Our work

The category’s real pain point wasn’t price or speed

Brand

Communications

Audience

The Challenge

A leading B2B e-commerce retailer of displays and fixtures needed a refreshed brand positioning — and needed it to do two jobs at once.

It had a loyal core of smaller business customers. It also had ambitions with larger enterprise buyers who didn’t especially think of it. Any new positioning had to hold both without diluting into something generic.

The category made that harder. The provider landscape is genuinely fragmented — trade show specialists, print shops, online retailers, promotional suppliers, industrial fabricators — and buyers hold no tidy mental map of who does what. In a category like that it’s very easy to write a positioning statement every competitor could also credibly claim.

Our Approach

We ran a four-day digital diary — long enough to see how people really work, short enough to fit the decision timeline.

The design mixed methods on purpose. Polls and ranking exercises to establish decision drivers. A sorting exercise across roughly 30 category players, to see how buyers organize a crowded landscape. Guided online shop-alongs where participants narrated their purchase process in real time — including on competitors’ sites — which surfaced friction no interview question would have found. And message testing with click-level heat-mapping, to see which specific words were doing the work.

We recruited a deliberate half-and-half split of customers and non-customers, covering both the core segment and the aspirational one, so the positioning could be pressure-tested against people with no loyalty to defend it.

What We Uncovered

Where the buying process actually starts for most of this audience — a stage earlier than the brand’s marketing had been built to serve.
The real hierarchy of purchase drivers, and the gap between what buyers say matters most and what actually causes them pain day to day. The difference is where the opportunity sits.
A brand perception diagnosis: the attributes the brand gets credit for, the ones it doesn’t, and the fact that the missing ones map almost exactly onto the category’s biggest unmet needs.
How buyers mentally group a fragmented landscape, and what it takes to be remembered for more than one thing.
A clear winner among three candidate messaging territories, with heat-mapped evidence of which phrases resonated and why the others fell flat — plus adjacent service opportunities raised unprompted.

The Impact

The client came away with a positioning direction grounded in a specific, defensible gap rather than a list of attributes everyone claims — plus the language buyers responded to, and a read on which elements of the runner-up messages were worth keeping.

The shop-along footage did a second job. Watching a real buyer get frustrated on your own site is more persuasive to an internal team than any bar chart, and it turned the experience recommendations into something people wanted to act on.

Key Takeaways

Recruit people who don’t love you. Half the sample were non-customers — the only way to test whether a positioning travels.
Watch the process, don’t just ask about it. Shop-alongs found friction no direct question would have surfaced.
Test the words, not just the idea. Heat-mapping which phrases buyers click turns “we like message C” into a usable copy brief.

Working with the Insight By Design team was a fantastic experience! Their research provided invaluable insights into our customer base and brand positioning. Chris was attentive, responsive and accommodating of our budget, ensuring we received the best possible outcomes. I highly recommend Insight By Design for their expertise and excellent service.

VP, E-Commerce & Customer Experience