Partnering to drive realignment and growth
Committed to empowering its customers with healthy meal solutions, Dairy Management, Inc. (DMI) partnered with Kraft and Dannon to create a coalition to drive industry alignment by reinventing a shopper-centric dairy department.
With the collective intent of growing overall dairy department sales, the group approached Big Red Rooster to create an innovative category reinvention process, addressing both the retailers' and shoppers' unmet needs.
Innovation Session accelerates the creative process
To get to the big ideas quickly, we facilitated a two-day Innovation Session, which was structured to tap into the dairy coalition's collective industry knowledge.
To fuel the process, our team executed a robust qualitative research study revealing shopper insights that ultimately informed the reinvention design. Armed with category analytics and secondary trend data, the 40-person group worked through a thinking path of Identify – Explore – Refine – Prioritize. The session created a strong alignment between coalition members on the "Big Ideas" and a prioritized set of design principles that ultimately informed the creative process.
Dairy of the future is a department, not an aisle
This subtle shift in vernacular – migrating from aisle to department – is a huge shift in mindset: both from a retail space allocation stand point and a category design perspective.
Initial research revealed the space allocated for dairy products was insufficient and the shopping experience was suboptimal. Our space planning team developed a category placement strategy that allowed for back-wall optimal operational efficiency, taking various flow and adjacency scenarios into consideration.
Designing for dining inspiration
Innovative merchandising solutions inspire shoppers with meal solutions and bundled products that showcase dairy as a central meal component, driving overall dairy consumption. Freestanding kiosks allow for product demonstrations, nutrition counseling, and couponing.
Focals in the kid-friendly strike zone encourage healthy dairy snacking options. Warm wood tones contrast with bright and whimsical splashes of milk on oversized department graphics, enhancing a sense of destination.
Supporting the Sell-In Process
Armed with a new vision for the dairy department of the future, the DMI, Kraft, and Dannon coalition met with select retailers to engage them in a concept test phase. Our team worked with select retailers on the dairy department pilot.
To illustrate the redesign's impact, we developed a 3D animation that allowed the viewer to explore the redesign's features in a dynamic, visually engaging format.
