The Challenge

With evolving retail landscapes and the rise of modern trade and Q-commerce, a leading beverage company needed to rewire its understanding of shopper behavior in the beverages category. The brand wanted to decode how planned vs. impulse purchases played out across store formats—and what nudges (POSM, adjacencies, assortments) worked best to drive conversion.

Our Approach

We deployed a multi-modal, real-world tracking approach that layered observed and self-reported data over time:

• Week 1 & 4 Accompanied Shopping Missions to capture natural vs.prompted behavior

• 4-week Digital Tracking via bill uploads, basket photos, and short self-reports to log every beverage mission

• Post-window Deep Dives to unearth motivations and store-level influences

This longitudinal structure allowed us to trace micro-moments of decision-making, capturing over 100 unique beverage purchases across 12 shoppers in 4 cities.

The Impact

The study unpacked 5 key shopper motivations—and mapped how they drove different beverage categories . The behavioral intercepts surfaced key insights around: trial triggers, conversion levers, and lost opportunities

These rich outputs is providing strong input for the client – both in  format-specific POSM and placement strategies, rethink adjacency bundling, and explore motivation-linked innovations in pack formats.