Expanding markets, evolving products, and shaping behaviours

Holland & Barrett saw an opportunity in the market for a full heart health kit. To avoid historic innovation failures, they wanted me to validate the proposition and model on a much smaller scale: a cholesterol testing kit. I was provided full access to their operational capabilities, products, and free range to manoeuvre as I needed.

After researching into the opportunity space and interviewing high cholesterol sufferers, I saw that there were already propositions like this; however, they didn't provide customers with the ability to manage their situation effectively. I had a hypothesis that if we provided people with products and content they could use (via a mail service kit), that over time their lipid levels would improve. With this intention, I formed customer personas, mapped out the journey and created a service blueprint to ensure it was possible. Speaking to a pathologist and a medical supplier, I was able to build out the supply chain relationships that Holland & Barrett couldn't facilitate. With the help of a Holland & Barrett nutritionist I selected the range of products that had the highest likelihood to positively effect lipid levels. With all of that in place, I planned a 90-day home study for 20 participants and created a Facebook campaign to recruit them via a survey landing page. To supporting the study, I created a simple proof of concept platform to report on participant's lipid levels via an API with the pathologists, and created supplementary meal and workout sheets. With everything ready the study started and the kits were sent off.

As you can imagine, dealing with medical information is highly sensitive, so I'll bring the explanation to an end here. What I will say, is that the study was well executed, even considering its lean setup (my garage at home was full of products and equipment). I managed to validate whether customers wanted this service, which they did. Whether is was possible for Holland & Barrett to operate this service, which they could. And lastly, whether it commercial advantageous to pursue, which it was.

As part of Holland & Barrett's brilliant basics initiative, I was asked to helped figure out how they could implement dynamic content into their product display pages (PDP). First I had to consider their intended use case, whereby ecommerce and merchandise managers could manually curate content via product, product type, or category. At the same time, due to a serious numbers of SKUs on the website, ensure the solution could also work automatically as well.

This meant understanding the content types and information architecture behind it. Essentially, the Holland & Barrett team wanted a gold, silver, and bronze approach, with all products taking on bronze content relevant to them, and particular products using the silver and gold. Each level up of content would show it predecessor's and its own.

In the end, after researching into technology solutions, UX best practices, and more, I wireframed and designed 21 new formats of content as singular components. Then, I pulled together various products with the varying levels of content to visualise how these would look on the front end. The new content formats included themes such as social proofing, influencer segments, more about the product, how it was made, its green credentials, and ingredients, etc.

My goal was to surface Holland & Barrett's digital proposition within their physical retail environment. The assumed benefit would be enhancing customers' end-to-end journey and increasing the digital channel's share of wallet (historically, in the physical environment's favour, even though the digital channel had greater range and benefit). To do this, I conducted a recce on how the digital proposition was surfaced in-store and spoke to customers to gather insights on how best to communicate it to them.

With data gathered and insights formed, I conducted research into how other brands across industries achieved this. From there, I devised a strategy that looked to position Holland & Barrett as an omnichannel partner for health. With this, the idea was to implement the digital proposition across various stages of the marketing lifecycle and across channels. Starting with a focus on messaging and positioning, this led quickly to wireframes and eventual high-fidelity visualisations to validate with customers and sell the vision and findings back to stakeholders.

With clear guidance, the entire solution was wrapped up into a handover document with rationale, findings, and guidelines on how to enhance Holland & Barrett's omnichannel presence, ensure a seamless customer journey, and strengthen brand loyalty.