Not the Customer the Brand Imagined
Who really rides a design bicycle, what does cycling mean in their lives, and what should the brand do about it?
Methods15 ethnographic interviews across Finland and the Netherlands, a co-led semiotic benchmark of 15 brands, synthesis workshops with the client.
Key findingThe people actually buying the bicycles, and their reasons, did not match the company's picture of its customer.
What changedThe client rewrote its strategy and communication around the findings.
Understand + Align
The storyAt the boutique strategy consultancy Noren I led the project with one colleague, owning facilitation and client relations, and conducted eight of the fifteen interviews myself. Alongside them we ran a semiotic benchmark of fifteen brands, coding what each one's imagery promised, so the interviews could be read against what the category was already saying. In the synthesis workshops, founders and store employees listened to anonymised excerpts rather than my summary of them. Hearing the messy reality in a customer's own words helped the founders and staff take ownership of the findings.
