Olive Oil Market Research

Olive Oil-New Product Launch

The Problem

The client is an award-winning olive oil producer in Victoria, Australia, with the vision to push the boundary of the traditional form of olive oil and create functional olive oil products to tailor the demand for premium and health-beneficial foods in the APAC region.

My Role

Consists of three parts

Survey design and Survey translation
Data Analyst
Project Management

The Challenge

The client wants to open up both Japanese and Chinese cooking oil market. However, olive oil is not a common use for home cooking especially in South Eastern cuisines.

Solution

Our team repositioned the olive oil in the Asian markets, understood the cultural perspective of demand for olive oil. Help launched the most liked concept into the two countries.

The Approach

The Process

Ideation

Our team supported the client in articulating the product design ideas.
I worked with client's team to gain understanding of their goals with the product design.

It is to not only distribute olive oil to the Asian markets but also to create beneficial olive oil product line to tailor the demand for functional foods in the region.

Concept Design

We generated six separated concepts of the functional olive oil products, with each concept aiming to target a specific consumer group. ( Due to confidentiality reasons, the concept designs could not be revealed on here)

We then tested consumers' implicit and expicit perception of the concepts , and compared the results with their perceptions of the existing leading olive oil brands in both markets.

Survey Design

We started with using the same set of survey questions for both Japanese and Chinese markets with the goal to find out overall liking of the new concepts, as well as consumer attitudes toward olive oil, compare to other types of cooking oil in the markets.

We were also seeking answers from the consumers to understand expectations on imported olive oil and finding our way to position the products in these two markets.

Here are some of the typical questions we asked:

Translation and Survey Question Adjustments

We worked with a third party to translate our survey into Japanese, through the first round of data collection we found out that the surveyed consumers were sensitive to words that indicating aging and gender-specific, and they were responding negatively to products that associated with those words.

We reworded the survey and at the same time asked the paticipants to share their local knowledge with us as well as the reason they disliked the words in the first round of survey, so that we could learn more about the Japanese culture and their consumer market.

Interesting Insights

The Japanese market responded negatively to the health enhanced features of the products; most of the consumer we surveyed consider this feature as being not natural or pure.

Chinese consumers considered there is a high possibility of giving olive oil as gifts for eldly family members.

Consumers in both countries all associated Australian products with the cleanness imagine.

We've also generated a word cloud for our client and their Chinese investors to have a intuitional understanding of consumer's expectations of the product.

The top three qualities they liked about the product is

Healthy/ Convey a healthy cooking oil image
Simple packaging, clean and aesthetic
Product features specially made to cater different consumers' needs

Distribution Channel

We've also discovered the power of E-commerce in China, where there is an increasing demand for olive oil in the online shopping space, but not so much of the traditional selling channels due to high barrier for imported products to enter the local supermarkets and department stores.

We helped the client to establish the online stores on multiple local social media platforms. Where we optimised the cost of product distribution at the same time provide local consumers with easy access to the products.