Video transcript: Understand your consumer to build trust, find greater value and transform

Transcript

Lisa Hooker:
Hi, Kien and Tamar. It’s great to get back together and talk about the research we’ve been doing around consumer health. What I find fascinating is it’s a massive market, over £6 billion, and we talk a lot about retail growing like 1-3% and consumer health is growing more like 6-8% longer term. So, it’s a great market, and you saw pre-COVID that people were so much more interested in their health and wellbeing, and actually COVID just accelerated that. And with an aging population, it’s going to become increasingly more important. We got together to do the research, you know, I think we did about 2,500 consumer surveys, we did focus groups, and we talked to people about how they feel about spending, and thinking very much about chronic illnesses and conditions. But, in that context Tamar, talk about your general findings and thoughts about the wider consumer health market.

Tamar Kasriel:
Well I think it’s really helpful to look at the broader context, and think how much health and wellness has changed over the past decades. It used to be that being healthy, that just meant not being ill, and now, there’s wellbeing which is a whole, sort of, positive, confusing area, where consumers are just inundated with all this information and advice and suggestions and marketing. And there is a big opportunity for brands, if pitched right, if they’re having the right kinds of conversations in the right places, to be able to really help consumers on their health and wellbeing journey.

Lisa:
And it’s interesting, this was a second study. Do you remember we did Consumer Reconsidered first, looking very much about the buying journeys for big ticket purchases. And then this one, we said, well let’s look at it for Consumer Health Reconsidered. And there were some quite interesting differences between the two.

Kien Tan:
The key that’s the same between both of those studies is understanding the customer journey. So, understanding the journey between, I first need this product, or I need a solution in the case of health, to actually buying the product. That’s the key to unlocking where you can interrupt that journey to influence people to buy your product. In the original Consumer Reconsidered research we found that the decision was based on either online or offline and the length of time it took to make the decision about the purchase. With health, the research that we did, the focus groups and the consumer research that we did, showed three specific factors that influence where and how people bought. So, the length of time you’ve suffered from a condition for example, if it’s an allergy or a skin condition, maybe you’ve suffered from when you were a child, or if it was more recently. So, those who’d suffered more recently
were more likely and open to new solutions, for example, than those who had habitually been taking the same thing. The second thing that affected people’s buying decisions was whether or not they like to take advice. And a lot of consumers, particularly older ones, don’t like to take advice, they’ll actually buy the same thing every time. And then the final decision, which Tamar will go on to talk about, is whether or not people stock up in advance. So, the vast majority don’t do that, don’t stock up in advance, don’t buy on a regular basis. However, there are some that do. So, how you target those different consumers, actually there’s different ways to approach them.

Lisa:
I find it fascinating is how people purchase. It’s still very much a shop based purchase, but I think because the importance of your health and seeking advice, I thought more would go
to specialist retailers. But the majority still go to the supermarket or the general retailers. And actually, even online, you’re starting to see the emergence of Amazon where people shop. So, it is quite surprising, that whole shopping journey.

Tamar:
Well, we found so much that really surprised us in this work. We did go in with some hypotheses, as you have to, and some assumptions that in this particular sector, because people are suffering from conditions which are frequent and predictable, you think of hay fever, it comes at the same time every year, that people would therefore stock up in advance. They know it’s coming. But actually, it was very surprising to find out that almost half of people buy products to alleviate their conditions as and when they need it, rather than stocking up in advance. And the other idea that we had to leave behind was that in this space, people are absolutely habit forming - that they would just keep buying the same thing again and again and again. And while it’s true that there are, I think it was about 19% of people, stick unwaveringly to the same product, actually the rest of people may be open to trying something new and trying a different product. So, there is opportunity to go and change, to deflect, to disrupt that shopping journey.

Lisa:
And it comes back, in a way, if you think in-store, to some basic retailing in terms of, you know, promoting, where you put your product, you know, how you communicate with customers, that it’s not dissimilar to other products really in terms of how you disrupt that journey.

Kien:
And that’s particularly important because we know that where consumers do change the brand or the product that they’re buying, 50% of those decisions are taken in-store right at that moment in time when they’re going to pick up that item because of that very reason that they don’t stock up. So, they go into store and then are persuaded by price and by promotions and by what’s at the end of an aisle to go and buy that product.

Tamar:
But I think, what’s really interesting about looking at consumer health in particular, is working out what are the lessons we can learn from other sectors and other industries and what elements are particular just to consumer health. And consumer health is, you know, our health is loaded and there’s a lot of baggage around it and concerns and anxieties and all the rest of it. But there are some elements about buying stuff which go across all sectors. So, as you said, given that for now the majority of consumer health purchases are made in-store, maybe
not at the traditional pharmacist, but at discounters and supermarkets and so on, we know that when consumers, the same consumer can be very different on different occasions. So, all of us, we have times when we just want a really streamlined process, we don’t want to touch the sides, we don’t want to have to interact with a pharmacist, answer questions and all the rest of it. We just want to go in and get out as quickly as possible. And there are also going to be times when we do want the human touch. We maybe want a bit of advice, we maybe just want a bit of conversation and being able to offer that same consumer those different options is a really, really powerful way to capture their spend.

Lisa:
And I think it is trying to map that consumer journey across online, offline, across websites, across research, so it is trying to track them, which I think new technologies are making it easier and easier. But, I think a lot of people still need to do that investment in their technology to actually get that depth of data that you really need to understand the buying habits.

Kien:
There are learnings to be had from FMCG companies and from food and drink and other consumer goods. It really is about know your consumer, different consumers have different journeys. Older people tend to be more habitual. But, the good thing is, that means they just come into store, they don’t plan in advance, they come into store, and then you can influence them in the store, at that moment in time. Whereas, younger consumers, they’re the ones who are more likely to be researching online, researching not just on the NHS website, but on your website. So, it’s almost segmenting your base of consumers to understand how you’re going to attract and approach and influence different groups of consumers at different times, which is good, old-fashioned, you know, consumer research, consumer understanding, consumer insights.

Tamar:
I also think that, in this space with everything that’s going on in terms of AI and the ability and the power that retailers and brands can have to really understand a single consumer and try and predict what that consumer might do, what they might want, being able to structure and have a strategy around that data is absolutely essential. It’s not optional any more. But what we have to always keep in mind is that conflict between our newfound abilities to hyper-personalize and the importance of privacy.

Lisa:
And we can’t, if you’re talking about data, we then have to talk about trust and privacy. I mean, we talk about trust all the time in the context of retail, but in terms of your health, that it’s so important. And, you know, it’s not just about trust, but it’s also about avoiding distrust, and putting the customer off and actually damaging your brand.

Tamar:
So, trust is an absolutely fascinating and complicated space that brands are rightly obsessed with, and it’s not simply one dimensional. There is also this key element of distrust because there may be some things around your marketing, or your messaging that actually bring in or attract a small group of enthusiastic consumers to you, but may actually alienate a bigger group of consumers. They may make them distrust you. And that can be a really powerful thing which turns people away. So, for example, we found in this work, that alternative health in general is something which really polarises people. So, there may be some people who are really drawn to an alternative health message, but at the same time, there’s actually a much bigger group of people who can find it very alienating and off-putting.

Kien:
Your start point in health is that there are some almost institutions in a way that are almost widespread, have widespread trust, and very little of this distrust. So, your GP, a specialist in the condition that you have, whether it’s a skin specialist, or an allergy specialist, or something like that, pharmacists. Also, interestingly the NHS website is almost universally trusted. I think the challenge is that some of these aren’t as accessible to consumers these days for the points that we raised already. So, that gives a huge opportunity for brands and retailers almost to fill that gap where, especially in the cases where consumers are looking for advice, some of the more simple methods are the ones that are the most trusted. So, I was fascinated to find out that, you know, simple websites, not brand’s Instagram feeds, or not the fact that they get PR or are in newspapers, or in the mainstream media, actually, people want to be able to log on to the website of the brand that they like to find out what they do. And, in a way, that’s been eclipsed by all the other, new methods of communicating with consumers which have the risk of this distrust angle as you mentioned.