Digital Ethnography: How Research into consumer behaviours around vitamins drew insights into sustainability values

Our client, a Branding and Innovation Agency, were commissioned by a leading supplements brand to uncover how consumers shopped for and integrated healthcare supplements into their daily lives. The brand also has a detailed website, informing people about all things health and well-being, and wanted to discover how consumers navigated and purchased specific products online.

The Challenge

Understanding how people consume health supplements can be a challenge. Naturally, people's health and well-being needs will vary throughout their lives. Not alone will different demographics use different products at different life stages, but every individual’s health is unique, making it difficult to fully understand their needs.

Our client was interested in getting authentic, in-context insights from all types of health supplement users to understand exactly how and why they used such products.

However, people's health is quite a personal and private thing, so gaining that real-life and authentic understanding was proving a challenge. To overcome this challenge, our client designed a digital ethnography study as a way to empower research participants in an unobtrusive manner.

The Goals

Our client objectives were to :

Gain an understanding of how different demographics used health supplements in their day-to-day lives, including the types of supplements they used, when they used them and why they used them

Understand what types of supplements people used, including how they research products, where and why they purchase them, and any other factors which have an effect of their buying experience

See exactly how and when they consumed supplements in real life circumstances

32 Respondents

15 Tasks

3 Weeks

Tasking Strategy: Scheduled Tasking

The Solution

Working with Indeemo, our client was able to identify 9 different target groups of supplements and vitamin consumers. Using Indeemo’s pre-tasking capabilities, they were able to capture respondents' use, attitudes and understanding of supplements and vitamins in media-rich uploads. Respondents of all ages and backgrounds were using supplements, but not how we might have imagined. But by using mobile ethnography, the responses being gathered meant that the company was getting a window into their lives and the role supplements played.

During the week-long study, our client was also able to use the unique in-the-moment probing tool to gain an even deeper insight. In the vast landscape of health supplements and vitamins, they were able to discover the exact combinations of supplements being used by respondents.

Key Insights

Our client obtained a wide range of data from various consumer personas. Because of this, there were many insights drawn from the study. One key insight, unknown to our client at the time, was people’s perceptions about vitamins and their thought process that goes behind decision making, whether online or in-store. This is related to environmental and sustainable vitamin and supplement products.

For instance, of the younger demographic (those primarily Millenials and Gen Z), often their purchase decisions are determined by cost value and brand. However, an emerging insight showed that of these cohorts, they also consider the packaging of the product, checking to see if the product can be recycled after use. Some respondents noted that they make conscious decisions in order to play a positive role in sustainable living.

Protecting Sensitive Data

At Indeemo we realize the depth and breadth of the strict confidentiality and security regulations associated with Healthcare projects and Healthcare data. Indeemo is HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996) compliant, GDPR compliant and ISO 27001 certified. Indeemo also offers an anonymized email option and push notifications to fully negate the need to store respondent/patient names or email addresses within the Indeemo platform.

GDPR Compliant

Information Security

Enterprise Ready

HIPAA & ISO 27001 Accredited

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Indeemo has been used successfully for pre-tasking and post-tasking across a wide range of industries in both B2C and B2B contexts.

Pre-work assignments can last as little as 10-20 minutes or can go on for 1-2 weeks.

Clients consistently tell us how much more productive their face-to-face sessions are as a result of getting to know respondents through Indeemo before they meet in person.