Beandeck is India's first online marketplace dedicated solely to coffee and coffee equipment in India. As an early player in a new market context, it reached out to Poocho to help it increase retention by deeply understanding the needs and expectations of its target audience.
Poocho conducted primary research with passive Beandeck customers (those who ordered only once or twice within a 4-month period) to understand the gap between their expectations around coffee and a coffee marketplace, and Beandeck in particular. We chose passive Beandeck customers in order to do competitive analysis on the services and product offerings of Beandeck's competitors.
Our research informed the development of more nuanced personas of coffee drinkers and helped us uncover opportunities for a more enhanced user experience and online content strategy for the brand. Our recommendations focused on website optimization, new platform features, and communications-based insights for marketing and advertising that would make Beandeck stand out from competition. In the process, we helped it refine its product-market fit as a premium platform for discovering new coffee.
Types of customer personas with unique targeting and communications-based attributes.
More engagement on Instagram content that was informed by research.
Photos and videos of customers using coffee products and equipment for better content targeting.
Recommendations for a revamped online customer experience.
With BeanDeck’s growing position as a coffee aggregator, one of the aims of the brand was to increase its conversion rate on the website. So we developed a research strategy focused on unpacking the user experiences of customers who had purchased from BeanDeck only once or twice. What BeanDeck's passive customers thought about the platform, what other platforms were they using and how coffee fit into their lifestyles gave us a customer-centric perspective of the marketplace’s online experience that it could then optimize for.
We started by learning about their experience on the website - the organization of information (content), the coffee filters and post-purchase checking out. We also unpacked the value-add passive customers got from competitive websites in order to hone in on Beandeck’s pain points and future opportunities. Our insights inspired the team to rethink their online experience from onboarding to checkout.
For BeanDeck to tap into an existing market and create a place of its own we needed a deep understanding of consumer patterns behind buying and using coffee products and equipment. This information would inform business strategy (which patterns and behaviors to prioritize) and also marketing strategy (how to position products for different audience types).
We mapped coffee preferences, brewing methods, motivations and purchasing behaviors of BeanDeck customers on to four distinct personas. Each persona had attributes for unique social media targeting and customer segmentation. We also discovered that there were shared expectations across three of the four persona groups which would cumulatively give Beandeck a larger addressable market to work with if it prioritized those overlaps. To this effect, Beandeck rearticulated its brand positioning to appeal to this wider demographic while simultaneously addressing the overlapping pain points of this group to reduce its churn. The result is a more targeted, informed marketing strategy that appeals to the shared experiences of a wider demographic.
For BeanDeck to target its customers better, we needed to understand the existing market and the behaviors of its customers. Digital diaries were a key aspect of our research methodology wherein we collected videos of customers preparing their coffee, along with pictures of the coffee products and equipment they were using on a daily basis. We combined this method with deep-dive interviews and Miro-board led desirability studies to further understand the types of online content and ad materials that resonated with or did not resonate with the target audience.
We learned that the desire for knowledge building around coffee varied in interesting ways across the four persona groups. These groups also corresponded to different content-based recommendations for digital ads. Armed with this information, we recommended that Beandeck offer more education around coffee for the personas it wanted to target. Beandeck was able to improve their ad performance and conversion rates based on incremental changes that incorporated this recommendation.
