Growth acceleration strategy for Asia

Growth strategy to identify long term opportunity for Dole

Case study

"To develop a robust and actionable consumer segmentation to identify key target consumers and link these clusters to renovation opportunities for our existing products or the development of new products."

Dole is one of the world’s largest producers and marketers of fresh fruit and packaged fruit.

Dole wanted to draw up a growth strategy for Asia. They needed to identify high opportunity segments across core markets and orient their product and innovation strategy to address the opportunity. The client brief to us: “to develop a robust and actionable consumer segmentation, to identify key target consumers and link these clusters to renovation opportunities for our existing products or the development of new products”.

We designed a three-stage programme which kicked off with a qualitative research phase. We used pre-task diaries to get to know the target markets better as people and their food habits.

These were followed up with in-home interviews where we spent time understanding the target audience’s lifestyle, values and observed food habits first hand. Learnings from the qualitative phase were used to feed into the quantitative segmentation exercise. We identified six segments regionally and profiled them by market.

We then unlocked long term opportunity for Dole through an action planning workshop using Incite’s ‘where to play’ and ‘how to win’ framework. Coming out of the workshop the Dole team had a clear action plan at a regional and country level.

"Incite’s work on putting together a clear consumer segmentation for our categories has provided us clear business benefit. We now have a much clearer portfolio strategy that has provided positive dividends to our product positioning, communication and in-store merchandising. Additionally, this work has provided us with clarity on new growth drivers to accelerate the business in Asia over the medium term."

Ashvin Subramanyam, Vice President Marketing and Innovation, Dole Packaged Foods Asia