Relevance & Research Question:
As one of the biggest German drugstore brand, the Corona pandemic confronts dm with several major challenges in different areas and units. How political, social and medical developments affect consumers, consumer behaviour, fears and concerns at the PoS, and the image of dm are key issues in this project.
Methods & Data:
dm needed above all fast, timely, reliable insights on current and highly dynamic developments. Weekly trend reports at the beginning of the project could only be achieved through a mix of methods and a highly efficient and flexible research process.
Diversity: we set up a very diverse project team to cover different point of views and lifeworlds.
Intelligence of the Q crowd: internal knowledge management platform collecting weak signals, observations.
Web crawler: capturing, structuring and analysing the web
Social Listening: Tracking, reviewing and quantifying previously found trends
Netnography: content analytical approach to capture, understand and interpret need states
Google Trends Analyses: uncovering linked topics and search patterns from a consumers’ perspective
AI: automated detection of trends.
Last not least: expertise and research experience.
Because of extreme time pressure, we opted for an agile and tight project management.
The project includes special process steps:
Regular editorial meetings between dm and Q to challenge trends and weak signals before reporting and to check relevance for dm.
Extremely open communication between client and agency, which enables a deep understanding of dm’s questions and a quick and tailor-made preparation of insights.
Results:
The results are presented in a customised format. It is suitable for management and includes exemplary trend manifestations as well as concrete recommendations for dm. In addition, the results are embedded in a context of society as a whole:
Overview and classification of all found trends in a trend map.
The reporting cycle has been changed depending on the social dynamics and dm’s requirements.
Q also conducted short-term on-demand analyses.
Added Value:
The results are made available in an internal dm network for the different departments and units and are used by dm branches, communication teams, marketing, product development and corporate strategy.
The reports work at different company levels (granular, concrete vs. strategic) and for the different areas such as marketing, private label development, communication, etc. In addition, the insights offer touchpoints for dm’s keyproduct categories such as colour cosmetics, skincare, washing and cleaning, etc.