Understanding the Indian landscape for an upcoming sexual wellness brand

An approach centered at customer discovery for uncovering insights to inform inclusive branding along with the launch strategy, positioning and identity

Client: Muse India | Intimate Wellness

Muse is India’s first direct-to-consumer bedroom essentials brand, crafting products for easy intimacy, everyday. The brand aspires to cater to the needs of adults in tier — I cities of India. The idea is to create an accessible, approachable and alternative brand beyond the mainstream and crass imagery around sexual wellness in India.

Role: Design Research lead
(directly collaborating with brand co-founders, Sahil Gupta & Anushka Gupta)

Skills: Advisory, Workshops, Brief breakdown, Project Management & coordination, Research plan and methodology strategy, Consumer ethnography, Recruitment, Session Moderation, Assets & framework for sense-making, Data Generation & Synthesis, Insight building, reports & presentation

Year: 2020 — present
Constraints: Coronavirus Pandemic, rendering the entire project remote

Problem statement

“Since there are already signals for a revolution around sex in India, are people ready for a brand which promotes sexual wellness to enhance the experience around intimacy?”

The goal was to discover perception and customers for an artisanal sexual wellness and lifestyle brand in the Indian context.

The Process

• Discovering themes of enquiry: After running brainstorm boot camps with the stakeholders, understanding the sexual wellness market in India through secondary literature, and by talking to experts, emerged foundational cues and enquiry themes.
• Creating the research methodology: Based on the themes of enquiry, and the constraints of the pandemic, time and budget available, brainstormed on a mix of a few qualitative research methodologies — which include the approach of a cognitive walkthrough paired with a co-creative visual activity, all in the context of an open-ended interview. The goal was to delve deeper into the subconscious aspects of what the inherent emotions, thoughts and perceptions of people are using visual cues to generate a deeper-level understanding.
• Creating a plan, assets & conducting the research: Apart from a discussion / moderation guide, visual board for co-creative activity and metric frameworks for the cognitive walkthrough, I created a structure for raw information with codes for quotes, interesting points, mental model and specific behavioral patterns. This helped cross reference visual and written data across all the participants for a big picture view with minute details to synthesize data from at a later stage.
• Sense-making, synthesis & deliverables: Data sorted in different ways with key take-aways, stories, quotes, helped to deduce patterns and perceptions using affinity mapping — along with diving into subconscious patterns of the participants with inputs from the co-creative activity helpful in unlocking the ‘what and why’ for generating insights. Alongside, I also, collaborated on branding references, research outcomes as creatives, quantitative surveys, and a branding based interactive lead-generation survey.

The Outcome

After making connections by looking at behavior patterns, and anomalies, in-depth personal narratives, I presented actionable insights to become a resonating brand for potential customers.

The process informed the launch strategy, brand image, identity and positioning, giving a ‘what, why, how, where’ of the entire landscape in bigger picture and minute details.

This phase ended with a soft launch of the brand.

Here’s the link to Website & Instagram handle.

To know more, please write to me at leenajain.work@gmail.com

“Leena is very professional, takes the time to think about the work, and isn’t afraid to voice her opinions in a well articulated and researched manner. She is flexible, process-oriented and independent. The work was well presented.” - Sahil Gupta, Co-founder — builder, Muse India