Why a new 'sparkle' isn't always the best answer
Every marketer has been there.
You’re running a brand or managing a category. After a period of solid growth, sales begin to slow. There’s no obvious reason, so you run focus groups. No radical problems emerge. Some participants share minor complaints that get amplified during the session—mostly because there’s not much else to say—but nothing definitive surfaces.
Despite this, a consensus emerges: The brand is getting tired. It needs a refresh. Or, as they say in the on- trade, a “sparkle.”
It’s time to call the design agency to sprinkle their magic dust. The goal isn’t to change the fundamental proposition or communication objectives. Instead, you hope a fresh presentation will encourage consumers to recognize the error of their ways and welcome your brand back into their fold.
Sometimes this works. Sales pick up, market share recovers, and the brand manager gets promoted. All is well.
But more often than not, it fails. Why? Because the issue is more fundamental: we aren’t asking the right questions, or we aren’t asking them the right way.
The Problem with the Front Room in Leatherhead
Every brand manager worth their salt could win Mastermind with “My Brand” as their specialist subject. The problem is, shoppers don’t share that obsession.
With very few exceptions, the brands people buy occupy almost none of their waking moments—and certainly very little of their conscious attention. Most everyday shopping is habitual. We buy what we bought before, entirely without thinking.
So why do we assume consumers can give chapter and verse on why their habits are changing when interviewed two weeks later in a living room on a rainy Tuesday evening?
Moving from Memory to Reality
To truly understand buying decisions, we must be present when and where those decisions happen: in-store, at the point of purchase.
We need to observe how shoppers behave at the category shelf and ask questions immediately about the behaviors we see. While EPOS data tells us what people are buying, the real gold lies in understanding the friction points:
- The Rejected: Which brands were considered but ultimately put back?
- The Invisible: Which brands weren’t even considered because they weren’t noticed?
When you shift your focus from consumer memory to shopper reality, you uncover the true drivers of behavior.
Identifying the Real Design Challenge
Observation reveals the exact commercial problem you need to solve:
- If shoppers walk past a display without looking: You have a design issue, but it’s not about aesthetics—it’s about visibility.
- If shoppers glance at a display but only focus on one area: You need to fix your category segmentation.
- If shoppers spend time interacting with a display but leave empty-handed: The design might be unappealing, but it’s just as likely that the pricing was wrong, the range was poor, or the layout was too difficult to navigate.
Any of these insights might lead to a change in packaging, POS, or planograms. But by targeting specific behaviors, your design changes serve a clear commercial objective.
That is how design spending becomes an investment, not an expense.