It's two hours before dinnertime. Most parents don't yet know what's for dinner. With limited time and resources -- and family schedules that often don't align, parents are trying to balance their nutritional goals and food budget with convenience and taste.
Back in the day, family meal time fit into nice little compartments -- like breakfast, lunch and dinner.
Meals (except for lunch) were mostly consumed at home, with mom doing the work. And for dinner, the entire family gathered around the table to eat and -- just as importantly -- discuss their day.
But for many households today, mealtime is drastically different. The family is splintered by competing and filled schedules and priorities.
With the traditional "family meal" long gone for most modern families, it's critical to understand the different ways in which families currently approach meal-planning in order to identify differing strategies and solutions to meet their needs. From grocery-shopping and lunch-packing to fast-casual and the frozen aisle, this research will reveal families' biggest pain-points. This work will look at each food occasion, revealing tactical and strategic solutions for food brands, retailers, and restaurants.
Qualitative: Digital Diary to Capture Daily Behavior
Capture the circumstances, solutions, and drivers for each meal by each family member
• Mostly open-ended
• Daily entries
• 100 participants for 7 days
• Helps build the quantitative questionnaire
• Identify key answer options for close-ended questions
• Add qualitative input and flavor
• Identify parent-friendly language
• Conducted via Mfour Mobile that allows busy parents to respond via a mobile device
• Panel of 2.5 million recruited via their mobile device
• Native app resides on device
• Participants can respond anywhere via text, photos, and/or video
Anchored Maximum Difference (MaxDiff) exercise to identify relative importance of key selection criteria (e.g., convenience, cost, nutrition, environmental concerns, family bonding, etc.)
Detailed classification questions to allow for analysis by different family archetypes
Online quant survey utilizing one or more of the major U.S. online research panels.
• 3,000 respondents total
• 1,000 respondents assigned to an in-depth survey by each of the three-day parts: breakfast/morning snacks, lunch/afternoon snacks, dinner/evening snacks
• Exploration to reveal pain points and solutions
• Anchored Maximum Difference (MaxDiff) exercise to identify the relative importance of key selection criteria (e.g., convenience, cost, nutrition, environmental concerns, family bonding, etc.)
• Detailed classification questions to allow for detailed analysis by different family types
Both phases of this research will be conducted among a representative U.S. sample meeting the following criteria:
• Parents of at least one child age 3-17 in the household
• Primary or shared responsibility for mealtime
• Mix of parents across age groups, working and non-working, various household incomes, number of children in the household, and a spread of ages for the children
Single integrated strategic report
- Combines qualitative diary exercise and quantitative survey
- Art-directed
- Drivers segmentation using Latent Clustering built from the MaxDiff exercise to identify unique parent groups such as Belly Fillers, Emotional Enrichment, Stress Managers, etc.
- Expert review and implications
- Data access on KnowlegeHound
Ken Roberts, President, Cooper Roberts Research, project lead
- Design, sampling, analysis, project management
- Deep food and retail expertise
Maria Bailey, CEO, BSM Media; subject-matter expert
- Marketing to Moms expert and author
- Sought-after presenter
Add Comment