The Challenge

Going to the pharmacy isn’t fun. You’re sick, your prescription probably isn’t ready, and your insurance provider is going to do everything it can to not cover the specific medicine you need.

One of our clients, a Fortune 50 pharmacy chain, found itself at the center of these negative experiences. People were leaving their pharmacies unhappy, and that was making our client unhappy.

So they decided to do something about it.

Our client hired us to speak to these sick and frustrated customers at the moment of truth: right after they left the pharmacy. Because we knew they just wanted to be on their way to well again, we got right to the point with people: Why does this place leave you feeling worse than when you came in?

The Results

Spending time with people when they’re most vulnerable was an incredible learning experience for both Bovitz and our client. At the end of the project, our qualitative and quantitative efforts resulted in a model that gave them a prioritized strategy for delighting pharmacy customers, and a tool to measure each individual store’s performance on these key metrics.

Armed with these new strategies and measurements for success, the nation's leading pharmacy chain was able to improve its pharmacy experience by putting the needs of (sick) people first.

The Challenge

One of our clients, a Fortune 100 electronics retailer, has a problem. People come in to look at the goods, push a few buttons, and then head home. Unfortunately, the buttons they're pushing aren’t on a new television or laptop, but on their own smartphones.

They're ordering the product from Amazon as they're standing in front of it in another brand's store. This needed to stop.

Our client decided it needed to complement its expertise in consumer electronics with a fundamental understanding of what people want. Their goal was to provide a personalized shopping experience to each and every customer who walks through their doors (either real or digital). They wanted customers to feel like the shopping experience was designed specifically for them. And they needed us to help them figure out just how to do that.

The Results

Our first step was creative exploration into the idea of personalization and what it means to people. After many skits, Play-doh dioramas, and sticky note exercises, we had nearly two dozen rough concepts for how our client could deliver a more personalized shopping experience. We then tested these quantitatively for stickiness and appeal, and finally shared a handful of the best ideas with our client's target segments for their input on how to launch them.

With their new understanding of people, one of the nation's largest electronics retailers is currently pursuing new, multi-channel initiatives that truly put people at the center of the consumer electronics shopping experience.

The Challenge

Finding the right painter's tape in a sea of it is hard. Beyond blue, there are so many more factors to consider, and people felt they were on their own to figure it all out.

To give the category more clarity and bring harmony to its own line, a Fortune 500 home and office supply company decided to redesign its painter’s tape packaging and revamp the in-store shopping experience.

Rather than jumping right to what happens at-shelf, our client understood the importance of first understanding what people really want out of painter’s tape. They brought Bovitz in to investigate what features people find valuable, how they evaluate different options, and what they don’t understand about the category. Only with that broader context could they dive deeper into the nitty gritty details, like what makes for the best packaging, what words cue key ideas, and how much is too much to read.

The Results

The 40 hours we spent visiting people all over the country and learning about the role of painter’s tape in their lives was well worth it. We got to the bottom of how they use it, how they shop for it, what they want out of it, and what sucks about it—all with live demonstrations to help us really experience it. This depth and breadth of new category understanding helped guide our client's designers and marketers on how to make their packaging and product ecosystem as easy and useful to users as possible.

Acting on our recommendations, our client is offering people more than just a tool for home décor. They’re giving them the confidence they need to do the job well.

The Challenge

When you work in a category as old as time, like cleaning, it's easy to lose sight of what real people's lives are like. But times change, and people change with them.

To get back in touch with reality, a national cleaning-product company needed to watch cleaning happen in real time. They needed to discover solutions that actually mattered.

Our client let Bovitz take them into the dirty, unkempt homes of real people. And we did it that way for a reason, not allowing people to clean their homes for several days before we arrived. More than just watching them in action, we wanted to get to the bottom of what cleaning (and clean) really means to people.

The Results

Forcing people out of their comfort zone allowed us to fully explore all of the sticky emotions underpinning our cleaning habits. And then, observing real cleaning routines gave us firsthand knowledge of all of the gaps that exist in today’s solutions.

For the designers and researchers we had in tow from the client side, this was the kind of eye-opening experience they were looking for. The little nuggets of human behavior and emotions hiding in plain sight suddenly looked like huge opportunities for doing something different—and better—in an age-old category.

Getting down and dirty with people in the real world gave our client a whole new understanding of how to not only solve for people’s cleaning needs, but also turn an ordinarily mundane chore into a more fulfilling part of people's lives.