Reformation Audience Research
Project Overview
We worked backwards with Reformation to identify the key challenges they were facing. In order to grow their brand to the next level, Gradient and Reformation decided to;
1. Build an understanding of Reformation’s audience. Understand the segments and shopping preferences of the discrete customer segments within Ref’s prospective customer pool.
2. Determine Reformation’s total addressable market. Ref wants to understand the segments and shopping preferences of the discrete customer segments within their prospective pool.
3. Identify the most important brand equities among prospective customer segments. To create an actionable marketing plan for the prospective customer segments uncovered, Ref needs to surface the brand equities that are most associated with purchasing apparel
- Segmentation Analysis
- Total Addressable Market
- Brand Equity Analysis
Through a segmentation analysis, Gradient identified six discrete mindsets and shopping behaviors across all prospective customers
The largest addressable market within the U.S. is the 36-50 year old age group, which became Reformation’s new target market
Although the average spend of the 36-50 age group is slightly lower than the 26-35 age group, their willingness to pay for luxury clothing (incidence rate) is higher.
Ref is lagging behind its competitors in terms of attributes most associated with purchasing, and have updated their communication strategy to address these issues
Research Approach
Survey Development
The survey contained 40+ values-based statements, profiling variables (shopping attitudes, preferences and behaviors), an awareness-consideration-purchase funnel and a brand equity module.
Administer Survey
We conducted an online survey with an external panel (n=1,950) and current Ref customers (n=1,183) between August 2nd — August 10th, 2022.
Segmentation Analysis
A non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) analysis on the segment questions from all prospective customers was used to determine the most valid and reliable prospective customer segments
TAM Analysis
The total addressable market was calculated for each geographic market by the incidence rate for the survey across age groups
Brand Equity Analysis
Current and prospective customers rated brands they were aware of on 15 brand equities. These ratings were used to uncover the attributes most associated with purchasing apparel from a brand. In addition, this analysis revealed Ref’s ranking on the brand equities relative to its top competitors
