Consumer Packaged Goods: Rebuilding Relevancy

A CPG brand faced a lack of appeal in its brand value proposition among Hispanic consumers, alongside an opportunity to potentially build a distinct new offering for the segment. Sales had been declining year over year across the majority of major Hispanic markets, a trend serious enough that leadership needed a clear diagnosis before deciding how to respond.

Brand insights generation research combined with a multi-market Hispanic consumer usage study identified the core issue: the product had lost its relevancy and connection with the target audience, and consumers had shifted to shopping the category based purely on need rather than any brand preference. A closer look at preferences, purchase motivators, and barriers used ethnographic in-home visits, online panels, and structured group discussions to build a fuller picture than any single method could provide on its own.

Recommendations covered modification of specific products and packaging most desired by Hispanic consumers, revised in-store marketing strategy including where and how the product was merchandised in highly Hispanic-frequented store sections, and a shift in marketing communications toward emphasizing culture over language alone, since language-only translation had clearly not been enough to rebuild relevance.

The brand saw an immediate increase in share of heart among the Hispanic target audience, followed by significant year over year sales increases across its top Hispanic markets, confirming that the disconnect had been about relevance and positioning rather than the underlying product category itself.

The in-store merchandising changes in particular turned out to matter more than the internal team had originally expected, a reminder that multicultural relevance is not purely a messaging exercise. Where and how a product physically shows up to a shopper carries as much weight as what the packaging says.

The brand's marketing and trade teams, who had previously worked on largely separate tracks, ended up aligning around a single shared plan once the research made clear how much the in-store and messaging pieces depended on each other.

Beyond the immediate lift in share of heart, the brand carried the underlying research forward into a broader repositioning that extended past the initial packaging and messaging changes into how the brand approached future product development. That longer term shift mattered more than any single campaign metric, since it meant future decisions started from an accurate picture of what the target audience actually valued rather than reverting to the same assumptions that caused the original disconnect. A research engagement that only changes one campaign without shifting that underlying decision-making process tends to see the same problem resurface within a year or two.