Duration

2.5 months (2019)

Role

Researcher

Tools

Paper, Google Workspace apps

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Under A Non-disclosure Agreement

Some of the details in this case study may be vague to protect the client's intellectual property.

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We set out to understand how people read packaging, and not just in the obvious ways. Colours whisper. Fonts suggest status. The finish on a box can signal "worth your money" before a single word registers. This project was about decoding all of that in the context of house brands, where the stakes are different and the margin for confusion is thin.

Challenge

Retailer house brands occupy a strange in-between: familiar, yet invisible. Cheaper, but not always chosen with confidence. Sometimes a smart buy. Sometimes a default. Sometimes a quiet red flag.

Our job was to find out what makes a house brand work, not as a cheaper alternative, but as something people actively choose. That meant understanding how:

• shoppers recognise and rank house brands in a crowded retail landscape,
• what names like Heartland, Meadows and Farmstead actually evoke,
• and whether packaging, naming, and reasons-to-believe move the needle on purchase intent.

How we got people talking about packaging

We ran multiple 2-hour focus groups across shopper types and age brackets. Rather than pushing toward answers, we sat back and let people talk, sometimes to us, sometimes to each other - about what they buy, why they don't trust certain brands, and what it means when a name feels "too try-hard.”

We walked them through shopping behaviours (not just where they shop, but what cues they rely on standing in front of a shelf), brand name reactions (Meadows, Heartland, Farmstead — easy to say? warm? cheesy?), and visual sorting: packaging mockups rated on instinct.

The most useful session was the clothing analogy exercise. We asked people to describe packaging like outfits. "Looks like a Zara basic," someone said. "This one's more Muji." That told us more about category fit and premium perception than any direct question could.