Revamping product styling directions for a global leader in the lighting industry
Project brief
A global lighting leader approached Turian Labs to understand evolving consumer segments and re-craft their product portfolio, along with styling directions for the home-lighting segment, as necessitated by dwindling sales per SKU for its India portfolio.
Key discoveries
A product refresh strategy crafted articulating:
A trends-led strategy outlining a new range of relevant products in the market, in alignment with customer demands, validated through experts
A series of strategic recommendations and key engaging features for successful new product development
Industry and context-specific forecasts of emergent trends and insights, to guide Color, Materials, Finish and Styling (CMFS) opportunities, enabling the client to anticipate and curate a product portfolio in the future that matches the pace of current trends and emerging consumer market preferences
In the present scenario, even the smallest change in consumer preferences can have a snowball effect on a brand’s performance in the market. Therefore, it becomes a prerequisite to develop products, services, and experiences that are up-to-date with current consumer trends and preferences. Consumer market research indicated that the big brands do not really hold a lion’s market share when it comes to the decorative lightening segment. The presence of a wide variety of substitutes from local players and imports from China have changed their sales equation tremendously. These goods are cheaper and widely available in the market; thereby creating a demand for exclusivity and experience in the products launched by the big brands. Indian consumers has evolved with time: now they are more exposed to different styles of design across the globe. This has also resulted in the growth of several unconventional players in the field like India Circus and Happily Unmarried, that sell new quirky designs and have created a market of their own.
Theme extraction from lifestyle megatrends for lighting design
Challenges
A global market leader in the lighting industry approached Turian Labs to broaden their scope of opportunities in the home lighting segment, by strengthening their portfolio in synchronization with emergent lifestyle trends and consumer (especially millennial) segments. The project asked for prioritization of product categories from the current portfolio, resulting in CMFS (Colour, Materials, Finish & Styling) recommendations.
The client had a large assortment of decorative lighting products in their portfolio, but what concerned them was a low sales contribution per SKU for their offerings. Hence the core premise for this project was to enable them to curate a portfolio that matched well with the current market trends and emerging consumer preferences.
Following are the major challenges that our team discovered during our course of research for the client:
1. Meaningful Product-Line expansion:
Our biggest task was to draft a trend-strategy to get a new range of relevant products into the market as per the customer demands, instead of widening the product portfolio. This way, we could optimize the number of SKUs in a category and increase sale value per SKU.
2. Capturing the most relevant trend insights:
The client wanted to build megatrend-driven design acumen for a rigorous trend and lifestyle based product development approach. This would provide them with strategic and holistic insights into the usage of colors, materials, finishes and styling (CMFS).
3. Threat of Local Substitutes:
Turian Labs’ proprietary practice of forecasting ‘Megatrends’ annually assisted the research and strategy team to synthesize emerging customer trends and their changing preferences products, services and experiences: these were later validated by user-research.
Bespoke projective techniques enabled the interdisciplinary team at Turian Labs to carry out user-research and CMFS research, in tandem with a home interiors and lifestyles trend study. In parallel, the research and strategy team navigated around the rising threat of local substitutes and the fact that new entrants brought in quirkier lighting products that were much liked by changing demographics and competed on all fronts such as cost, quality and styles, experience (installation, after sales, etc).
Offering early views into future trends in terms of fashion, styling, and CMF, the team at Turian Labs offered actionable insights that the client could trust and easily implement. These were presented in the form of scenarios understandable by a multidisciplinary team on the client's end. Additionally, we crafted a style guide for each emergent personas during multiple rounds of research and synthesis that included its implementation into the lighting domain.
Impact on the business
Our studies helped in identifying current and future problems while developing products for our clients to bridge that gap. Our solution for the client consisted of the below major findings:
Identification of home interior trends & implications for decorative lighting
Our designers offered interior trend insights that the client could trust, with early views into future trends in terms of fashion, styling and CMF, to we help them plan their new product lines.
Building User Personae based on empathic insights and trend mapping
The insights synthesized from user research were combined with the trend study. This synthesis gave rise to multiple user behaviors and preferences based on their lifestyle. These preferences were then observed to craft three diverse user personas, which would help develop curated persona-based product offerings.
Opportunity identification and mapping
During the course of research & synthesis, some new product possibilities emerged, which could be used by the brand as a market differentiator. New products were identified and finalized to remain relevant in the current scenario and 3-5 years in future for the user personae.
Recommending a Style Guide
We developed a style guide for all three user personae with the help of mood-boards to depict the implementation of the trend into the lighting domain. Visual inspirations were gathered from diverse fields such as fashion, consumer durable, home interior, and automotive.
Towards the end of the project, Turian Labs drafted a trends-led strategy with a ‘T-shaped’ approach that was geared towards launch of a new range of lighting products in the market, that suited customer demands instead of widening the client’s product portfolio. Our studies not only helped identify possible future concerns, and rectify current and immediate issues, to help our clients build products to bridge that gap.