Moving right along.

We are finally up and moving with our project! It's good to finally know where we are going.

My team and I spent the last week conducting qualitative research. We interviewed people on our product-- their perceptions of what it is and does (seems silly considering everyone thinks they know what fabric softener is, but not everyone knows all it does), what benefits it offers (again, people assume they know all of the benefits, but most do not), how they use it (again, most people do not use it correctly), and what benefits would attract them the most to the category. All in all our results were very similar, even though we surveyed very different populations. What we found was that not many people truly understand what all fabric softener does for the clothes. That could play into why a lot of our respondents did not think using it was an essential step in their laundry process. Great insight for us! We now know that those benefits need to be better related and communicated to today's consumer! Simple, right? 

Our product was designed for and very successful years ago when the world of washing clothes in the home was very different. Now our machines do much of what these supplemental products were created to do. That's bad news our product. So, our next few steps will involve conducting quantitative research focusing on attitudinal statements. We are creating attitude statements for respondents to agree/disagree with to see where their priorities lie. We hope that this will show us which benefits will actually appeal to today's consumers more than the others, and then we can begin on getting those messages on the product's bottles. We want to go about this research in this way because we know that if we ask respondents whether between their family's clothing softness or the value of their dollar, which is more important, we probably will not get truthful responses. We are hoping that careful phrasing and anonymity will give respondents a feeling of safety when answering truthfully.

I have confidence in our plan of action and look forward to the coming steps!