A recipe for building attitudinal loyalty – helping further develop a proposition to build long term retention and brand growth.
Gousto - a meal kit retailer - is a high-growth brand experiencing a phenomenal level of new customer acquisition. With that comes opportunities and challenges for long term retention and spend, even more so given the use of discounting to encourage trial across the category. Building long term attitudinal loyalty remains a huge opportunity – to retain and grow existing customers and help drive further advocacy and growth.
THE CHALLENGE
Gousto continues to grow. The organisation, founded in 2012, has seen impressive upward revenue growth in recent years, in part accelerated by increased demand throughout the pandemic as many consumers shopped online for their groceries for the first time, and sought exciting new ways to do mealtimes at home.
The brand has achieved phenomenal levels of new customer acquisition, with customers joining for a variety of reasons. However, as the recipe box concept is still quite new to many people in the UK, vouchers and discounts are an important part of encouraging trial. Gousto’s focus therefore, is to increase retention among those customers newer to the brand - through and beyond the first month discount trial period - by building loyal connections and making sure customers feel rewarded for using Gousto after their discount ends.
OUR SOLUTION
Being a data business first and foremost, all of Gousto’s business decisions are made founded on data insights. Therefore, we introduced a new research programme, to help identify reward concepts which will be most effective at driving loyalty and retention.
This programme was developed across 3 phases, comprising 1) a qualitative ‘exploration’ of customer attitudes and usage, 2) a qualitative ‘refinement’ of new tactics and concepts to drive loyalty, and 3) a quantitative ‘test and validate’ phase to quantify customer feedback to final iterations of developed concepts. Ultimately with the objective of developing a go-to-market plan for the strongest concepts to build attitudinal loyalty and retention.
BUSINESS IMPACT
This programme of research was devised in a way to flex and adapt to customer feedback and ongoing business priorities for Gousto. Results are being presented throughout the organisation, from the Insights and Loyalty teams all the way to the Exec board.
Gousto are using the recommendations from the research to iteratively build new customer facing concepts and incentivise customers through gifting. This work has been vital in cementing confidence in the opportunity loyalty gifting presents.
“Motif’s expertise has really allowed us to understand what is most valuable and motivating for customers, and has been a huge help in defining our route in how we’ll reward loyalty at Gousto”
—Tara Abboud, Senior Insights Manager, Gousto
Wondering about how to build loyalty for your brand? Asking yourself if there are other approaches out there to use insight to better predict business outcomes? Please get in touch to find out more!