Building category plans around how shoppers actually choose

The business question

Heineken needed to update its understanding of beer and cider purchase decisions. How did people choose before and during a store visit? Did the business’s category groupings reflect the way shoppers saw the range? And what helped or hindered engagement with craft beer?

The answer needed to support category planning, not just describe consumer attitudes.

From behaviour to explanation

I led a programme through Visuality that combined three stages:

• Shopper observations and intercepts established how people behaved in the retail environment.
• Accompanied shops, focus groups and mobile ethnography explored motivations, occasions, influences and the language people used.
• An online survey of 3,000 respondents tested the emerging picture, including MaxDiff analysis to establish relative priorities.

Together, these methods connected shopping missions and consumption occasions to decisions at the fixture.

What the analysis revealed

The work examined how familiar brand repertoires, price, pack size and format shaped choice, and how those influences differed between shoppers. It also exposed the role of education and guidance in helping less experienced shoppers navigate craft beer.

This mattered because the same category execution would not serve every shopper equally well. The analysis gave the team a basis for considering different needs when developing merchandising, communication and category plans.

Making the evidence useful

The output brought together purchase decision hierarchies, shopper segments and category groupings. It addressed concrete questions about formats, the chiller, category relationships and the influences shoppers encountered before entering a store.

The result was a structured account of how people approached the category and where the business could help them choose, with commercial implications attached to the research findings.

What the work delivered

The category team received an evidence base for decisions about shopper education, range navigation and retail execution. It made differences between shoppers visible and connected those differences to practical category opportunities.

For brands and suppliers, this is a way to build a category argument around shoppers’ decisions rather than an internal view of the product portfolio.