Children's loyalty concepts & sustainability
Bachelor Industrial Design Engineering 2021
This project is my bachelor thesis project. It was done in collaboration with the toy company BiOBUDDi which strives to create sustainable toys and, as of recently, loyalty concepts. Loyalty campaigns are campaigns stores implement with the goal of maintaining and rewarding loyal customers and attracting new customers. These days the topic of sustainability has becomes more and more important, which leads to customers asking these stores to find more sustainable options. BiOBUDDi strives to create answers to this question. The aim of my project is to design and develop a new concept for a loyalty campaign that is sustainable but still attractive to users. The campaign has to be attractive to the users to work and thus be profitable for the store. The research foregoing the design process focuses on three main aspects: the loyalty campaign part, the sustainability part, and the user part.
The loyalty campaign research focused on the workings of loyalty campaigns, their history, and the elements of a successful campaign. Loyalty concepts originate from 1903 and have since been used by many shops to boost their customer base and customer loyalty. These loyalty campaigns are an important and powerful marketing tool due to their indirect effects. Moreover, these benefits do not only benefit the retailer but also the customer.
From a competitor analysis, it was found that most campaigns are either aimed at both sexes or at boys, even though research has shown that girls tend to collect more than boys. Moreover, most campaigns are not related to big events, except if the event is soccer. Finally, in the past campaigns with plastic figurines have been the norm, whereas in recent years campaigns featuring more paper stickers or paper elements have been more popular. This means that for designing a new campaign it is important to keep in mind that the campaign is suitable and attractive for both boys and girls, that the campaign is not linked to a big event, and that the campaign is a more sustainable option for the stores whilst being more original than using cards or stickers.
Past loyalty campaigns that have run in different grocery stores in the Netherlands
As mentioned before, sustainability is a main aspect of this campaign design. Sustainability is a big topic in recent years. According to the nine strategies of Potting et al. (2017) to help design products for a more circular economy, it is best to refuse; to make the product redundant. However, in this instance it is more suitable to follow the use rethink strategy; to give the product multiple functionalities or to make it shareable. This aligns with the 3Rs; reduce, reuse, recycle. The company BiOBUDDi has done its own extensive research on plastics and bioplastics, it even has created its own.
Different types of plastics, the created bioplastic by BiOBUDDi is Bio-based & non-biodegradable
The last important aspect of the assignment is the user. To get a complete overview, a stakeholder analysis was conducted. From this, it was decided to get into contact with parents and caregivers via an online survey and to include children in the design and development process via co-design sessions. In the first co-design session the goal was to understand the wishes of children. The results were that they liked to collect things in general, but especially products that were immediately recognizable, visually attractive, and with which one could immediately do something. The children were unable to explain why these were their wishes, therefore some literature research followed. This literature research showed that children have a collecting instinct, they enjoy the act of collecting things and displaying their collections. Besides that, children have the instinct to play. This instinct is derived from the fact that children learn via their play. Lastly, children recognize via visual cues rather than haptic cues, making good and attractive graphics imperative.
An overview of the different stakeholders involved with loyalty concepts
Past loyalty campaigns as ranked by children in a codesign session
Having completed all the research the requirements were drawn up and the design phase could be started. Four concept directions were created from these requirements and turned into mood boards. Children were then asked to give their opinion on these concepts in a co-design session. From this one concept was a clear winner and two were definite losers. However, the hypothesis was made that this winning concept was not their favorite concept, they just liked the mood board and the visuals the best.
This hypothesis was checked in the following co-design session. The two remaining concepts were worked out further and presented in new mood boards that were similar in visual style. The two remaining concepts were that of a castle and that of a game, where the castle concept was the clear winner in the previous session. From this session, the hypothesis turned out to be true and the game concept was chosen as the final one.
As a game has many elements to it there was a lot to do during the development phase of this assignment. The most important aspects of the development were to make sure the sustainability part was still being taken into account and to especially find a way to incorporate elements that made the user aware of the environment and sustainability and elements that would encourage the user to think of reusing parts of the product. As was found in the previous co-design sessions, children find images and graphics very important. That is why the co-design session in this phase mostly focussed on the graphics. The children were tasked with choosing the ones that looked the best, but also the ones that were the best for their function in the game. As it has to look good, but also be clear and work logistically.
Eventually, the end result is an innovative concept for a loyalty campaign that is sustainable in terms of material use, making the user aware and supporting reusability, but also attractive to its users as children were involved in the design process.
This product was tested and evaluated by a testing session with both a group of adults and two groups of children and by conducting a requirement analysis. Both tests were positive.
Unfortunately, there is an N.D.A. at play in this assignment, therefore I am not able to show the final result. However, the final result may be found in the supermarket one day.
Photo taken at the final test session with the final design blurred out