Graphic Designer & Research Internship

The aim of this project is to research and analyse customer values and the way they could they influence the market, or more specifically – it explores how a different beer drinking culture could affect the beer industry in Denmark.

The problem scenario opens a discussion on how Hop Bottle, a Danish brewery start-up, can translate the actual values of consumers into an effective brand strategy. An initial general market research is developed to explore the origin of cultural changes that the industry is currently undergoing.

A set of personal interviews conducted with beer consumers explored how interaction with the product in their daily life affects their consumer habits and outgoing behaviour. 

 The aim to be a part of an inclusive social construct has switched its value focus to a simple demand to own and consume trendy products.
 

Finally, a mental model containing the choice factors of this group of consumer patterns was used to open a discussion on how values and behaviour specifics could be satisfied by the company and turned into a competitive advantage. Although several strategic directions derive from the analysis, the main outtake reaches the final conclusion that Hop Bottle’s products should not only tick the obvious boxes but live up to social acceptance standards – look trendy and complement a person’s self-image.

The research investigates personal values and consumer experience characterizing the beer market in Denmark, focusing on its social environment specifics. The described social construct summarizes subjective consumer profiles, so the main research philosophy used to approach the problem scenario is interpretivism.

Interpretivism allows the researcher to take changeable nature into account. This means that collected primary data constitutes acceptable knowledge with focus on the reality of situations, motivated by individual, subjective actions (Saunders et al., 2009). Or more specifically - social and lifestyle behaviour patterns of a group of individuals emerge from their actions, interactions and experiences when it comes to their common culture patterns of beer consumption.

However, to reach a credible conclusion, the researcher could not be a fully inseparable part of the research. Hence, conclusions could also be subjective, especially when values are one of the most significant factors of interpreting results. To boost credibility, pragmatism should also play a role in both observation and data interpretation. Adopting elements of the pragmatist philosophy allows the researcher to work with both objective and subjective meanings, which leaves space for a discussion of collected data (Saunders et al., 2009).

The two philosophies combined integrate different perspectives and call for an inductive approach, best reflected by the following methods of qualitative data collection, chosen for the purposes of the research:

• Ethnography 
• Grounded theory study
• Phenomenological study

Customer Journey map - an alignment diagram that follows the journey of a customer through different stages and levels of consumption. This type of diagram is useful in illustrating the interaction of an individual with the product on a daily basis in a chronological, linear setting. The main purpose is to achieve a realistic visualisation of several individual patterns, later analysed and grouped to form general profiles of different customer type niches.

Mental Model diagram – used to explain the general processes of human behaviour, feelings and motivations behind beer consumption experience. It is a large map that contains mental patterns of a group of people. In this case, the diagram explores in depth the mental behaviour of emerging favourable profiles that the company could focus on. The map is constructed by basic building blocks that represent a person’s thoughts, reactions and general guiding principles. Groups of those boxes form “towers” of affinity, further grouped into clusters called mental spaces. Mental spaces are then separated with vertical lines and are labelled on top, indicating a specific process which is being analysed.

The following images present the images and graphic design work I have made for the purposes of the project.