The global collectibles market is estimated to be worth 360 billion. This market includes sneakers, trading cards, watches, figurines, the list goes on. Neustreet is a new player amongst the various B2C collectibles' platforms. Its founders, who are collectors themselves, started the business with the premise that collectors struggle most with pricing data when they buy/sell collectibles. The team hired Poocho to validate this thesis through consumer research and develop market-informed branding and marketing assets in preparation for the brand launch.
Over a 4-month period, Poocho delivered a brand book, pitch deck and marketing strategy based on primary consumer research with Neustreet's target audience.
We did secondary market research to understand the culture of collectibles that informed a new logo and tagline for the company. We then recruited collectors of sneakers, trading cards, figurines and streetwear to understand the pain points in their journey of buying and reselling collectibles. We unpacked their relationship to collectibles, the various online and offline touchpoints through which they do their transactions and the community networks that they rely on to get their collectibles news. Our personas validated and refined the business value proposition and directly informed the marketing strategy for a brand launch.
Types of customer personas with unique needs, interests and channel-based attributes
Photos/videos on journey touchpoints and attributes of collectors
Neustreet competitors on whom we did deep-dive primary and secondary analysis
Customer journey experiences prioritized for product development
Our research strategy focused on unpacking the current experiences of collectors on competitive platforms. This information enabled us to hone in on Neustreet’s product-market fit based on actual pain points.
We first did market research that gave us a baseline to assess the opportunities that exist for Neustreet to penetrate the collectibles market. After roadmapping our research design, we then conducted stakeholder workshops to get an understanding of who Neustreet founders presumed their ideal users to be, and the USPs that would drive traffic towards the platform.
Based on the information we collected, we developed a journey map prototype for collectors that became our baseline for primary research that leveraged statistical, descriptive and multimedia responses. We learnt about participants' own vetted process of buying/reselling collectibles and their workarounds for the limitation of different platforms.
The evidence collected helped us map collector experiences across 5 major journey touchpoints. Using this information we created a priority list of value-ads that would make Neustreet a strong competitor in the space of collectible exchanges. The turnaround for the research process was 3 months.
Real images of sneakers collected by study participants
Neustreet’s USP as the go-to price aggregator across collectibles meant it needed a brand identity that would be universally understood across collector groups. At the same time, the logo and tagline needed to succinctly capture the company ethos.
After a series of iterations and stakeholder workshops, we finalized on the arrow. It symbolises the financial and emotional highs that a collector experiences in his journey to buy/resell a collectible. It is also in itself a reflection of the type of data visualization customers will experience through the platform. The hot pink color was a contemporary take on the familiar stock market graph to associate managing collectibles with keeping an asset portfolio. The brand book took us 4 weeks to complete.
Developing Neustreet's brand book
Motivations are primary drivers for user behaviour, defining their specific interests in various collectibles and facilitating educated choices. These motivations helped us create two customer personas that had distinct problems but they also overlapped in their experiences with buying/selling collectibles.
By eliciting responses to some desirability questions we were also able to understand the needs of each persona. We mapped our interactions with multimedia responses from each participant to generate pain points unique to and similar to both groups so that the Neustreet team could take a more informed decision on which product features to prioritize and how to build marketing content around the needs of the different groups.
Personas also led to a nuanced understanding of true competitive advantage based on the brand's value proposition and pain points articulated by the two persona types.
