Amárach: Watching real DIY habits unfold over one bank holiday weekend

The Challenge

Amárach had worked with this home decorating client for years on brand tracking, but this project was different. The client wanted to properly understand its existing and potential customers well enough to shape strategy, and for the first time, agreed to let Amárach take a qualitative route. The catch: five to six weeks, total, for both quant segmentation and qualitative fieldwork, and a board that needed convincing.

“We knew we wanted to be in people’s homes, because this was all about homes, and how people felt about their homes.”

The team’s window landed on the June bank holiday weekend: peak DIY season, good weather, and people across the country up ladders, in paint aisles, mid-project. The traditional way to do this kind of research, visiting people at home across the country and shadowing them in store, would have taken months. Amárach had one weekend to get inside real homes and real habits instead.

The Approach

Rather than staging the quant and qual work in sequence as usual, Amárach ran them side by side, letting emerging personas from the segmentation guide who they leaned on for the qualitative fieldwork, and tailoring outputs as patterns appeared in both at once.

Thirty participants, recruited over the bank holiday weekend. All were in some stage of a home decorating project, some just starting, some mid-way, some just finished, and asked to show Amárach around their homes, talk through the choices they’d made, and take the team shopping with them via in-store vox pops and photo uploads.

Full control stayed with participants. Filming themselves, rather than hosting a researcher, meant no tidying up for a stranger, no performing for an interviewer, just people talking through their own homes in their own words.

Built-in probing without interrupting. Amárach could still follow up and ask for more via the platform’s Q&A structure, without breaking the natural, unscripted flow of what participants chose to show and say.

Every demographic, no drop-off. Participants ranged into their 70s, and video-based tasks worked just as comfortably across the board, nobody was excluded by the format.

“Sometimes, if they’re speaking into their own phone and making a selfie video, they have that kind of in-private conversation. They think out loud as they’re taking you around, and you can get some real nuggets from that.”

The result was over 450 photo and video uploads in a single weekend, richer and more candid material than a traditional shop-along, at a fraction of the time and travel cost.

The Results

The footage surfaced something a researcher standing in the room often can’t: unbiased, unselfconscious detail. Participants showed and told Amárach what mattered to them, not what they thought a researcher wanted to see, and that meant genuine emotional content came through, hopes, pride, honest frustration, that a moderated interview is at risk of flattening.

Amárach wove that material, video reels, verbatims, photo uploads, together with the quantitative deck and presented it first to the client’s leadership team, then to the board. Even the board’s most skeptical members responded to hearing directly from customers this way; watching people walk through stores and debate paint colours in their own words did more than any static persona slide could.

“The stuff that they loved the most was to listen to the reels at the end of the presentation. Even the most skeptical of board members seemed to buy into hearing about their customers in this way.”

The client moved fast. Within a week of the presentation, they’d identified a clear low-hanging-fruit persona group and began producing tailored communications, and started adjusting how they worked with stores off the back of the evidence. Because the research landed right in the middle of the client’s active strategic planning window rather than sitting on a shelf, a new phase of marketing communications was already live within weeks of the fieldwork.