Our work

What a week of real drinking occasions revealed about where a new beverage line could win

Audience

Brand

The Challenge

A global spirits company was building a new line outside its core category and needed to know whether it had a real place in young adults’ daily routines — or was a nice idea competing for occasions already spoken for.

The team had four early-stage concepts and a decision about which deserved further investment. But the harder question sat underneath. This is a generation that talks about health constantly and buys inconsistently: ask what matters and they’ll say everything matters.

So concept scores alone would have misled. The team needed the concepts read in context — against what these consumers actually reach for all day, what they’ll pay, and what a new product would have to displace to earn a place in the rotation.

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Our Approach

We designed a two-stage sprint that put behavior before opinion.

Stage one was a six-day mobile diary. Participants logged every beverage occasion for a full week — what, when, why, how satisfied they were — alongside brand sorting, projective tasks, image and video uploads and group discussions. The format let us probe mid-week on what we were seeing, rather than locking the design before we’d learned anything.

Stage two brought a subset back for 1:1 interviews with product in hand. Because we already knew each person’s week — their occasions, price thresholds and goals — we could ask far sharper questions than a standalone concept test allows, and read every reaction against that person’s real repertoire.

Senior IBD people ran the diary, the interviews and the analysis. Working through an agency partner, the output had to serve the agency team and the brand’s product developers at once — so we built it that way.

What We Uncovered

A quantified picture of a week of real consumption: how occasions divide across need states, and which everyday occasion the category’s most under-estimated competitor actually owns.
The hierarchy behind stated health goals — which attributes are genuine non-negotiables, which are a bonus, and where the trade-off with taste and price breaks.
The value equation: the point at which a new product stops being an everyday choice and becomes an occasional one.
How this cohort discovers new brands, and where trial feels low-risk.
A concept-by-concept diagnosis: where each idea would realistically live, which claims created intrigue, and which created skepticism to resolve before launch.

The Impact

The team came away with more than a ranking. Each concept was placed inside a map of real occasions, with a specific answer on what would have to be true — on formulation, claim substantiation and price — for it to earn frequency rather than novelty.

Our outputs produced a clear roadmap to guide product formulation changes, messaging strategy and inform subsequent quantitative concept testing.

Key Takeaways

Test concepts against behavior, not opinion. A week of logged occasions turns “would you buy this?” into “what would this replace?”
Diaries buy you the right to ask better questions later. Knowing someone’s actual week made the follow-up interviews far more productive.
Be clear about what exploratory work can’t decide. Naming the limits is what makes the rest of the read usable.

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