Even in the Vietnamese market, the era of simply making and selling products is over. Now, consumers are in an age of wide product choices. For manufacturers, consumer-focused marketing strategies have become essential, such as differentiation from competitors and product development to capture the needs of consumers. Our client, a food manufacturer, did not yet have sufficient marketing tools or applications, so they were taking a lot of time to acquire the various data, and they just couldn’t reflect consumer preferences in their product development.

As FOURDIGIT commenced the project, we first thought it would be important to gain a deep understanding of the circumstances in Vietnam. We conducted user research to understand local lifestyles, spending habits, and even the devices and applications people use. We worked hard to understand and empathize with Vietnamese people's lives, cultures, and behaviors.
In addition, we conducted group interviews with local staff to identify the challenges that our client was facing. First, we had to identify what kind of challenges the members of the relevant departments had, everyone across the departments had to get in touch sympathetically with those challenges and everyone had to consider how to resolve them all together, so we worked to involve all the people in all the departments in tackling this phase.We then created a persona to actually use the analysis platform and we visualized the new task process with a customer journey map. Over a total of three days workshopping, we designed the functions, systems, and user friendly interfaces needed for the analysis platform.

Until then, our client had relied on personal feeling to plan new products, with no data analysis. Building this platform enabled them to utilize existing data and share planning ideas digitally, to develop products that better meet the needs of consumers. For the client, "creating an analysis platform" was a brand new experience and they did not know what kind of system they needed or where to start. We felt that moving this project forward by getting everyone involved to empathize with the challenges that needed resolving, the challenges each department faced connected up in lines rather than points, and the bond among all the project members strengthened.