An Australian-based company specializing in supplying plastic material to bottling plants for the creation of food and beverage packaging was seeking to gather feedback from their customers, as sales had not increased over the prior year and they had also noticed a drop in purchases from existing buyers.
ThoughtLight was selected for this research. The participants selected were production managers of bottling companies who were existing customers. Through the ThoughtLight audio recording, video, and photo capture features, participants responded on a series of touch points where insights were needed. These included reporting on what the structure of a production day was usually like at their plant, the line capacity for production, the quantity of plastic packaging products they produced on a weekly basis and for what types of specific products, the pain points they were faced with regarding their molding machines, the amount of production loss during each line run, and feedback on the overall quality of the products produced using the plastic material.
The number of responses gathered over the course of one week was remarkable. After analysis of the insights gathered, the plastic supply company was quite surprised to find out that the formula for some packaging products was the problem. The bottling customers were hearing concerns about an unsavory aftertaste in their packaging products which as a result led them to purchase plastic packaging material from other suppliers.
The Australian-based company was able to look more closely at their formulas used for the types of packaging in question and reduce the amount of PET (polyethylene terephthalate) to be used, in order to minimize the unsavory aftertaste generated in the production process. What started out as an effort to understand a decline in sales resulted in their customers coming to appreciate the attention to finding out why and working toward a solution, and resulted in a renewed sense of confidence in buying packaging materials from the client sponsor.
