to work through as smart packaging
develops,” Harmer acknowledges. However, Avon and CDP’s consumer trial
made it “clear we’re doing research”, with an explicit consideration of
GDPR, which meant participants were more likely to accept and then
ignore the presence of the diialog technology. As King says, in this
case, “the fact that it’s smart packaging means nothing to the consumer,
but it means a lot to us and our clients”.
Interpreting outcomes
Once
the data has been collected, “we need to clean it, we need to put IDs
on it,” King tells us. “We need to figure out what that data means, time
stamp it. There’s a lot of data maintenance that goes into
understanding it.”
The
time stamps gave CDP an idea of when the Avon cream was being used. The
expected timeframe was in the morning or the evening, but consumer
trials can produce “the odd case where it’s used differently”. Once the
team mapped out time stamps, they could begin to understand how the
product was used.
“We
also have different sensors that will interact with each other to give
us different data,” King says. This could be how long the product was
used for or the intensity of the movement during its usage, which could
indicate consumer behaviours such as shaking the product before
dispensing it. “We have sensors in our pack that can tell us about how
fast the product is moving and how quickly it’s being moved. We get a
high data signal when it’s being treated in a heavy-handed way.”
The
next challenge is interpreting the data. “We have a consumer insights
team that will dig into all the data,” King adds. “Sometimes we have
behaviours from the data that takes us a little while to figure out
because we’re not sure what consumers are doing. This is where combining
this technique with an interview or other traditional methods can help.
“We
can recreate it in our own office to try and get the same data
patterns. We can see if they’re shaking it really vigorously or if they
leave it upside down, and that’s why we’re getting the reading. So it’s a
bit of data manipulation and then a bit of our insights team figuring
out the usage patterns.”
The
why of this behaviour can then be established by triangulating
different diialog sensors. For example, King uses the example of the
heavy-handed treatment of the Avon packaging; the consumer insights team
concluded that this was because people were in a rush when they were
using it, based on the timestamps showing it appeared to be part of
their morning routine.
“If
Avon conducted this study themselves and if they got people to come in
and use that product, or if we did it and we got people into our
offices, they definitely wouldn’t have been that heavy handed,” King
acknowledges. Even if they tried to recreate it with ethnographic
studies, she argues, the participants “wouldn’t be as heavy handed
because they’re aware they’ve got people watching them. So you do
realise, actually, they are throwing this product around a bit more than
we thought they would.”
For
King and Harmer, this is what underlines the importance of using
diialog for consumer trials: getting unexpected data suggests that a
more realistic picture of consumer usage has been created, which gives
companies something to work on that they might not have accounted for
with more traditional methods.
Source: Packaging Europe