Amidst the ever-expanding landscape of health-conscious consumers, standing out on the grocery shelf is no longer just about being "organic". Successful brands in crowded markets are ones that solve for consumers' specific wants and needs.
Below, we'll explore how Organic Valley, a farmer-owned co-op for over 35 years, leveraged quantilope's Implicit Association Testing after facing an "everything is important" fallacy; when asked what it is they value, consumers often say "everything" — providing little direction for brand growth. Using quantilope's Implicit methods, Organic Valley was able to understand what's driving consumers to the premium/organic milk category.
Whether it's innovation projects, category strategic alignments, or marketing campaigns, it all comes back to the core understanding of the consumer; insights need to drive strategy.
- Tripp Hughes, Senior Director of Consumer Strategy at Organic Valley
Tapping into System 1 thinking
Most grocery shopping decisions happen in a millisecond, driven by "System 1" processing — the subconscious, low-stakes decision-making that accounts for 90% of our daily choices. To capture these insights, the Organic Valley team used two of quantilope's automated advanced methodologies:
- Single Implicit Association Test (SIAT): To uncover the core values consumers associate with the premium and organic milk category.
- Multi-Implicit Association Test (MIAT): To understand how Organic Valley and its competitors actually deliver on those specific values.
Like all methods on quantilope's platform, the Organic Valley team was able to "drag-and-drop" these automated methods right into their survey, without tedious manual programming or required behavioral science knowledge.
These implicit tests account for split-second decisions by weighting answer choices on reaction time; the faster a respondent selects an element, the more deeply it is rooted in their subconscious. This forces respondents to provide their genuine reactions, rather than selecting "everything" from a multiple choice list or ranking all items as "very important".
Turning insights into action
The Linked Implicit Testing results (SIAT and MIAT) challenged common industry assumptions and provided Organic Valley with a clear path forward:
- Holistic values win: Consumers most highly associate social and holistic values with the premium/organic milk category.
- The "freedom" fallacy: Interestingly, the study revealed that values centered around "freedom" (e.g., "free range") are not significant drivers for category purchases, despite many brands building entire campaigns around this theme.
- Generational nuance: Because quantilope's platform is automated, Organic Valley was able to instantly slice the data by different segments, such as generational age groups, to generate actionable business strategies.
Armed with their implicit insights, Organic Valley has been able to support new marketing campaigns that align with real consumer values.
Leveraging an automated implicit method provides an easy way to tap into your consumers' subconscious and uncover what they're really thinking — providing new perspectives in a project that you wouldn’t be able to uncover with simple U&A questions alone.- Tripp Hughes, Senior Director of Consumer Strategy at Organic Valley
For Organic Valley, their shift to quantilope's Implicit Method Testing wasn't just about finding out "what's important," but about delivering products that appeal to underlying emotions and needs — creating a deeper, more meaningful connection with their consumers.
