Secondary research trends were refined and compiled into distinct categories.

Description

Analysis of the gourmet chocolate market to identify new opportunities for industry expansion.

Overview

The gourmet chocolate market has grown exponentially over the past few years. Our team wanted to discover how and why it was succeeding, and if those insights could be later applied to the advancement of the chocolate industry as a whole. We began by defining the meaning of “gourmet chocolate,” gathering answers from both within and outside the industry. Taking trends acquired from secondary research, we clustered them to form distinct categories that would later serve to help define typical user types.

Users were plotted onto axes that helped form five distinct user profiles: Lovers, Healthies, Gifters, Addicts, and Socializers. These user types were assembled onto an economical scale to determine appropriate product price points and spans. This information was then assembled into personas, complete with individual profiles, motivations, and experience maps. The experience maps were overlaid on each other to discover key opportunities throughout the user journey. We found the most opportunities in the early attraction and late extension phases. Our accumulated insights were compared against existing industry trends to create higher-level macro trends, serving as criteria for future market development.

Users were plotted against social/personal and daily/special axes to define key user type clusters.

Personas and experience maps were created to represent each of the five user types.

Macro industry trends were derived from clustering smaller contextual, product, and user trends.