I was part of a group of students across MIT and Wellesley College that took part in MIT Sloan’s Entrepreneurship Lab, an action learning lab that pairs student groups with local startups to assist on critical challenges and opportunities. Our group was paired with Aisling Organics, a D2C clean beauty startup founded by Krysta Lewis. Inspired by her own negative experiences with current products in the market and after realizing that she wasn’t alone, Krysta founded Aisling Organics to introduce products to address these negative experiences and use the brand as means to advocate for clean living and an elevated health consciousness. At the time, she came to us with the following challenge to solve:
For this project, I led the team in our approach to consumer research and persona development, as well as in forming our strategic recommendations to Krysta and her team.
To start, we took a look at past sales data and developed customer segments based on purchase behavior and customer characteristics using machine learning techniques. Using past customer order information, we were able to classify who were the "core" customers of the brand based on past behavior patterns. It was these customers that we wanted to focus on at the start to understand the ‘why’ behind their actions, believing this to be a good lead to developing the core persona.
From there, I created the interview guide to drive our discussions with these customers, covering topics that included: their current beauty habits, their awareness of clean beauty and their desire for such products, and their comfort with buying beauty products online (given that Aisling Organics only sold products through digital channels). We also asked them about how they discovered Aisling and thier current feeling regarding the overall brand experience.
We partnered with Aisling Organics to send out an initial survey with incentives tied to both completion and expressing interest in a phone call follow-up. We took some time to experiment with messaging and other signals of trust to determine what was most effective in ellciting a response. Ultimately, out of the original 193 individuals reached out to, 43 completed the initial survey and we ended up speaking with 11 of them to understand their relationship with the brand.
Taking what we learned in our interviews with current customers, I guided the team to frame the voice of the Aisling Organic customer through their habits, motivations, and desires - a framework that I believed would allow us to not only understand the current experience of the Aisling Organic customer, but also their desired state and the why behind it all - as the 'why' was what we would use to form our recommendations and frame our concepts.
At a high level, we found that the Aisling Organic customer is one that didnt’t really consider herself a makeup person at all, but they were ultimately attracted to the brand for its mission to promote transparency and health, its advocacy to live a more conscious and healthy life, and most critically for its unique Founder story. The core customer is a person that is digitally native, even in the context of beauty buying (only after finding her go-to’s), and values an overall positive customer experience more than anything else.
With the core persona determined, our next step was to address the secondary, more implicit, request: how do we connect with people that are like the Aisling Organic customer to grow the brand. To get there, we conducted more consumer interviews using our guide (minus the Aisling Organic specific questions) and the habits-desires-motivations framework to understand general customer profiles that exist in the market. Out of our additional interviews with a diverse set of consumers, we developed four more personas to capture the behaviors that we observed.
To describe the differences in behavior amongst these four personas (and the core persona of Aisling Organics), I created a map that plotted each persona four areas: Price Sensitivity, the Importance of Clean Beauty, their Desired Mode of Purchase, and how much influence Brand Image has over their preferences.
In our research, we actually found that there were a lot of similarities in behavior between the core persona of Aisling Organics and the Young & Moderate consumer. Specifically, we found that the core persona was the Young & Moderate consumer prior to being exposed to Aisling Organics and Krysta’s story. The Young & Moderate consumer is a consumer that we also found to not really consider themselves a ‘real' makeup person, but desired guidance and a source of truth when choosing products for them and deeply valued a positive product and brand experience in exchange for loyalty. This persona was not deeply knowledgeable of clean beauty, but with their deep desire to consume products that didn’t negatively impact their health, this presented a huge opportunity for Aisling Organics to connect and address this gap.
At a high level, we advised the following to Krysta and the Aisling Organics team, in addition to providing insight into their core persona:
Overall, this was a fun project to work on and many thanks to Krysta, the Aisling Organics team, and the Entrepreneurship Lab for the opportunity. It was a great chance for me to only dive deeper into Brand Strategy, but also serve as a mentor for my teammates when it came to approaching user research and crafting the voice of the customer.