Hormel has made a huge shift in the way they handle research. This global company has more than 20,000 employees and 50+ brands, such as Spam, Skippy, Black Label Bacon, Applegate, and many more. As you might imagine, they rely heavily on consumer insights. I recently co-presented with Heather Vossler, Hormel Director of Insights and Innovation, to learn about their approach to research, how it has shifted in the past few years, and how they are adapting during COVID-19.
Heather shared Hormel’s story of organizational change, including how she helped the Consumer Insights team revamp everything from how they buy research to the research methods they use. These shifts resulted in the team’s ability to spin up research much more quickly than before.
For years, Hormel had worked exclusively with custom suppliers for their research. As their insights needs increased and timelines accelerated, they realized they required more agility and always-on resources from both the qualitative and quantitative sides. “Our brands’ consumers were changing so fast; we needed to have more control over, yet also flexibility in how we were going to approach certain insights needs,” Heather explained.
The first step: adding an ongoing community. “We had to do quite a bit of selling to get the organization to shift this way,” Heather said. But after they had one success with an “always on” resource, everyone was on board.
A few years later, they began to identify some research gaps, including:
Hormel has now shifted to a hybrid approach – a mix of DIY and full service, with a variety of new technology tools to support their team. Being able to deliver insights in a more flexible and agile manner has resulted in a true cultural shift at Hormel. “Everything starts with an insight now,” Heather said. To make sure their approach and resources are structured and on target, the Hormel Consumer Insights team:
Hormel has an always-on subscription with Digsite that allows them to conduct more robust qualitative research sprints in a quick and agile manner. According to Heather, they have Digsite Sprint studies going on almost 100% of the time. Some of the activities Hormel has used within the agile Digsite platform include concept mark-up activities, self-recorded videos, online chat conversations, and fill-in-the-blank storytelling. Here are two Hormel case studies that show how Hormel uses online qual.
Hormel was seeing a lot of shifts in the nut butter category, with many new entrants and flavors. Consumers were also using nut butters differently than the traditional sandwich use. Hormel wanted to do some exploratory research to see how consumers felt about the category.
Solution: Consumers were brought into an online Digsite community to provide information about how they perceive, use, shop for, and store nut butters.
“We were able to provide some [unmoderated] activities and then go back and start a conversation with the participants,” Heather said. They used the conversation activity to do additional probing, ask for more photos and get more detailed information.
Results: This informed the ethnography work that followed, which the team feels was much richer due to this online qual work they did ahead of time.
Hormel has several brands in the deli section of grocery stores. They wanted to understand consumers’ pain points, how they shopped, and what they called the different sections of the deli.
They conducted a study in December 2019, but then COVID-19 hit and impacted food behaviors in many new ways.
Solution: They decided to go back and re-do a version of the December 2019 study, to understand how the COVID-19 pandemic has impacted consumers’ perception and shopping behavior in grocery store deli sections. Consumers shared their past and current attitudes and behaviors with respect to shopping in the deli sections of the grocery store.
Results: New COVID-19 era deli shopping insights
Using a platform like Digsite with DIY plus supported services allows Hormel (and any company) to very quickly go in and build a flexible study. Here are some of the primary benefits:
Now more than ever, it’s critical to gain consumer insights quickly. At Digsite, we do this by working in small development teams, breaking complex problems into short sprints, focusing on building and testing solutions concurrently, executing fast customer-driven feedback and integrating learning into a coherent whole.
After many years of trial and error, here’s an approach both Heather and I recommend to teams looking to add new consumer insights platforms and capabilities:
For an in-depth look at how to conduct market research during the COVID-19 pandemic, check out our new eBook How to Conduct Market Research During the COVID-19 Era.