Developing Strategies Through Qualitative Research Software

How Discuss Helps Unilever With Their Commitment To Consumer-Centricity

The Challenges

Unilever has a long-standing commitment to keeping consumers at the core of their business and decision-making. However, budget limitations make it challenging to build one-on-one connections with consumers who live outside of their teams’ immediate geographies. Thus, teams across Unilever were looking for solutions that enable them to be consumer-centric, while avoiding the cost and hassle associated with frequent travel.

Exploring a new retail channel, a CMI team at Unilever needed to gain a better understanding of the shopping behaviors of consumers in the UK who purchased a particular Unilever product. These conversations needed to happen within a short time-frame, as they would be leveraged during an upcoming strategy workshop. And it was critical for the team members to engage in these conversations first-hand in order to build their own understanding of the consumer so they could participate in the discussions in a more informed way.

The Solution

Unilever used Discuss to recruit and host these conversations on their live video platform. Over the course of two weeks, 30 members of the CMI team engaged in one-on-one conversations online with consumers. Since these conversations were conducted from consumers’ homes and not central locations, Discuss was able to recruit from a more representative swath of consumers dispersed around the UK, not only those located in metropolitan areas. Discuss’s end-to-end solution enabled the team to engage directly with consumers themselves in order to hear first-hand how consumers went about the shopping process. Following the workshop, the team compiled a highlight video of the findings, allowing the insights to be shared and rewatched repeatedly.

The Results

Having connected directly with consumers beforehand, the brand managers joined the workshop equipped with relevant perspectives, personal stories and insights, which they shared throughout the day. It made for a workshop that was energized and externally focused, rather than corporate and insular, and made it feel as if the consumers were right there in the room.
They were able to further infuse this energy throughout the organization by clipping together highlights from the sessions in a reel. Leveraging the video recordings allowed them to keep the voice of the consumer alive long after the workshop and influencing future decision-making. Unilever’s long-standing mission of developing consumer-centric strategy was accelerated, simplified, and made scalable by partnering with Discuss.

The team received the benefits of observing and interacting with the sessions in real-time without hindering their success or integrity, resulting in a more intimate understanding of the role of mothers’ emotions on babies’ growing independence.

About Discuss

Discuss is the leading live video solution for enabling brands to discover actionable insights and build consumer connections at scale. When brands have frequent and direct conversations, they deepen empathy and understanding for the consumer, create better products, and deliver more effective marketing. Discuss provides a live video platform and end-to-end services, including recruiting and moderation, for an all-in-one or flexible solution to enable quick, easy, and scalable access to consumers around the world to stakeholders across the organization. Discuss makes it easy to ask questions when you have them and develop a more consumer-centric organization.