Marketing strategies
focusing on families
and kids

Challenges and opportunities of market research with kids

Activation strategy

Brand positioning

A Quick Service Restaurant wants to develop kids special offer and merchandising to reinforce its positioning as a family brand

Kids are a relevant and not easy target for this fast food chain:

They are the consumers of the present, and, most important, of the future
They have tremendous influence on their parent’s choices in terms of restaurants & food
They need to be entertained when consuming on the premises
Their preferences are clear but not always fitting with parents needs

In this context, the company wants to better target marketing, commercial actions and merchandising in order to

CONECTA recommended to collect both points of view of parents and kids to build a more complete picture of the families ‘needs and preferences

Our research plan combined:

We customized every element of the project based on our knowledge of the psychology and developmental stages of children and families

Group set up:

Small groups of 4 kids to increase comfort and encourage sharing
With kids of similar age,
Relatives/friends were welcomed to make easier for the them to express themselves
Short group discussion length to maintain the attention

Location: we chose a friendly and comfortable environment, creating two connected but different areas:

Moderation: while one moderator collected parents’ points of view, another expert was facilitating the discussion with kids.

This second moderator used specific techniques to understand kids needs and perception, such us:

creating a puppet show to simulate the process of ordering at the restaurants and understand kids’ demands in terms of menus and food offer
drawing out how they feel about the communication material on the premises
playing with the merchandising’s offer to see what products are the most engaging
using stickers to rewards them and keep them engaged

We provided insights and learnings to target the marketing mix to families:

-Adjust the look & feel of the brand

-Update the brand mascot

-Rework the merchandising, segmenting the offer by kids’ age and gender

-Improve the space distribution and redesign the restaurants in terms of lay out, decoration, visuals

-Optimize the menu, highlighting the star products for kids