While many motivations exist behind people’s purchase decisions, health, wellness and sustainability aspirations play a growing role. These rising purchasing reasons are something we are calling an “aspirational” compass for shoppers. Since 2017, InsightNow has been tracking the motivations and behaviors of a proprietary community of Clean Label Enthusiasts®—a shopper segment showing a roadmap of emerging trends related to aspirational purchasing motivations around health, wellness and sustainability.
In today’s world, shopping behaviors have gone through tremendous disruption and changes due to the pandemic. Achieving market success looks different now, and assessing the actual behavior of this growing segment of consumers whose aspirations motivate their shopping will be important—particularly in the food and beverage industry.
Following the Aspirational Compass
Using proprietary implicit testing techniques, InsightsNow is further exploring this segment of buyers guided by aspirational goals. We are looking at the gap between aspirational buys, and actual (situational) buys in food and beverage. When studying this, we will ask consumers what they’d do differently between shopping in an “ideal world” versus how they actually shop today. This assessment helps us understand the gaps that exist—even for specific shopping scenarios for specific products.
In our webinar, “Aspirations vs. Reality: How the Gap Sparks Innovation,” we will help innovation teams understand what we mean by this “compass,” the gap that exists between shopper segments, and how to innovate to close this gap.
Better Reaching Target Consumers
When you’ve done the research to understand where there is a purchasing gap between aspirational buys and actual buys, you can identify where change needs to happen for the highest level of success in the marketplace. When a gap IS identified, it means no products meet the need (innovation opportunity), or there are products which exist that are not positioned properly (communication opportunity), or that there are products which are there but just not known (awareness opportunity).
Aspirational Purchasing & Impact on Product Innovation
Once you understand the aspirational shopper segment—and whether you have an innovation, communication or awareness opportunity—you can improve product claims and marketing messaging for products to better reach the aspirational purchaser. Food product designers, developers and marketers need to keep up with consumer attitudes and perceptions about new ingredients, emerging product benefits and the association between ingredients and benefits to substantiate claims. This is especially important to the aspirational shopper.
Webinar for More Information
Our webinar this September, “Aspirations vs. Reality: How the Gap Sparks Innovation,” with our CEO Dave Lundahl and our CRO Greg Stucky, gives you the perfect opportunity to learn more about this aspirational shopper. The webinar covers an InsightsNow study conducted to understand changing motivations driving primary shoppers’ food and beverage purchases. The study looked particularly at behavior drivers related to health, wellness, and sustainability concerns. In this webinar, you will learn from our findings about the gaps identified between aspirational and actual motivations in select product categories, how to better define your product’s target consumer, and how to target the gaps and find opportunities for innovations or messaging.
