How Mobile Ethnographic Research helped a mens hair-care brand understand consumers’ usage of hair-styling products.

Our client had been long-established in the hair-care industry. In particular, their men’s styling-products was one of their most successful in a wide range of offerings. Just like fashion, hair-styles change and our client pride themselves on staying on-trend and providing quality, functional styling products.

The Challenge

As a global brand, our client offered its hair-care range in every corner of the world. Their ability to create quality products had ensured that they had grown to be one of the most reputable brands on the shelf. But unlike products like shampoos and conditioners, styling-products were a bit more personal to consumers.

Whilst it was possible to create great hair-cleaning products that suited all-male consumers, getting hair-styling products right was proving more of a challenge.

Everyone’s hair is different as and as our client was learning, everyones hair even had a life of its own. Wax, gel, clay, and hairspray were just some of the products accompanying our clients offering on the shelves. But understanding who used which products, not alone why they used them was difficult to understand.

Our client needed to get some deeper insights into just how male consumers across the world were using hair-styling products. But to understand this, they needed to get some real-life insights into the routines and rituals of hair-care amongst a truly representative sample of hair-styling consumers across the world.

The Goals

Our client’s objectives were to:

Get a clear, unbiased insight into the everyday hair-styling routines and rituals of a hair-styling product users
Try and identify some common attitudes and opinions of male consumers when it came hair-styling products
Understand how hair-styling habits differed across geographic regions

50 Respondents

5 Tasks

2 Weeks

Tasking Strategy: All-at-once Tasking

The Solution

To truly understand the hair-styling habits of consumers, we knew that our client would need to embed themselves in the everyday lives of respondents over a period of time.

To get fuller and more representational data-set, our client identified two key target groups of users; Fanatics, and Occasional Stylers.

Additionally, they decided to recruit respondents on two continents to understand how cultures and usage habits would differ amongst respondents.

By using Indeemo, they were able to coordinate a cross-continental study from the intuitive, user-friendly Indeemo Researcher Dashboard. In doing so, they were receiving real-life-insights, in real-time from a multitude of respondents using hair-styling products.

This visual representation of consumers in-the-moment hair-styling routines provided fascinating insights in the most personal of environments.

In order to attain these real-life insights, our client used an all-at-once tasking option with respondents recording and uploading anything related to their hair-care routines over 2 weeks. By getting inside the lives of respondents, they were able to understand some common grievances with hair-styling products. They received over 400 uploads from 50 respondents throughout the course of their hair-styling routines, giving a vast amount of in-context data that would prove pivotal in their ongoing development of products.

If you’re looking to understand more about how a mens hair-care or hair-styling brand can use Indeemo to understand their consumers, please get in touch.

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Indeemo has been used successfully to test concepts, products and adverts ranging from smart wearable devices to low-calorie beer to recycling advertising campaigns to comms testing aimed at medical consultants.

Our customers consistently remark on the richness of the feedback that can be captured using video and autoethnography compared to lab or central location testing.