King Technology: Reading the Walmart aisle through shoppers' eyes

The Challenge

King Technology makes water treatment products for pools and hot tubs, and for most of its history has sold through the professional channel. In February, the company landed its first product in Walmart: a genuinely different format from the liquids and big buckets that fill most pool chemical aisles, a dry chemical pod that goes straight into the pool skimmer instead.

Lynn Nord, King Technology's Marketing Insights and Operations Manager, has run research for the company for over 30 years, mostly concept tests, focus groups and field trials. She had never run anything that let her watch shoppers encounter a product live in a Walmart aisle.

"I haven't seen our customers that close, and I've been doing research for 30 years for the company."

With Walmart offering a second year on the strength of first-year performance, King needed answers fast to three questions: does the product stand out on shelf, what do shoppers make of it once they interact with it in store, and what happens once they actually try it at home.

The Approach

Lynn built the study in three deliberate phases: a cold reaction to the aisle, a hands-on interaction with the product, and a 30-day real-world follow-up. Shoppers were sent in with a simple brief, go to the pool chemical aisle and tell us what stands out to you, with no steer toward King's product at all. King wanted an honest, unprompted read before anyone knew there was something specific to look for.

Only once that cold reaction was captured did shoppers interact with the product itself: reading the packaging, reacting on camera, and buying one of the four variants to take home. Weeks later, the same shoppers reported back on how it performed in their own pool, closing the loop from shelf to skimmer.

Recruiting for that design wasn't simple. Because King's product was only stocked in a subset of Walmart stores, Lynn had to match every participant to a qualifying store by zip code before recruitment could even begin. Far more people wanted in than she could use; she had to turn away most applicants simply because they lived nowhere near a store that carried the product. Payment was staged to match: for the store visit, to reimburse the purchase, and again after the 30-day check-in, a structure Lynn learned as she went, closing out one phase and opening the next mid-study.

"We got fairly decent positive interaction with them in the store. We got unbelievable raving positive comments after the 30 days."

The Results

The in-store read was blunt. Shoppers noticed the big, familiar brands they already bought, or whatever looked biggest and loudest on the shelf. King's product, boxed in black with neon accents to stand out against the aisle's usual blue, white and orange, and confined to a three-foot shelf width, was easily missed.

But once shoppers picked it up and read the packaging, reactions turned around fast: interest, curiosity, a sense that this might genuinely be worth trying. And once they had lived with it for 30 days, that interest became something closer to enthusiasm. Shoppers raved about not having to measure or touch anything, about avoiding the spills that come with liquid competitors, and about water quality they said was noticeably better, even among people who had previously used a liquid product. Because the pod dispenses over 24 hours and lasts 90 days, it also asked far less of them week to week than what they were using before. Several said they planned to buy it again, and wanted to try the other three variants too.

Those findings fed directly into two big decisions. Because the base packaging is regulated by the EPA and can't change, King is instead redesigning the shelf fixture itself, adding a tray and header to draw more attention within the same three feet. Alongside that, the company is putting more weight behind brand awareness before next pool season: try-me campaigns on social, giving away pods to sample, and increased consumer media, all aimed at getting shoppers looking for the product before they ever reach the aisle.

The study also proved a model King is now reaching for more widely. A recent quarterly innovation day generated 400 new product ideas, and this kind of ethnographic testing has become the tool the company uses to vet which ones are worth pursuing, including an early companion-product concept already through two rounds of positive concept testing. On the strength of that pipeline and the Walmart study's impact, King brought its next year's research budget forward and tripled it ahead of its October fiscal year, expecting to exhaust the current budget before then.

There are no hard sales figures to point to yet: the packaging and awareness changes are still rolling out ahead of next season. What King has instead is something more durable: real evidence of a product people love once they find it, and a concrete, shopper-tested plan for making sure more of them do.