At the ESOMAR 3D Digital Dimensions conference in Boston this week, Olga Churkina of Fresh Intelligence Research and Tristan Morris of PepsiCo shared a fascinating mobile ethnography case study which featured a game of Marketing VPs vs. Aliens. And the great news is this gamification technique is accessible to almost anyone from Planet Earth who conducts online surveys.
Tristan represents the voice of the consumer inside the marketing department, and he is “bombarded” with questions about consumers’ interactions with PepsiCo’s food products: Frito Lay snacks and Quaker granola bars and cereals. One question was vexing his team: why, if Tostitos is the second leading snack brand in Canada, does it not sell as well in western Canada as it does in eastern Canada? In the West, Tostitos faced competition from many small brands with just 1% or 2% share nationwide – as a result, these brands were poorly understood.