Unilever's Home & Personal Care (HPC) division produces a wide range of products from laundry detergent to designer fragrances. The Consumer and Market Insight department of HPC is responsible for gathering information to ensure that these products have the right advertising message, the unique packaging and the optimal performance characteristics for their target customers.

The brand team was trying to grow the market for their product by expanding the product's uses beyond its traditional function. A backer card was being used to highlight additional use ideas to consumers. The targeted promotion was timed for just before the holidays and the team needed to make a few decisions including the best new uses to promote and if extra spending on the format of the card would create more impact. The nature of these decisions required both qualitative and quantitative insight, but the compressed timeframes made that impossible. They turned to Invoke.

The brand team conducted two live Invoke sessions with fifty respondents each. The Invoke platform provided Unilever's team with several capabilities that were key to getting the data they needed quickly:

• Brand Managers could quickly and easily surface the most compelling "non-traditional" uses for the product. "What surprised me most was the varied responses that you got in the open ends; we got at more issues because of the large number of respondents and the private, unrushed format," commented a Unilever team member. The Unilever team walked away feeling they had identified the additional uses that would get the most attention from consumers.
• The instant responses received during the session from the large national sample quickly answered their questions regarding the impact that promoting multiple uses for the product would have on brand equity.
• The open-ended responses collected from every respondent clearly indicated that spending more on the card format added significant value.

Working with Invoke, the Unilever brand team gained two weeks in their product development schedule. This timely information allowed the Brand Manager to make better decisions and act on them immediately. They were most impressed with the speed with which we were able to find the answers to base their decisions on. "We came away knowing both the format of the backer card and the information that needed to go on it," said a team member.