MW Chocolate leveraged video ethnography to study consumer behavior during summer road trips, capturing real-time insights across the entire journey from pre-trip planning through on-the-go purchases, enabling faster qualitative research without traditional ethnographer costs.
The Challenge
- Summer seasonality creates soft sales periods requiring equity-building activities to drive chocolate bar purchases
- Syndicated data identified summer road-tripping as the #2 consumption occasion for chocolate bars
- Traditional in-store ethnographic research faced permission delays and high costs from employing ethnographers
- Need for faster insight gathering without compromising research depth and consumer authenticity
Solution & Implementation
- Recruited 55 U.S. consumers to participate in video ethnography documenting their Labor Day weekend road trips
- Captured planning and packing processes before travel, then observed pit stops and snacking purchases throughout journeys
- Eliminated in-store permission requirements by using video to follow consumers directly on their travels
- Enabled real-time insight review as video submissions arrived over the weekend without ethnographer resource requirements
The Outcome
- Avoided costly in-store permissions and expensive ethnographer deployment
- Captured rich, people-first feedback directly from consumers in natural road-trip settings
- Enabled weekend insight review for rapid decision-making during critical seasonal sales period
- Demonstrated scalable video ethnography as alternative to traditional in-store observation methods