PRESENTED BY
How Safeway Leveraged Design Thinking
and Agile Market Research to Build a Fast
and Effective Innovation Process
“We can now do in 6 weeks what takes
some CPG companies 6 months!”
Nicku Bruce
Innovation Manager
Safeway Consumer Brands
The Challenge
The Safeway consumer brands insights team is responsible for both short and long term innovation of 16 brands within
Safeway’s private label portfolio.
Safeway’s management team challenged the consumer brands group to engage their target consumer earlier and more
often by adding Design Thinking methodologies to their upcoming innovation projects. Design Thinking combines
empathy for the context of a problem, creativity in the generation of insights and solutions, and rationality in analyzing
and fitting various solutions to the problem context.
The overall research objectives were:
1. Find ways to implement a design thinking strategy into all future consumer brands innovation research projects
2. Find a way to do this within an aggressive timeline
3. Become more consumer centric and ensure ideas generated map to an identified un-met consumer need
The Solution
Safeway’s innovation team was looking to implement their new design thinking strategy within just six weeks of the initial
challenge. It was imperative to keep the process moving while still gaining the consumer’s voice much sooner than
before. The innovation team turned to GutCheck to help them meet the aggressive timeline and spend more time on
what mattered, the consumer.
EXAMINE
IMMERSE
5 WEEKS
IDEATE
TEST & REFINE
1 WEEK
Family-friendly Hot Beverage Concept Refinement
The Safeway Consumer Brands Innovation team was looking for ways to engage the whole family with the growingly
popular single-serve hot beverage brewing systems. They utilized GutCheck to help them assess a multitude of
single-serve cup product concepts developed for the whole family.
Single serve cup research objectives included:
1. Assessing overall appeal and drivers of appeal for each of the product concepts
• Including uniqueness and purchase intent measures
2. Understanding how the concept can be improved
3. Understanding potential use cases for such a product
GutCheck launched a qualitative Instant Research Group of millennials/gen X with kids who own a single-serve machine
to quickly gather the insights needed for each product concept.
During the study two universal truths became clearly obvious.
Kids love using the single-serve brewing system – It’s engaging, easy to operate and gives the
instant satisfaction of the brewed beverage quickly after they participate with it.
Everyone loves chocolate - Whether in combination with flavors like caramel, toffee, honey,
strawberry or mint…chocolate reigned supreme. A long list of rich commentary from the
qualitative study revealed that everyone loved the chocolate concepts.
GutCheck’s quick consumer read gave Safeway the ability to quickly examine, immerse, ideate, test and refine their
single-serve product concepts. They were able to eliminate product lines like hot milk concepts and focus on expanding
their varieties of chocolate based flavor options to attract both kids and adults alike. The new design thinking process
combined with GutCheck’s platform gave Safeway a new level of agility.
The Results
Agile Market Research
Initially, the need for high-speed turnaround drove
Safeway to retain GutCheck. Ultimately, the high quality
of the results and alignment with their Design Thinking
strategy drove Safeway to renew its contract to partner
with us long-term.
Design Thinking Methodology
Fast. Affordable. High Quality.
For all the of the project concept projects Safeway has explored across all 16 product categories, GutCheck has been
able to continually quickly deliver high-quality insights that the consumer brands innovation team uses to improve both
strategic and tactical decision-making.
Blazing Engagement Speed
“By integrating agile into
GutCheck was able to provide quick consumer reads in
the Design Thinking
days—providing Safeway with the results needed for their
GutCheck Advantages
aggressive timeline
process I was able to more
quickly gain a deeper
Impressive Concept Refinement
Safeway’s innovation team was given the exact feedback
needed to easily narrow the initial concepts across
multiple product lines AND? Refine those ideas to better
meet the consumer needs
understanding of my
consumer’s needs and
better align my products
to meet them”
Nicku Bruce
Innovation Manager
Safeway Consumer Brands
Critical Key Findings
GutCheck’s detailed qualitative findings gave clear
direction for concept refinement within their innovative
design thinking process
About GutCheck
GutCheck is a global, online agile market research solution that enables our clients to get quick consumer reads to
address business questions, whenever they need to be answered. GutCheck’s flexible quantitative and qualitative
platform enables us to instantly recruit target audiences and our full-service team provides the insights and
confidence our customers’ need to react move businesses forward. For more information: http://gutcheckit.com.
PRESENTED BY
(877)-990-8111
sales@gutcheckit.com
633 17th Street, Suite 1300
Denver, CO 80202
FIND US ON
©2014 GutChck is a registered trademark of Brainyak, Inc. All rights reserved. Various trademarks held by their respective owners.