How many times in your life do you ask yourself, your significant other, or your children, “What do you want to eat?” To decide what ultimately ends up on your plate, you’ll make a decision based on a number of factors, including whether or not you’ll eat at home or at a restaurant, how much time you have to make something, what ingredients you have on hand and even what you might have had to eat the last few days so that you make every effort to keep meal times fresh and new.
Think back before that moment when you decide what to have for dinner. How did each item make the cut to get in your shopping cart?
Did you create a list based off of family’s requests and a meal plan? Are you buying the same staples you get nearly every week? Are you purchasing based on sale prices and what coupons you might have, or what looks good?
And before that: what influenced those items that were a must-have for your shopping list?
A friend’s recommendation of a new recipe, a recent blog post from your favorite food blog, a delicious meal you had at a restaurant last week?
There are a million little decisions that go into each and every purchase in the average American household. As a food company making items and ingredients you see on the store shelves, it’s our job to understand what consumers want, how they find what they’re looking for, and anticipate what they might want next.
The Consumer and Customer Insights Department (CCID) does just that: they listen to and spend time with our consumers to understand their lives and their needs. CCID’s insights help us create products that best fit consumers’ lives and communicate with them in a way that makes sense to each individual’s personal journey, from what they’ll have for dinner, to what they’ll snack on during the day, and what they may plan to eat next week.
But of course, not every consumer or family thinks the same way or needs the same things. That’s where Campbell’s team works to understand insights that go deeper than broad age and gender demographic data.
We don’t make products for a 32 year-old woman with a husband and two kids, we make a Slow Cooker Korean Barbeque sauce for a busy mom or dad who loves new flavors and trying new recipes, but may not have all the necessary ingredients for the exotic flavors they love.
By understanding and immersing themselves into these consumers lives, CCID can identify meaningful and lasting ways to connect them with Campbell’s brands, and those insights can help fuel innovation.
Our foods have been playing a role in people’s lives for 145 years. In order to make products that continue to meet changing tastes and needs, our team is focused on knowing consumers in each part of their journey at every stage of the day – especially before they get to the last-minute question of “what do you want to eat?”