DermaCo Consumer Research: Challenging the Brand's Assumptions

Yagini took on a consumer research brief for The Derma Co., Honasa's second-largest brand, at a point where the brand team had a settled view of who their customer was: a metro-based, experienced, active skincare user. The brief was to understand the customer profile and brand health more rigorously.

Rather than commission a full brand health tracker, which was beyond the team's budget, she worked with Kantar to design a two-part survey, online and offline, that would answer the specific questions the brand needed answered. She owned the questionnaire design end to end, working with the brand manager to narrow down exactly what they were trying to learn: awareness metrics, usage patterns, and where lapsed customers were going.

Kantar handled the offline fieldwork, going door to door to collect responses. Yagini then took the raw and filtered data and generated the analysis and the learnings herself. What came back contradicted the brand team's assumptions on almost every dimension.

The data showed that DermaCo was functioning as a beginner-friendly entry point into active skincare, not an advanced product for experienced users. The customer base was more concentrated in tier one and tier two cities than in metro areas, directly contradicting the brand's existing targeting logic. A pin code analysis confirmed the geographic spread.

She presented the findings clearly: a table laying out what the brand believed against what the data showed, point by point. The findings were used to restructure the brand's marketing strategy, influencer briefs, and communications, shifting the messaging toward the actual customer and addressing the pain points of lapsed users.